Zuev Club
Architect Ilya Golosov
Moscow, Lesnaya street, 18
1927–1929
Sergey Kulikov, architecture historian:
“The Club of the Union of Communal Workers named after Comrade Zuev” is named in honor of the locksmith of the Miussky tram depot, who was executed in 1907 for the murder of his boss, engineer F. F. Krebs. In the same year, the future author of the project for the club building, Ilya Golosov, entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he mastered the basic skills of "working in styles", which at that time was considered the basis of architectural education. Becoming in 1918 an employee of the Moscow City Council workshop headed by Ivan Zholtovsky, Golosov began, under his influence, to experiment with classical architectural forms, experiments on which he ended his career in 1945. However, it was this building of the workers' club that brought him the greatest fame to the architect, which dates back to the period of his passion for constructivism in the second half of the 1920s.
Before finding himself in the circle of constructivists, Golosov developed one of the most distinctive theories in the history of Soviet avant-garde architecture. The "theory of the construction of architectural organisms" was called upon "to reveal the laws of artistic construction." Golosov called an "organism" an architectural composition, the central element of which is a "subjective mass" around which secondary elements or "objective masses" are formed. The most important task of the architect is to identify the internal motion contained in these "masses", the trajectory of which is called the "line of gravity" and depends on the configuration of the volume. The active "line of gravity" is vertical, the passive "horizontal", together they make up the compositional frame of the "architectural organism". The internal movement of the main element of the architectural composition, as a rule, is active, vertical and must be completed compositionally, in contrast to the secondary volumes supporting it with horizontal "lines of gravity". Such incompleteness allows, according to Golosov, to include the "architectural organism" in the urban fabric and presupposes compositional asymmetry.
All these principles were implemented in the project of the Zuev club, the construction of which was completed in 1929. It is an asymmetrical corner building, where a vertical glass cylinder of stairs cuts through the horizontal “passive” parallelepiped of the main mass of the club. The cylinder rises above it, which makes the composition and the trajectory of vertical movement complete, which cannot be said about horizontal volumes, the movement hidden in them breaks off to the right and left of the cylinder, dissolving into the surrounding buildings. The club underwent reconstruction in 1954, balconies disappeared, some niches and windows were laid, however, thanks to the perfectly preserved compositional unit of the building, you do not notice this immediately, involuntarily confirming the correctness of Golosov's theory. Despite its intricacy, the language of the building's architecture is extremely clear and is taken by the author from the vocabulary of constructivism."
