A few days ago, a meeting of the working group under the chief architect of Moscow approved the project of a business complex on Mozhaisk highway in the version of Alexei Bavykin in 2013. In July, the project of the building, made for the same site and the customer of another workshop (LLC NPP "Gradostroitelstvo"), was discussed at the arch council, and then the council members unanimously expressed the sense that the previous version of Bavykin was more convincing. The customer again turned to Bavykin's workshop, and received new facades and slightly revised plans (the plans had already been approved, it was impossible to radically change them). This option has now been approved by the working group and is likely to be implemented.
We have been watching the project since 2006. The history of its discussion and agreement is extremely intricate and curious; it even - to some extent, of course - reflected the changes in Moscow's views on architecture over the past 7 years. Using his example, they seriously discussed the idea, plasticity and relevance, and not meters and not schemes, which in itself is a rarity for Moscow. Further: the project turned out to be a kind of test, because in connection with it many figures of the (then) Moscow architectural scene suddenly began to betray themselves: Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, seemingly committed to the idea of stylization, rejected the project for being "ruined"; and the architect and critic Kirill Ass, who had not previously seemed to be in harmony with the mayor, echoed him in denial, although he did not motivate his position in the same way as the mayor. And only historians of architecture liked the project - still, the courage of the architect, who allowed himself to draw on the avenue a gigantic shadow of either the Beauvais arch or the Roman aqueduct, was impressive.
But you can't go against society (and society rarely takes into account the opinion of historians) and now Alexey Bavykin himself admits his idea of turning an ordinary office center into a giant visual attraction is not entirely correct. Everything has its place and time. In 2010, the arch
turned into a square pylon in the spirit of the classic modernism of the 1980s and was then approved by the public council under the mayor, even Luzhkov. Then the customers handed over the project to the NPP "Gradostroitelstvo" company, which developed three even quieter versions of lower number of storeys, shown at the above-mentioned July architectural council. And finally, over the past few months, Bavykin's bureau has proposed a new version of the project. The authors of this third version are Alexey Bavykin, Mikhail Marek and Natalia Bavykina.
The architecture of the new version is very restrained, the facades, faced with fine bricks, are almost white. Thin windows combine three floors at the bottom, two floors at the top; their rhythm is a little out of order - it either resembles the instrument that is played, fingering the keys, or a one-dimensional barcode. At the top, the wall becomes denser, the frequency and height of the window strokes gradually decrease; the same compaction of the mass, quite in the spirit of the classical paradigm (and as opposed to the avant-garde), occurs at the corners.
If the first project of 2006 was a shadow of the Beauvais arch, now only a shadow remains from the arch. More precisely, the shadow remained from the pylon proposed in 2010, and from the semi-arch-ruin, which was at the very beginning. "Pylon's Shadow" - tall glass balconies that cut through the facades in the places where the pylon was. The glass plane on the facade facing the city center, which was once cut by an energetic "nose", is now covered by a large ornamental lattice depicting trees (we also remember tree trunks in the first version of the project, so this theme continued).
"Shadow of the Ruin" is a small beveled console pushed out from the volume of the upper floor towards the avenue (this is how designer shelves are put forward, fixed inside the cabinet on one hinge). On the long side of the console, the name of the business center is written in large letters, and on the end facing the center, the most interesting detail of the new version of the project is located: "the balcony of a lonely smoker", seen as a characteristic trifle in Alexei Bavykin's handwriting, it seems, even by Grigory Revzin (or Nikolai Malinin?) Back in the 1990s.
I would understand this detail as a somewhat proud signature: "here we are, we do not burn on fire" - and I would not be surprised if, when the building is built and the seven-year history (and by that time already eight or nine years old) finally ends, the architect Alexei Bavykin will find time to climb this balcony and smoke, looking at the Beauvais Arch, on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, on Moscow.
