Sanatorium "Voronovo"
Architects I. Z. Chernyavsky, I. A. Vasilevsky
Moscow, Troitsky administrative district, Voronovo village
1968–1974
Denis Romodin, architecture historian:
The Voronovo sanatorium is essentially an architectural complex of the 18th – 21st centuries. Until our time, buildings of the middle of the 18th century have survived in Voronovo, which arose under Ivan Vorontsov, who owned the estate at that time. It was then that active construction began on the estate. In the 1750s - 1760s, according to the project of Karl Blank, the Church of the Savior Not Made by Hands and a detached 62-meter bell tower, which became the main dominant of the area, were built, and an elegant two-storey Dutch house was erected in the park. While Blanc's style is easily recognizable in the building of the Baroque church, his Dutch House is an eclectic structure, where the architect, using the layout techniques of traditional Dutch architecture, applied baroque elements characteristic of that time. The building has been rebuilt several times and is currently restored. The church was plundered only once - in 1812, and in Soviet times it was not closed, retaining the interior decoration. The bell tower was damaged in 1941, remained abandoned for a long time and was restored in 2014.
The manor house was less fortunate. The three-story manor house with an 8-column portico and outbuildings was designed at the end of the 18th century by Nikolai Lvov for Count Artemy Vorontsov. At the same time, an extensive park was laid out, which was adorned with the water surface of an artificial reservoir: it divided the green massif into two parts. But in 1812 the manor house, which belonged at that time to Fyodor Rostopchin, was almost completely burned down and was partially restored in 1830 without the second and mezzanine floors. The next radical reconstruction of the house was carried out in the 1870s-1880s, when the estate was owned by Alexander Sheremetev. The second floor was restored, a high attic was built with lucarnes and narrow chimneys. The surface of the outer walls received a plaster decor imitating rustic texture. The window frames had multi-part fine glass panes. The building acquired an appearance similar in style to the French palace buildings of the 17th century and the neo-baroque German architecture of the late 19th century. Unfortunately, the author of the restructuring project remained unknown. Perhaps it was the architect Nikolai Benois, who often worked for Alexander Sheremetev. The house was damaged by a fire in the 1920s and the second floor was rebuilt in the 1930s in simplified forms. By that time, the Dutch house was also partially rebuilt.
In 1974-1986 the Institute "Spetsproektrestavratsiya" carried out work on the reconstruction of the main house and the restoration of the Dutch house. The manor house was rebuilt for the needs of the holiday home, and the facades were restored according to its appearance in the second half of the 19th century. All this was done at a time when the territory of the former estate was under the jurisdiction of the State Planning Commission. The committee received this territory in the early 1960s: then, on an area of almost 160 hectares, there was a huge neglected park, a two-story manor house, a Dutch house and the ruins of service buildings. A project was prepared for the restoration of the estate, but the existing structures could not meet the needs of the State Planning Commission, because it was required to create a large boarding house for mass recreation of committee workers, and in the future it was planned to create a sanatorium with a medical building. It was decided to build a new modern complex on the site of a meadow, behind the surface of a reservoir - near a landscape park. This territory was located away from the buildings of the XVIII-XIX centuries and did not violate the historical appearance of the estate. The site turned out to be of a complex curved shape, bounded on one side by the line of the forest, and on the other by the banks of the reservoir.
The project for the development of the new complex was entrusted in the mid-1960s to the architect Ilya Chernyavsky, who was then already in his years, and his young colleague Igor Vasilevsky. The creative team has developed a project for a complex consisting of adjoining public and dormitory buildings. They did not design a solution for dormitory buildings in the form of a parallelepiped with "cells" of loggias, which was typical for that time, but came up with an interesting technique that was completely new for Soviet resort architecture. They bent the sleeping building between the reservoir and the forest, breaking each section with numbers into separate blocks. The result is a curved "ladder", as if laid on its side. This arrangement made it possible to isolate the rooms by eliminating adjacent walls, and to do without long, straight corridors, where the doors of the rooms would go. Outside, this solution turned the elongated dormitory building into a complex series of volumes, arranged by the rhythm of deep loggias with alternating screens of fences - transparent lattice and deaf.
From the end part, this building is closed by a powerful reinforced concrete staircase, and the other part passes into a stepped public building, which smoothly descends to the surface of the reservoir and unfolds to a pedestrian bridge thrown from the shore with the old manor ensemble. As a result, leaving the manor park, its visitors see the first stage of the sanatorium from the most spectacular perspective. The authors, most likely, took into account the illumination of the sun on this side during the day: in clear weather, chiaroscuro changes on the facades of the entire structure. At the same time, from each distant point, the building, in any weather and season, is revealed in a completely new way, demonstrating interesting details on the brutal stone facades.
It was the stone cladding that gave the complex a monumentality and resemblance to exposed stone rocks against the background of water and forest. Unfortunately, the cladding in 1968-1974 was not performed at the proper level, and in 2011-2012 the surfaces of the facades had to be finished with plaster imitating a stone pattern. Fortunately, the vertical divisions of the public corps were reproduced, and the textured new plaster even gave it a new sound. Chernyavsky and Vasilevsky made a massive canopy from the side of the main entrance, which cuts into the extended volume of the cinema and concert hall. Under it, they placed an open terrace and a foyer, from where vacationers enter a large atrium, around which a dining room, halls, dance and sports halls and a library are located on several levels. The authors abandoned the conventional skylight at the top of the atrium, because such a solution would create the effect of a well. They brought in side glazing at different levels in some places, facing the street, which made the entire atrium light and airy, and the mirrored marble cladding of the walls and railings added light. The walls and galleries are finished with the same stone as the facades. Fortunately, during the interior renovations in 2011-2012, all stone cladding was carefully restored, which returned the atrium to its original beauty. The harsh image of the atrium and galleries is made lighter by the original chandelier and lamps made in the form of complex cone-shaped parts - imitating red copper and assembled into spherical shapes.
It is worth noting the decision of the dining room of the dining room and the pool, in the interiors of which the architects used multilevel suspended ceilings with aluminum slats imitating old bronze. The dining room was specially divided into zones, placed at different levels and delimited by decorative fences with landscaping. This gave the room a coziness and made it unlike an ordinary dining room, although up to 580 people were served there at the same time.
In the dormitory, on each floor, halls were arranged, equipped with fireplaces of various shapes and decor. The authors of the project decorated the corridor of the first floor with a fancy fence with landscaping, which separated the entrances to the premises from the main passage. All these elements have survived to this day and have been incorporated into the new interior of the case. When the main finishing works were completed in 1973-1974, the premises were furnished with original furniture and equipment from the CMEA countries and Finland. In the halls there were Ball chairs - spherical structures made of fiberglass, invented by the designer Hero Aarnio. They were successfully combined with the interior and exterior of the holiday home, which was progressive for Soviet architecture in the 1970s. Of course, the State Planning Committee could afford the implementation of such a status project, and its capabilities gave architects Ilya Chernyavsky and Igor Vasilevsky to fully express themselves. It is with this project that Chernyavsky begins an interesting period of resort architecture. He uses the solutions worked out in Voronovo in another rest house - in Otradnoye, designed for the Moscow City Executive Committee. And the architecture of the building in Voronovo already in the 1980s attracted serious attention of the domestic and foreign architectural community. So, in the book by Udo Kulterman "Architecture of the 1970s" this building was the only one that represented the USSR.
Unfortunately, Ilya Chernyavsky did not manage to realize the medical building in Voronovo, which was supposed to be located on the Small Pond. This project was developed in the 1980s and consisted of a building covered with a complex pitched roof. When the reconstruction of the holiday home began in 2012 into a modern sanatorium of the Ministry of Economic Development, a new medical building was built there. It was made semi-underground with overhead lighting and an exploited roof with lawn and paths. This decision made it fit into the territory without disrupting the perception of the main facade of the dormitory and public building of the 1970s."
