about the competition and site of the First Exemplary Printing House
The starting point for the authors of the project, submitted to the competition by the architectural bureau ABV, was the era of the construction of the historical buildings of the printing house - the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries. The formation of the bourgeoisie as a class and artistic movements closely related to this phenomenon, above all the birth of the Art Nouveau style - these processes, rudely interrupted by well-known historical events, formed the basis of Nikita Biryukov's concept. It was bourgeoisness in the best sense of the word that he proposed to make the hallmark of the complex. “This is a complex for people who are confident in themselves” - this is how the authors define the target audience of their project.
The architects saw their mission primarily in restoring the historical silhouette of the main building of the printing house. The main "evil" is the fifth floor built up in Soviet times, which leveled the upper line of the facade and thus grossly violated the architect's plan - it is dismantled according to the project, and an attic is erected in its place, which, due to the indentation inland from the facade line, does not interfere with the perception of the characteristic silhouette of the building. Instead of one "Soviet" floor, the authors managed to achieve full-fledged two, and by deepening the superstructure, the apartments located on the upper floors got access to the terraces. The facade itself, designed in an exquisite beige and gray tones, is decorated with delicate stucco decoration, and the windows of the first floor are lowered almost to the ground in order to accommodate shop windows there - of course, expensive and prestigious, which only can be located in a respectable bourgeois building.
But the authors of the project had to seriously break their heads over the apartmentography of this building. Trying to plan apartments in accordance with the TK, they were faced with the fact that it comes into irreconcilable contradiction with the existing structure: the pitch of the bearing columns, ceiling arches, the location of the windows. Which, in general, is not surprising, given that Erichson and Shukhov did not design housing, but a production facility. It turned out that the partitions rest against the window frames, the windows "stick" to the walls, the vaults of the ceilings break in the most unexpected places, and the overall proportions of the rooms leave much to be desired. It was impossible to do anything with the constructive, it is an object of cultural heritage, which means that it was necessary to sacrifice the technical specification. The authors of the project offered the customer their own version of layouts - with rooms of the correct proportions, competent arrangement of windows and arches plus, as a bonus, a mezzanine level “cut out” on the highest second floor - and the customer, which is pleasant, agreed with their arguments. “We have made residential premises out of the printing houses,” sums up one of the authors of the project, Valentin Ostroumov, “without deteriorating their quality and without destroying the historical heritage”.
In the rest of the corps, there was no need to retreat from the technical assignment, although in each case the task was new and difficult. Building number 2, stretching along the 2nd Monetchikovskiy lane, is distinguished not only by its solid length, but also by an incredible depth for a residential building - more than twenty meters - which again significantly complicates the layout of apartments, which, with a standard approach, turn out to be huge in area. Both problems were solved simultaneously due to facade solutions, since in this building, we recall, according to the TK, only the frame of the building was preserved, everything else was erected anew. The elevator shafts recessed into the depths of the facade divided the volume of the building into four parts, so different from each other that they can easily be mistaken for four compact, independent structures standing in a row. The difference is in the materials used - facing stone, ceramic bricks, again stone - both in colors and in the plastic itself: the squares of recessed windows with French balconies alternate with an accordion of triangular bay windows. Returning to apartmentography: such active facades, going inside the building, made it possible to bring the apartments to a more or less reasonable area.
Another printing house, overlooking the Garden Ring, has never tried to compete in splendor with the main building, but no less harmonious in its restrained elegance. The authors of the project emphasize its "modest charm", cleaning the mother-of-pearl gray with beige interspersed, highlighting the decorative elements characteristic of Art Nouveau and again pushing back into the attic so as not to smear the noble silhouette of the attics.
The only red-brick building in the ABV group's project is a former dormitory for the workers of the Sytinsk printing house, located inside the courtyard. Here the architects preserve and restore the decorative masonry, and the upper level, where the number of storeys today varies from three to four floors, is leveled with the help of a brick attic with terraces. Since, even taking into account the superstructure, this building turns out to be the lowest in the complex, the authors of the project propose to equip the roof with the use of green spaces - and thus make it part of the courtyard, further decorating the view from the windows of the upper, most prestigious floors of the surrounding houses. The yard is generally planned to be made very green, and the whimsical arabesques of the flower beds and paths seem to soften some of the brutality of the factory architecture of the former printing house.
By the way, the authors of the project wanted to solve the last building of the complex, which is being built again at the intersection of Monetchikovskiye lanes, in some stylistic opposition. “It is, I would say, more feminine,” comments Valentin Ostroumov. "Everything around is so courageous, and we tried to make him more graceful." Compressed from all sides by the grip of insolation restrictions, here the authors of the project could express themselves only in the design of the facade: the house received a facing of light bricks, crossed vertically by a dark stripe of French windows assembled in triplets - every woman knows that a vertical strip slims! - and, quite unexpectedly, colored decorative inserts under the very roof of the attic, referring to the rich ornamentalism of Moscow Art Nouveau and thus stylistically "looping" the architecture of the complex of the former Sytinskaya printing house.
