The project was made for the site on which last spring the remnant of the architect Sokolov's mansion, protected by the residents, the deputy Elena Tkach and "Arhnadzor" was demolished. The house looked terrible, did not have any security status, more than half consisted of the so-called "soldier's masonry", post-war, sloppy and unreliable. The house was demolished legally, the demolition commission, under the personal leadership of Deputy Mayor Khusnullin, issued a permit.
Arkhnadzor coordinator Rustam Rakhmatullin proposed to restore the Sokolov mansion in its former form, that is, in fact, since there was little genuine left of the mansion, to rebuild it in its previous forms, or even more precisely to build a remake in the forms of the Sokolov mansion - a small, one-story monument to the mansion in the middle of Moscow. In the rhetoric of city defenders, the project, which is planned to be implemented on this site instead of a modest mansion, figured exclusively as a giant modern building made of glass and concrete - a typical and somewhat boring formula of the eighties, denouncing the unwillingness to even look at the proposed project, since any replacement of the protected one is evil.
Meanwhile, glass and concrete, of course, are present in almost any modern building, but this is not the point. There are still not so many subtle projects, attentive both to the environment and to their own plasticity, not alien to reflection, even in the center of Moscow to be scattered about. Architect Alexei Bavykin, together with his daughter Natalya Bavykina, has been designing for this site since 2010, offering the third option, subject to ever new restrictions. Previously, the house occupied the entire site, then it was limited by a spot of a demolished house and the contours of the plan got a whimsical shape, repeating angular extensions (it is completely unclear why this should be done if the predecessor house was demolished anyway, but there are rules and the architects kept them, they even the height turned out to be slightly less than the allowed). We asked Alexei Bavykin about the Sokolov mansion and he replied that if in his opinion there would be something left from the house that could be meaningfully preserved (Bavykin studied at the Moscow Architectural Institute at the Department of Restoration under S. S. Podyapolsky and something understands the safety and possibilities of conservation), he would not undertake this project in any case. And yet - that he hates remakes, does not see any meaning in them, and he would never have undertaken a remake.
The architects are confident that they are right, and, frankly, I would like to see the project implemented, so it makes sense to take a closer look at it. ***
A dog ran across the sky and disappeared … And the dialogue in the genre "I will tell you, as an architect to an architect", so attractive in any reconstruction, neither the first nor the second did not work out. And it couldn't have happened. The house, which in 1884 was built for himself by “the out-of-class artist-architect Sokolov, who was limited in means and modest in his desires” - with a front entrance, rusticated pilasters and a semicircular pediment, simply turned into ruins. Not in ruins, but in ruins: the ruins are romantic and attractive, the ruins are wretched, unattractive and, unfortunately, evoke a feeling of disgust rather than interest in their past.
The house passed from hand to hand, it was redesigned, and something was added to it all the time: in 1899 - a winter garden, and in 1903 - a one-story kitchen … the fate of communal housing - with the obligatory erection of additional partitions, cutting and closing openings and the indispensable hammering of nails and crutches under troughs, sledges and bicycles into the walls of the hallway. And in the 1970s, this promised, well-equipped life, which smelled of pies, boiled linen and all the same cabbage soup, ended: the house was turned into an office building with a badly closing slit-like skewed front door, another unknown who and how put partitions, and cracked glass subbotnik to windows subbotnik. From that time on, the house, which suddenly became ownerless, was already irreversibly destroyed. And no one cared that he was once a mansion, so rare in this part of the city that there was probably a front garden in front of him, and behind him, most certainly, a garden, which could be accessed through the terrace. Even the roof rafters rotted twenty years ago …
What kind of dialogue is there? So, a soliloquium about a new model, so unloved by Bavykin, "the construction of a new one, but exactly the same as the old one." ***
It is very difficult to design in one of the narrowest and shortest Moscow lanes, sandwiched between the pseudo-Russian facade of the Firsanovskaya almshouse and the silhouette of the Vulykh tower, bristling with kokoshniks. There are no spatial or emotional landmarks: for example, inexpensive apartment buildings diluted with Soviet housing construction. The whole building is not perceived from anywhere: someone sees the bottom, and someone - only the top. Someone manages to see one corner, and someone - the opposite. And the search path for options is endless. And by the irony of a mocking architectural fate and the will of the customer, the Bavykin architects had to walk through it twice.
The first time in 2010, when a kind of manifesto house was supposed to appear on the red building line: a clearly defined indentation of a glass penthouse, an irregular colonnade of trees growing into a sculptural crown and a broken lattice of the eaves.
At first glance, the return to the narrow section of Elektricheskiy Lane in 2013 does not seem so bright and declarative. But something is wrong with this declarative dullness. In the second version, practically nothing remained of Bryusov's brother. Well, except that the reed patinated in bronze, as before, grows on the railing of the balconies, and the glass volume of the penthouse waves in the sun with the faceted glass of the outer wall.
The house, on the other hand, acquired a tripartite, unusual for it before, retreated from the red line, almost completely coincided in the plan with the contour of the collapsed mansion and immediately ceased to dominate in the street perspective, leaving this privilege to the same Firsanovskaya almshouse, which in the Soviet years they did not forget to build on a couple of floors, turning from a box-box in the style of "a la rus" into a kind of worn-out chest. And against the background of such a visual dominant, the light, graceful, almost weightless volume of the apart-hotel makes you keep looking at yourself all the time. If you look around, you will immediately understand the position of the corner tower, which inexorably resembles either the architecture of castles and fortresses, or the building of Mosselprom. “The tower was invented by us as a small dominant, in the spirit of the low verticals characteristic of old Moscow,” says Alexei Bavykin, “remember, there were bell towers, towers at the corners, and other small accents, many of them were demolished during the Soviet era. So, thinking about this turret, we wanted to somehow return to the Moscow rhythm with its small verticals."
And inside, behind the almost impenetrable density of the walls, in a layered pie of floors, the Bavykin architects managed to combine the incompatible: on the ground and underground, everything starts with the park-elevator shaft, on the second, third, … fifth - it turns into a bedroom with its own bathroom, and on sixth - it is transformed into a part of the penthouse not covered by the open plan. And now, set deep into the composition, it is this trompe l'oeil tower that is visible from almost any point of the alley, like a lighthouse in a narrow channel of a city river.
The volume opposite to the tower - the third in the row visible from the alley - has completely mimicked the surrounding buildings. And this indistinguishability works exactly like a paper clip, connecting the expressive middle volume with the entire surrounding space. Makes it an integral part of it.
And then there is the non-standard brick wall cladding, which Moscow architecture has long lost the habit of. Today, when it comes to cladding, we most often think about color and material, and not about its plastic possibilities. Here, the plastic, longed for in the inexpressive Moscow sun, and the ripples of the facade scales are achieved by simple shifts by a quarter of a brick - forward or backward, with the same step in a row or with different steps, repeating in height or out of rhythm. Imitating the joints left over from the dismantled masonry, hinting at the hypothetical belonging of the house to some disassembled structure - as if the vertical protrusion from the side of the courtyard belonged to something broken off, from which regular brick protrusions remained: this can be seen in monasteries, and in city courtyards, if take a closer look, it comes across - the textured pattern of the masonry not only makes looking at the facades boring, but also adds a plot akin to an alternative history, - presented very subtly, for those who understand, the theme of ruins. In the arch on Mozhaikoye Shosse, Yuri Mikhailovich Luzhkov personally "hacked to death" this topic when he was mayor, but the architectural idea does not die, but is transformed, sprouting with other methods.
In this version of the project, little is left of the teeth of the "crown" of a wild order without capitals, but the house has absorbed a lot from the quiet householder in the Moscow courtyard, with its plan dictated by the circumstances, protrusions, cliffs, spontaneous restructuring - it is this image that becomes the main one, it is also allows you to best associate with the environment.
So maybe there is no need to regret that the sculptures, serenely lying on the pillars of the crown, reflected and multiplying in the glass surface of the walls of the penthouse, have gone into oblivion, and also that the Bavykin dog will never run across the sky over Elektricheskiy Lane …
