We continue the series of publications of photographs by Denis Esakov.
Large-block residential building known as Burov's House, Openwork House, Lace House.
Leningradsky prospect, 27, building 1
1939–1940
Authors: architects A. K. Burov and B. N. Blokhin, engineers A. I. Kucherov and G. B. Karmanov, artist V. A. Favorsky.
Boris Kondakov, architect, urbanist:
“Before us is an example of a building of the era of“mastering the classical heritage with a human face”, an example of Soviet Art Deco. In an era when facades often required to blindly reproduce samples of ancient classics (which does not exclude brilliant examples in this genre as well), Andrei Konstantinovich Burov went his own way, guided by the principle "the best thing to imitate the ancients is not to imitate them": these words of P. A. Vyazemsky Burov quoted in his work "On Architecture".
This house, a harbinger of massive residential construction in the USSR in the second half of the 20th century, has little in common with what was created in the subsequent era, when architecture retreated not even to second, but to third positions. Here it was possible to combine seemingly incompatible things - the cheapness of industrial production and the highly artistic approach of "piece" architecture.
The facade of the house personifies the search for a new tectonics (according to Burov - a plastically developed, artistically meaningful structure) of a building, consonant with the time, a building that was supposed to be assembled like an airplane from large elements produced by an industrial method, and not bricks. Burov gropes for a new proportional rhythm of modern building materials in this work. Here, for the first time, the technological feature of building from large blocks was comprehended: the seams were not masked, but, on the contrary, were accented.
“An attempt to impose on the inorganic, crystalline structure of repetitions (for example, identical apartments, expressed on the facade) the dynamic structure of the golden section, to hide them under it, distorts both the problem and its solution. Architecture turns into falsification,”argued Burov. Another quote from the master is also appropriate - from the time when he had already finally established himself in the idea that industrial materials are the future. Here he is apparently criticizing his own residential building of Narkomles (Tverskaya Street, 25), the first stage of which was completed several years earlier at the building on Leningradka: the grooms and guards lived on the first floor, the lord lived on the second, and the servants on the third), and then the eight-story building takes on the appearance of a three-story one. And I, too, was guilty of such falsifications."
One can imagine how, in some parallel reality, whole cities would be created from similar buildings on Leningradsky Prospekt. Andrei Konstantinovich has a description of them. “There will be a marble-lined floor of the central square with fountains, surrounded by a mirrored wall of shop windows framed in gilded steel bindings, - a hall-square covered by the sky and inscribed in the greenery of residential areas … and a ceremonial center, modern, just as beautiful and modern, how beautiful and modern the Acropolis was for its creators."
But, as we know, the story turned out differently, the house remained a piece prototype. Meanwhile, this house is surprisingly modern, it combines those qualities of a unit of urban development that seem to us the most important now: a public ground floor with a cafe and a kindergarten - an active facade; rich and variable plastic of the facade with an industrial approach to its creation, fully revealing when close,"Tactile" contact of a person with architecture - instead of deliberate monumentality; apartment-type accommodation is a decision based on Burov's personal impressions of American hotels."
