The Izvestia Quarter near Pushkinskaya Square is typically Moscow, one might even say hypertrophied Moscow, in the sense that it represents all the main trends in the city's architecture since the middle of the 19th century. This is a typical example of diversity and timing, but in general it is quite high quality, completely without slums.
Alexey Ginzburg has been working on this part of the city for seven years now, striving to preserve all layers of urban development, and where possible, restoring historical justice - in particular, he opens and preserves the brick surfaces of firewalls for both apartment buildings and for Izvestia Barkhin - because it was so. The result is colorful and fresh, in Moscow-style almost like Lentulov's: a kind of exemplary restoration of a fragment of Moscow buildings; 4 buildings of the 1st stage are now completed. We talked about Barkhin's Izvestia and Tyulyaeva's apartment building on Dmitrovka, now we are talking about two other houses: the Dolgorukov-Bobrinsky estate of the 1850s and the building of the editorial office of the Russkoye Slovo newspaper by Ivan Sytin, built by the architect Adolf Erichson in 1904. They are located on two opposite corners of the block: east and west, one opens Malaya Dmitrovka, the other looks at Tverskaya.
Estate of the Dolgorukov-Bobrinsky
Since 2007 - an identified cultural heritage site, it has a lot of local lore connotations, including a visit by Pushkin in 1832 (for more details see
post of Archnadzor 2013; then the work was only planned). It includes the walls of estates of the second half of the 18th - early 19th centuries, which is generally typical of houses in the Moscow center; Tyulyaeva's house next to Dmitrovka also contains fragments of the Amir estate. Meanwhile, the two-story building that we see belongs mainly to the years 1853-1856. There are still quite a few local history "bookmarks" at the house, the Moscow Archaeological Society of Count Alexander Uvarov met here, and from 1947 to 1964 the editorial board of "New World" worked under the leadership of Simonov, then Tvardovsky. Then, in the corner between the outbuilding and the house, a beer house settled, which was replaced by a casino in the 1990s. At this time, the house was inhabited by many tenants: offices, shops, nightclubs. However, now, after the restoration, the house is also planned to be rented, most likely for offices.
The pub and the casino in the corner were not revived, but the front garden and the fence, which existed during the period of the Novy Mir editorial office, were restored. The lost cast-iron balcony from the side of the square was also returned to its place. The window frames were restored: the outer cold frame repeats the pattern of historical windows known from photographs and surviving fragments, and the double-glazed windows installed on the inside for heat are practically invisible from the street. The meander-edged railing has been replaced by a simple steel rail.
In the 1930s, the right-hand side of the house was extended with a third floor; On the whole, the entire house, which is extremely multi-layered, is called a puzzle by Alexei Ginzburg: there are a lot of layers in it and not a single room is alike. The walls were “spreading out,” and on the whole the house “looked more like the scenery for the Kinz-Dza film than the center of Moscow,” says the architect; the wooden floors were deformed and were exposed to the street. The floors and ceilings had to be replaced with reinforced concrete ones.
Of the historic interiors, the architects restored only those that were under protection: the main staircase and part of the second floor; stone steps, stone inserts on pilasters, stucco moldings were restored, the wooden roof over the stairs could not be preserved, but it was replaced by a wooden one.
One of the most tangible problems turned out to be salts, which impregnated both the porous white-stone basement and the brick. The walls were cleared of salts for a long time, this work continued even in the summer; after the completion of the cleaning procedure, the brick walls in the courtyard - as we remember, following the historical truth, Alexey Ginzburg leaves them brick - were covered with a hydrophobic compound.
After the restoration, the house acquired a yellow color instead of pink, probably because the style of its facades is sometimes defined as late classicism. It makes a bright pair with Tyulyaeva's house on Malaya Dmitrovka: yellow and light green alternate with bright terracotta bricks. Another "neighbor" of the Dolgorukov-Bobrinsky estate is the Church of the Nativity in Putinki on the other side of the street, one of the most "patterned" and famous churches of the 17th century. Although the difference between them is 200 years, together they remind of undersized Moscow, a city that, after the construction boom of the late 19th - early 20th centuries, and then during the period of Stalinist construction, was almost completely transformed.
On the other hand, the estate contrasts with the Izvestia building - like old Moscow and new. ***
The building of the newspaper "Russian Word"
If the estate on the corner of Malaya Dmitrovka is a representative of the "old Moscow" part of the quarter, low, multi-layered, cozy, then the editorial building, in which Ivan Sytin himself lived, at one time was a symbol of novelty: from the scale of the publishing business - by 1917 Sytin bought almost the whole quarter, except for Tyulyaeva's house, says Aleksey Ginzburg, up to Art Nouveau architecture with mascarons and a tiled facade. The building marked the beginning of a new, printing specialization in this part of the city. After the October Revolution, Russkoe Slovo was quickly closed, although it resisted Soviet power for almost a year, until July 1918, under various names. Since 1921, the editorial office of the Trud newspaper has settled in Sytin's house.
In 1979, Sytin's house was moved on 400 skating rinks, not to widen the street, but to increase the area in front of the new Izvestia building, built shortly before. That is, they did not move from Tverskaya to the depths of the quarter, but to the northwest: two three-storey apartment buildings, between which the editorial office of the Russian Word was built in 1904, had been demolished by that time - in the 1960s. The Sytinsky house was moved 33 meters to the corner of Nastasinsky Lane; Moreover, in 1979 this procedure took not 2-3 months, as in the 1930s, but three days - the hydraulic jacks became more powerful (see "Technology of Youth" No. 8 1979).
A monolithic slab was brought under the house - it was discovered during the work - it was reinforced with steel beams inside, outside the entire first floor was surrounded by a metal bandage and rolled on 400 rollers. The back wall of the house remained in place and was later dismantled. Then Sytin's house was restored, but inexpensively and carelessly: the original "joinery" of the window frames was replaced with a new and dissimilar one. "But the subject of protection as Sytin's office got a room with Soviet walls and a ceiling," says Alexei Ginzburg, "most likely it belongs to the 1950s, but it certainly has nothing to do with Sytin." During the restoration of the 1980s, decorative arches with mascarons appeared on both firewalls of the house, until then, with mascarons - most likely between 1982 and 1985.
“It was interesting for us to restore what was lost during the transfer of the building and before that,” continues the architect. In particular, the decorative walls with oval holes were restored to mask the roof at the ends of the house. The mosaic frieze with flowers on a gold background has been restored. The first floor was re-tiled with beige tiles - it's hard to say when, but by the 1960s it had already been replaced with plaster rustic; washed the tiles of the upper floors, after which it turned out that during the Soviet restoration it was repaired with tiles of a different color - the facade turned out to be spotty; late Soviet elements were varnished, which ensured the uniformity of tone. All the old tiles have been mothballed. The window frames were redone from old photographs. The ground floor windows have been reduced; Alexei Ginzburg returned them the original outlines of the showcases with glass to the pavement, and it was not without debate: during the agreement, it was suspected that the architect was not reviving the old showcases of 1904, but was trying to install new ones. But nothing happened.
The metal fittings of the deeply removed cornice and balconies are completely rotten; but the architects decided not to recreate them anew, but to reinforce them with anchors and pins, fearing that it would not be possible to accurately reconstruct the art nouveau plastics in our time, so the cornices and balconies remained authentic. On the other hand, the decorative arches of the early 1980s on the firewalls have been preserved.
The original staircase of the Sytinsky Russian Word was also dismantled in the 1980s - when the Izvestia concert hall was attached to the moved building from the side of Nastasinsky Lane, later turned into the Kodak kinomir cinema (its
closed in 2012). During the 1980s - 2000s, the main entrance to the Sytinsky house was a staircase from Kinomir. Now the architects of Alexei Ginzburg's bureau have built a new staircase inside and a new communication core to replace the one lost in the 1980s.
The technical floor was hidden in a cold attic under a hip roof, providing it with “gill” slots for ventilation, which made it possible to preserve the traditional silhouette of the building without disturbing it with protruding “fungi” of the ventshakht, - Alexey Ginzburg sums up.
The ceilings inside were designed by Vladimir Shukhov, says the architect, and consisted of an I-beam with a pitch of 1.2 m and a metal membrane about 10 cm thick, reinforced with brick chips. Not wanting to load the old floors and thus test it for strength, new monolithic slabs were made higher, preserving both Shukhov's structures and the stucco molding preserved on them from below. The architects did not complete the stucco molding - since the premises are planned to be rented out without finishing, its preservation and display remain on the conscience of the tenants. The two lower floors of the house are now planned to be given to shops, 2.5 upper floors - to restaurants. ***
I think it is quite clear from the story how much Alexei Ginzburg is fascinated by the topic of restoration while preserving both the historical appearance and the original elements of buildings. This restoration, on the one hand, is quite thorough and detailed, and on the other, it is quite vital, designed not for museification, but for further functioning. Which entails a number of compromises: strict connoisseurs would suggest, I think, to restore the publishing function of the Sytinsky house and completely revive everything that was inside … Actually, one of the problems of our time is the struggle between perfectionism and pragmatism and their inability to agree among themselves. Some, let's call them the old Muscovites, demand too much, others ignore their demands on this basis, doing what they think is necessary. The hard work of Alexei Ginzburg is a reverse example, an example of a reasonable, but by no means excessive, compromise, very useful, I believe, for the city.
