Exhibition “Model for a New Life, 1: 1 scale. Avant-garde on Shabolovka "was created jointly by the Avant-garde Center at the Library" Education of Workers ", galleries" On Shabolovka "(" Zamoskvorechye ") and the construction college" Bauhaus-30 ". It tells about an exemplary quarter, whose history began with the construction of the Shukhov Tower. In the area of Shabolovka Street, within a radius of one kilometer around the famous Comintern Radio Station, in the 1920s - mid-1930s, wonderful examples of architecture appeared: the Khavsko-Shabolovsky residential area, a school with an astronomical tower, a hostel for students of the Textile Institute, Donskoe Baths, a department store Mostorga, and in the Donskoy Monastery - the Anti-Religious Museum and the first capital crematorium and columbarium. All these structures were united by a common theme - the formation of a new, Soviet way of life and, through it, a Soviet citizen. Leading architects of that time were involved in their design - Ivan Nikolaev, members of the ASNOVA association and others. It is important to note that the gallery "On Shabolovka" itself is located in one of the buildings of the Khavsko-Shabolovsky residential area.
The exposition is housed in two triangular halls. Each architectural object at the exhibition has been assigned a serial number and symbolic designation - its generalized outline. In the large hall, there are plywood display cases, models of these buildings, and the composition of each building is played here in its own way. At the hostel of the Textile Institute, two buildings are marked with whatnots with exhibits, and the third, public one, is a workbench table. The baths plan is interpreted as a vertical plane and outlined with benches, the commune house presented in the same way received a pyramid showcase with glazing in the center - where the courtyard is located on the plan. The rounded volume of the Mostorg department store led the creators of the exhibition to the idea of turning its showcase into a kind of counter. The supporting column of the hall “became” the chimney of the crematorium, and under the glass of its window one can find the original membership card of the Society for the Development and Propagation of the Idea of Cremation.
Also among the exhibits are dishes that belonged to the first inhabitants of the residential area, rare sex guides for young people of the 1920s, a steel I-beam that was once part of a hostel. Historical photographs and building plans are placed on the plywood surfaces. The early Soviet slogans are especially tender: as if carved out of stone in their brevity and categorical nature, they are nevertheless applied to more everyday materials - metal plates and colored posters.
The small hall presents a response to the era of the avant-garde of our contemporaries: there
exhibited essays and projects of design students of the SC "Bauhaus-30", studying with Alexander Ermolaev. Plywood and wooden sculptures, simple, almost "schematic" furniture, diploma projects of communal houses (of course, student ones) and exhibitions in the ZIL Palace of Culture - all these are exact thoughts about values that are almost a hundred years old, and honest texts of young designers are sometimes not inferior in its categoricalness to the judgments of those who a hundred years ago were convinced of the need to form an absolutely new subject environment.
The exhibition includes historical film documents that show the seemingly stern faces of the 1920s and the coachmen against the backdrop of constructivist buildings. On specially for the exhibition, digitized fragments of newsreels, one can see an anti-religious procession, the burning of the first corpse in a crematorium, and scenes of life in a commune.
The exposition, designed by the architects of the "k-workshop", makes a great impression with its elegance and conformity to the spirit of constructivism: chopped font, clean geometric volumes devoid of empty decorativeness, clear narrative logic.
The exhibition is complemented by a series of lectures on a new architectural typology, which will be held on Thursdays, and on each Sunday, film screenings are scheduled here on the topic of new life and changing gender roles in society in the 1920s. These screenings will be hosted by Maxim Semyonov - film critic, film researcher, employee of the S. M. Eisenstein, author of a course of lectures on the history of cinema at the Moscow School of New Cinema
