It is difficult to build on Ostozhenka. On the one hand, the place is historical, it imposes serious restrictions on the height, style, even the shape of buildings. On the other hand, this is one of the most prestigious and popular among the current generation of architects, the district of old Moscow, and there are a lot of high-quality modern buildings that set a high standard, like nowhere else. However, the "stellar" period of Ostozhenka, when critics and defenders of the heritage only talked about it, passed somewhere in the middle of the two thousandth. The house with reliefs, designed and built by Nikita Biryukov's bureau - finished just before the crisis, in 2008. Perhaps that is why it did not cause a serious resonance - and it was completely in vain.
The customer, the Barkley corporation, owned a small plot in a quiet Khilkov lane leading from Ostozhenka to the Moscow River. There were two objects of the so-called "environment building" on the site. A one-story wooden house and a two-story brick building of the 19th century did not belong to the category of monuments, they were in a rather deplorable state and at the same time occupied almost the entire site, so there was no way to preserve them.
The historical development of the area determined both the plan and the volume of the building: the specific and insolation restrictions dictated the low number of storeys and an unusual Z-shaped plan. The result is a small corner square in front of the main entrance and a quiet courtyard on the opposite side. You can get into it by going through the entrance hall. The building is chamber: on the ground floor, in addition to the lobby, there are two office premises (about 200 sq.m. each), and on the upper floor there are only 27 apartments with a total area of 3200 sq.m.
However, the architects of the ABV Group really wanted to preserve at least a visual memory of the lost heritage with some hint. This desire, as well as the study of European experience, prompted them to create a complex sculptural facade. “We decided to make sculptural fragments of classical decor a part of our building,” says the chief architect of the project, Pavel Zheleznov. - In old European cities, you can often find houses in which at different times they cut new windows, laid old ones, thereby changing the pattern and even the proportions of the facade. We also got involved in such a “game” of different times and styles."
Overall, the façade is very modern. The smooth planes of the so-called "Jurassic stone" are cut by a regular grid of large windows. The windows are arranged in vertical rows, which alternate with neat glass bay windows stretched to the full height of the walls. These moderately light, moderately respectable facades might seem too restrained, if not for the reliefs made of fireclay ceramics (exactly the same fawn color as the stone), built into the plane of the facade to the right or left of each window.
The reliefs were cast and made by hand, with each fragment consisting of several parts. “We spent a long time choosing the right material, trying artificial concrete, various composite mixtures,” continues Pavel Zheleznov, “but still we settled on a natural material - ceramics, even though we had never worked with it before”.
The relief fragments are recessed in relation to the planes of the walls and thus form a second, thinner "layer" of the facade. However, the layer is not so thin - the reliefs are high, carefully molded and beautifully painted, and their tops even protrude beyond the plane of the main stone facade. However, it is more important that the plot basis for all the reliefs was not human figures or ornaments (which usually happens), but fragments of the facade of a classical building. Moving some distance away from the house in order to better see it in its entirety, we can make sure that this is not at all a random collection of beautiful architectural details. The decor elements are arranged very logically - as if the house was a 17th century Roman palazzo, then the facade was repainted to a flat one, the height of the floors was changed, new windows were pierced in the walls, but for some reason some of the reliefs survived and were even cleaned by restorers.
Similarly, in Roman courtyards, fragments of antique reliefs peep out from under the plaster; in Venice, new windows break the rhythm of openwork Gothic arches and fractional Byzantine reliefs. And in Moscow, restorers, clearing some unremarkable wing from strata of plaster, find the trimmed "tails" of ornate platbands from the times of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich.
However, the palazzo, depicted by architects on the facades in Khilkov Lane, could not have appeared in Moscow: not in the 17th century, when ornate platbands were preferred here, not in the provincial XVIII, or in the strict XIX. And even in the houses of Zholtovsky, in which everything is elusively "wrong" - it could not. In Rome or Vicenza, on the contrary, such palazzo is very possible, but such metamorphoses never happened to them there: luxurious reliefs were not painted over and windows were not cut through. Moreover, even if someone had decided to act so cruelly with the Palladian facade, it would still look different. (At least the ceilings in the 17th century palazzo were definitely higher.)
All this is so implausible that it seems to be some kind of mistake. But this is a completely deliberate move, there was no claim to reliability from the very beginning. And, therefore, we have before us not an imitation, but a dramatization, a performance on the theme of architecture, a kind of plastic self-reflection of a building, a detailed reflection on the history of architecture. This is a fascinating and beautiful performance. It would be desirable to look at it very carefully, to find faces of mascarons on the consoles, next to it - fragments of baroque window "ears" or garlands entwined with ribbons in the spirit of Emperor Augustus. On the other hand, such a move is very correct and convenient - it allows you to decorate the facade with wonderful stucco molding, without resorting to either direct stylization or worn-out postmodern effects like a "column in glass".
This museum-theatrical way of placing classical forms on a modern facade makes it "unframed" and attractive - in Moscow, and even abroad there are few such buildings. But at the same time, the technique should be recognized as a sign of the times - it can be recognized as characteristic of the "thinking" architecture of the 2000s. The general trend could be conditionally labeled as “construction of ruins”, both Mikhail Filippov and Ilya Utkin managed to have a hand in it in the 2000s, and after the crisis it somehow dried up, supplanted by fashionable ideas of sustainability and environmental friendliness. But the version of Nikita Biryukov and Pavel Zheleznov, even within the framework of this tendency, is more than unusual: as a rule, it was about imitation of ruins, but Moscow did not know exactly such a staging of multiple reconstruction of a house.
The architects planned to continue the game started on the facades in the interiors of public spaces of the house: the entrance lobby, elevator halls and halls on the floors. In a completely modern interior, fragments of "old" paintings should have appeared on the surface of the walls. As if they were cleared during the restoration and placed in a frame under glass. Unfortunately, these design ideas were never implemented.
But the project of night illumination of the building, obligatory for the city center, was completed. Column-shaped "floor lamps" were installed in front of the facades, and lower lighting was installed in the paving at the base of the facades. In addition, each sculptural fragment received its own point source of illumination, which complicated and greatly enhanced the plastic solution.
Some time ago, apartments in this house were considered almost the most expensive in Moscow. Of course, this is a consequence of the specific economic situation, but the fact is obvious: the Russian customer of a "premium-class" building can no longer imagine success without not just a high-quality, but an individual, creative architectural solution, and is ready to spend "excesses" of effort, time and money. And the result is not long in coming. Modern Moscow buildings, both new buildings and reconstructed ones, have one well-known drawback - they often look good from afar, from the window of a bus or car, but they do not at all stand up to careful, close study: work with details is either absent altogether, or rather Low quality. And in front of this house I would like to stop and examine carefully all the little things, to understand how the facade is made. Maybe the tradition of leisurely evening walks around your beloved city will soon return?
