Engineering building of the Moscow Metro
Architects: A. I. Taranov, V. M. Ginzburg
Moscow, Prospect Mira, 41 p. 2
Completed in 1982, fully commissioned in 1986.
Maria Serova, architect, co-founder of the Sovmod project:
“The radial northeastern highway of Moscow - Prospect Mira - has undergone many changes over the past century. Looking at it today and then is not the same thing at all. Rebuilt and expanded, 1st Meshchanskaya Street, next from Sukharevskaya Square towards the Rizhsky railway station, became known as Prospekt Mira. The street took on a new face, being built up with Stalinist houses, and in 1957 participants of the International Festival of Youth and Students, fighters for world peace, marched along it.
The metro station of the same name of the Kaluzhsko-Rizhskaya line (called, by the way, until 1966 "Botanical Garden") was opened later, in 1959. The station lobby has grown right in the middle of the estate that once belonged to the Kuznetsov porcelain manufacturers. The first lobby, however, was demolished, and in its place in 1982 there was an impressive complex for the underground engineering services, which preserved the exit from the metro on the ground floor.
The Corps of Engineers is like an alien from another reality: it stands alone among the rest of the buildings on the avenue. The building is both static and fluid: its large-scale volume is still visible from afar, the brutalist image is firmly imprinted in memory at first sight. On the other hand, with its shape and smooth smoothed corners, the engineering building bends around the preserved wing of the estate, creating a pedestrian walkway and a small area in the space between the buildings. Rhythmic rows of windows with concrete "platbands" enhance the feeling of dynamics, the building seems to flow from the foreground to the background. By the way, a story is connected with these platbands, which almost jeopardized the completion of the construction: only one form was allocated at the plant for pouring non-standard concrete elements, and the production did not fit into the construction timeframe. It was with great difficulty that the second form was knocked out at the plant so that construction would not stop. As a result, the building was completed, and today it performs its functions.
Architectural decisions, initially motivated by considerations of economy - finishing with metal profiled sheets, the use of repetitive elements - today seem to be witty, interesting finds that give the building a special technological look. The image, which has already firmly got used to the canvas of Prospect Mira, which is violently noisy at night and during the day. An image that, with its calm strength, combined with the rhythm of the window ornaments, is imprinted for a long time in the minds of those passing and passing by."
