The book “ArchiDron. The fifth facade of modern Moscow”appeared largely due to chance. Photographer Denis Esakov prepared a series of aerial photographs of the capital for the city's online edition. Then the circumstances changed, and they spread across different media, Russian and foreign. The publishing house DOM publishers offered the author to put the photos together - so the album was released, while receiving a detailed accompanying article by Karina Dimer.
The preparation of the project began in early spring and was completed in the late summer of last year. Each building was filmed from three angles - two from the air using a drone and one from the ground, the drone was raised to a height of 500 meters. We had to wait a long time for sunny days suitable for work, but most of the time was taken not by the filming process, but by the selection of objects. As a result, the book includes photographs of seventy Moscow houses of different years: from the Shukhovskaya tower to the residential complex "Garden Quarters" with a mandatory stop over the skyscrapers of Moscow City.
“I had three criteria: architectural significance, a complex plan view and accessibility for shooting,” says Denis Esakov. - The first list consisted of architectural "stars", from which I then removed those that on the plan look like very simple rectangles. Then, with the help of colleagues, Nina Frolova and Boris Kondakov, he cut off the less significant ones with Occam's razor. It was a complex and multi-stage process”.
The book, in fact "trilingua", was released in three versions of the cover - in Russian, German and English, and it was the English title that turned out to be the most interesting: Spying on Moscow - "spying on Moscow" - fully describes the difficulties that the author had to face while shooting, and the subtitle A winged guide to architecture - "winged guide to architecture" - creates a poetic image that is very close to the content.
ArchiDron. The fifth facade of modern Moscow is not a story about roofs at all, as the name suggests. This book is an atlas of the sacred geometry of the city, hidden from the eyes of pedestrians. However, even what you already know, thanks to an unusual perspective, is revealed in a new way. So, the history of the emergence of Novy Arbat suddenly becomes completely tangible: the ideal horizontal line of the avenue invades the body of the city where the rest of the houses are deployed at a completely different angle.
The objects in the album follow each other in the chronological order of their appearance. Therefore, the "Archdron" flies not only over buildings, but also over eras. The Suprematism of Melnikov and the ideal rectangles of the Constructivists are replacing the “palatialism” of Moscow State University and VDNKh, which is replaced by the simplicity of modernism and the motley geometry of later buildings.
From photography to photography, the book develops a visual narrative not only about architecture, but also about people and the country. The layout of the central square of the "city of electronics" Zelenograd, designed in the mid-seventies, when viewed from the air turns out to be a "microcircuit" - exactly the same as from a transistor receiver.
Round houses on Dovzhenko and Nezhinskaya streets did not receive three brothers for the 1980 Olympics, but it turns out that at about the same time, “circles” of the AZLK museum, Natalia Sats Children's Musical Theater and the Moscow Youth Palace appear. However, the fact that on the roof of the last two there are "Olympic rings", a casual passer-by will hardly guess.
ArchiDron. The fifth facade of modern Moscow "reveals the secrets of buildings. The Patriarch House in Eromolaevsky Lane appears on the plan with a matryoshka, in addition to the antique statues on the façade and Tatlin's tower. On the roof of the main pavilion of VDNKh, four gilded inscriptions "USSR" are visible. The drone flies very close to the facades, so that you can, for example, see the air conditioners with which the Ostankino tower is hung.
There are almost no people in the album: they get into the frame only a few times and exactly so as to remain unnoticed. The photographs from the ground were taken without fancy: in the book they are no more than address plans, too obvious to draw attention to themselves. The camera angles from above are a completely different matter: aerial photographs look like ideal blueprints, which suddenly came to life, acquired material and color, but remained two-dimensional at the same time.
