Director of the Museum of Architecture Irina Korobyina announced this at yesterday's Innovation Award ceremony at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture. Within a month, the deed will undergo state registration. Then the museum plans to start negotiations with the daughter of artist Viktor Melnikov Elena, who continues to challenge her rights to the other half of the house in court. The director of the museum also counts on the support of the Deputy Minister of Culture Andrei Busygin. All this was reported today by the RIA Novosti agency.
The house of Konstantin Melnikov is the architect's own workshop in the form of two cylinders with diamond-shaped windows, built in the late 1920s on the Arbat, among communal apartments, clubs and communal houses of socialist Moscow. A completely unique house-experiment, but not over public (as was then customary), but over private life.
The world famous masterpiece became the subject of property disputes after the death of its author and owner. Konstantin Melnikov died in 1974. He divided his house between two children, Victor and Lyudmila. Viktor Melnikov lived in the house until his death, was engaged in maintaining the house, showed it to architects and art critics. He did not let his sister into the house, but in 1988 she managed to sue the right to own her half without the right to live there.
Property disputes escalated after the artist's death in early 2006. Viktor Melnikov bequeathed his half of the house, bypassing both daughters - to the state with the condition to create a museum in the house of the father (Konstanin) and son (Viktor) Melnikovs. One of his daughters, Ekaterina Karinskaya, now lives in the house and advocates for the transfer of the entire house to the state and for the exact fulfillment of her father's will. Her sister Elena Melnikova immediately tried to challenge her father's decision in court, but at the very first meeting she stated that she supported the idea of creating a house-museum. But the trial has not yet been completed.
Then, in March 2006, Sergei Gordeev bought the second half of the house from the son of the daughter of the architect Lyudmila, Alexei Ilganayev. There was talk that Gordeev would transfer his part of the house to the museum, but it never came to that. The youngest senator in the country, Sergei Gordeev, rapidly and energetically began to collect avant-garde works, mainly architectural ones. Then Gordeev founded the Russian Avant-garde Foundation, which in four years published many books about architects of the 1920s, mostly written by the chief specialist on this topic, Selim Khan-Magomedov. Until recently, it was the Fund that owned half of Lyudmila Melnikova.
In 2007, several buildings of the 19th century were demolished next to the house, a foundation pit was dug and construction began. Melnikov's house cracked and began to slide towards the foundation pit. Geologists then spoke of unreliable, water-saturated soils that needed to be frozen in order for the house to survive. This was not done, the house is covered with cracks, the plaster is sprinkled on it, but the house is still standing.
In the same year, Sergei Gordeev formed the International Board of Trustees for the creation of the Melnikov House Museum. The council met once, but did not agree with the senator, and some time later published a letter in which its members stated that they support the idea of transferring the entire house to the state to create a state museum of the two Melnikovs, and do not support Gordeev's idea of creating a private museum of the architect Melnikov. This letter appeared in 2010, and ended with a mention that this year Konstantin Melnikov turns 120 years old.
Thus, by 2010, the conflicts moved to the next stage: from a dispute between relatives, they turned into an ideological dispute. Ekaterina Karinskaya and the Arkhnadzor movement defended the idea of an exclusively state museum. Sergei Gordeev, on the other hand, was going to create a public-private museum (opponents of this idea suspected him of wanting to make the museum completely private).
A new stage in the development of this history began in December 2010, when Sergei Gordeev handed over to the Museum of Architecture his collection of architectural graphics of more than 3,000 items. Shortly before this, the press reported that Gordeev had left the Federation Council and sold his business. Obviously, Gordeev is curtailing his activities, and the distribution of collections to the museum of architecture is only part of this process. The Foundation still owns the Burevestnik club, also built by Melnikov - the Foundation planned to create an International Center for Architecture there.
So, now, presumably, the museum in the Melnikov house will be state-owned. That is, the ideas of the first group, who wanted to give everything to the state, won. It is difficult to say whether this will turn out to be a Melnikov museum, how many Melnikovs there will be and, most importantly, how quickly it will turn out. Now the museum does not look like an organization capable of taking care of a very important and very emergency monument. Its building itself needs a "complex" reconstruction, for twenty years the museum has not had a permanent exhibition (Irina Korobyina promised to open it in 2011, and in the fall at Zodchestvo she presented to the public the concept of the museum's development, developed by Yuri Grigoryan). It is not clear who will reconstruct the museum and with what funds, and Melnikov's house, a masterpiece in disrepair, has now been added to a series of vague plans.
It must be admitted that the existence of the Melnikov house under the wing of the Museum of Architecture is quite logical. You can go further and imagine a whole network of restored avant-garde masterpieces, or even just architectural masterpieces belonging to one museum. Restorers study the features of reeds and other technologies, create a unique Russian school for the restoration of masterpieces of the impoverished but proud architecture of the 1920s. True, all this looks more like a life-building utopia than reality.
In 2006, when the former raider Sergei Gordeev bought half of the house, and Elena Melnikova told the press that she wanted to sue her part in order to sell it to him, everyone was afraid that Gordeev would demolish the house, or spoil it, use it somehow commercially, and called for help from the state, as an abstract value for protection from a dangerous raider. There were reasons for these fears - it’s unpleasant to admit it, but the goal of creating several Moscow cultural centers and galleries at once was to promote the status of the site, then to drive out everything cultural from there and build more expensive areas, preferably class A +. The most illustrative example, where this idea came true almost entirely, is Art-Play on Timur Frunze Street. So, the senator was feared as an aggressive owner of the people's property. And now, in response to the transfer of his share to the museum, the press is feeling an implicit but tangible satisfaction with the nationalization that took place.
However, Gordeev founded a fund, called a council, published books, and collected graphics. What if he really intended to create a private avant-garde museum? Or a few museums - centers for the study of the heritage of the 1920s? All this collecting, of course, could only be a cover for insidious plans - what if it was not such and the respected experts were mistaken in showing such fierce resistance to the senator's plans. Purely theoretically, in the conceived centers, Gordeev could raise one or two future followers of Khan-Magomedov, giving them the opportunity to engage only in research, and not intrigue and not making a living. Purely theoretically - it could have happened. But we will never know if this is true. Because this line has been cut short, no one wants to create private avant-garde museums in Moscow and collect collections of untidy but precious leaves. Instead of two options, state and private, there is only one, state, and its plans are more than vague. It remains to observe the development of events.
