There was no permanent exhibition in the Museum of Architecture for twenty years - since the Donskoy Monastery, where its branch was located, was transferred to the church and all the funds stored there were hastily transported to Vozdvizhenka. Prior to that, in Soviet times, the exposition in the Donskoy Monastery told about world and, mainly, domestic architecture until the 19th century, and in the main building - the Talyzins' house on Vozdvizhenka - about modern architectural processes. One of the museum's curators, Aleksey Leonidovich Karpun, says that the history of architecture is represented in the funds by an interesting collection of models and models, starting with the collection of antique monuments bought by Catherine II for her grandchildren. Most of the models belong to the 20th century - numerous lost objects: the Sukharev Tower, the palace of Alexei Mikhailovich in Kolomenskoye, a collection of wooden churches of various types that appeared here in the 70s and 80s thanks to Alexander Viktorovich Opolovnikov. There are amazing historical exhibits, for example, the model of the Assumption Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin, created during the Great Patriotic War. There are also genuine author's models, for example, Andrei Voronikhin's model of the Kazan Cathedral. But the main gem of the collection is the model of the Grand Kremlin Palace. In Soviet times, it was available for viewing in the Great Cathedral of the Donskoy Monastery, and for the last twenty years it lay dismantled on the third floor of the Talyzin city estate.
The fate of the model from the very beginning was not easy - like the fate of its author, the rejected genius of Russian architecture Vasily Bazhenov. For the first time it was seriously damaged when it was taken in 1773-74 to St. Petersburg for the approval of the project by the empress. For most of the 19th century, she traveled disassembled to various museums and depositories in Moscow. For the first time after Bazhenov, it was assembled in 1906, but already in 1929 it was dismantled again. Since then, it has been restored and assembled twice more, but already in fragments. However, the restoration of the model continues. The head of the restoration department of the museum, Andrei Lvovich Moiseev, is not sure that it will be possible to restore it in its entirety, for this there is no space of sufficient size, because the total length of the model is 17 meters, but he is amazed at its quality. Surprisingly, firstly, the condition of the wood is excellent. It is believed that the tree for the model, and this is mainly larch, was taken from the palace of Alexei Mikhailovich dismantled at that time in Kolomenskoye. Secondly, the quality of the work is striking - not only the high elaboration of architectural and decorative details, but also the careful processing of those parts of the model that will never open to the eyes of the audience. However, Vasily Bazhenov amazed with the quality of the models' execution even by his professors in Paris and Rome. In addition, in the design process, he assigned the model the main role, for him it was "already half of the practice", it was on it that he worked out the tectonics and visual balance of the future building, therefore the new museum exposition demonstrates to the public two options for solving the central part of the palace, facing Moscow - river.
The Grand Kremlin Palace was to become not just a building - it was conceived as a new face of Moscow, the transformation of its cultural and political center from a medieval fortress into a bulwark of the Enlightenment. The idea of Moscow as the third Rome was to acquire materiality in this building. It is no coincidence that the central square of the palace - oval - gives rise to associations with the square in front of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. The clarity and regularity of the palace plan matched Catherine's ambitions to create an equally regular ideal state. The project, as we know, was not implemented, but Bazhenov's model acquired the value of an independent work during his lifetime, it became a school of classicism for Russian architecture. The model was shown in a specially built model house in the Kremlin, was opened to the public in St. Petersburg, Karamzin in 1817 called it one of Moscow's landmarks, at the beginning of the twentieth century it was on display at the Polytechnic Museum. Material evidence of one of the most brilliant epochs in Russian history is now available to us. And matter, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, has the original property of spirituality.
