1. He was saved for 30 years
Alexey Ginzburg is the grandson of Moisei Ginzburg, who built the Narkomfin house. His father, Vladimir Moiseevich, began to work in the house in the 1980s, Alexei joined in 1986. For about thirty years, it was not possible either to stimulate the state to take care of the key monument of the Russian avant-garde, or to find an investor interested in competently restoring the house, although the project was ready since the 1990s, however, the architects were constantly refining it. An investor from 2008 to 2014 proposed a project according to which an underground parking was built under the house.
At the end of 2015, a new owner appeared, Garegin Barsumyan's "League of Rights" company, in 2017 100% of the property was transferred to the company, all residents were resettled. In 2016, detailed restoration studies of the house began, and it turned out that its reinforced concrete structures were in good condition. The actual restoration work, according to representatives of the developer, began in January 2018. The restoration of the house is being carried out by Ginsburg Architects, which has been waiting for this opportunity for about thirty years. Tours are constantly conducted in the house. Working
real estate site, which specifically emphasizes the value of the house as a monument of constructivism.
“At some point, I realized that excursions in the house began to be conducted not only in English, but also in Russian, that the atmosphere in society had changed, our compatriots were finally interested in the history of avant-garde architecture. Apparently, this interest accumulated in the air and influenced the beginning of the restoration,”says Aleksey Ginzburg.
The restoration project has been approved by the Department of Cultural Heritage. There were no difficulties in agreeing, because, as Alexey Ginzburg says, "the requirements that we place on ourselves are more stringent than general standards." However, the building of the People's Commissariat for Finance is still a monument of regional significance - Aleksey Ginzburg quite rightfully considers it deserving of federal status, as well as being included in the list of objects protected by UNESCO.
2. House-commune: not true
House of Narkomfin not a commune house, - Alexey Ginzburg does not get tired of repeating, - this communal house … But even if you memorize this subtlety, in all honesty, it does not become much clearer.
What is the difference between a communal house and a communal house?
The commune house presupposes the complete socialization of everyday life - representatives of the typology are, first of all, student dormitories of the late 1920s (then the project of the student commune house was
competition). One of the most illustrative examples is the communal house of architect Ivan Nikolaev on Ordzhonikidze Street, a hostel for students of the Textile Institute. Moses Ginzburg criticized the practice of communal houses: “… the conveyor belt along which normalized life flows here resembles a Prussian barracks. There is no need to prove the abstract utopianism and erroneous social essence of all these projects. One cannot fail to notice in this whole program the mechanical process of the increase to astronomical sizes of the molecular elements of the everyday life of the old family”(M. Ya. Ginzburg. Dwelling. M., 1934, pp. 138, 142).
The communal house does not impose complete socialization of everyday life, but rather offers its elements as convenience. The name goes back to the project Communal building A-1 ”, Which Ginzburg proposed to the competition organized by him for the SA magazine in 1927 as an experience in creating a new type of housing, which included the principle of combining completely individualized living quarters with a number of socialized functions. (Modern architecture, 1927, No. 4-5. Quoted from: SO Khan-Magomedov. Ibid. P. 79).
The author's name of the house of Narkomfin - experimental house of transitional type, so it is named in the book of Moses Ginzburg "Dwelling". Why experienced? In 1928, Ginzburg, an energetic theoretician and practitioner, one of the undoubted leaders of the constructivist movement, who was keenly interested in housing problems, initiated the creation of a "typification section" of housing under the Construction Committee of the RSFSR, the then Ministry of Construction, and became its chairman. The section has developed housing units and their interconnection, striving for efficiency, standardization and industrialization without losing variability. From the speech of Moisei Ginzburg at the plenum of the Stroykom: “It is necessary to carry out such standardization that would make it possible to vary the types of housing, using the same standard elements” (S. O. Khan-Magomedov. Moisey Ginzurg. M., 1972. P.97) …
3. An apartment building as a model: true
The 19th century tenement house was taken as a source and a reference point: “The analysis showed that this type of housing, with all its cultural squalor, to a certain extent satisfied the interests of the middle and petty bourgeoisie and, moreover, gave a higher economic effect than, for example, mass housing construction Moscow in the first years after the revolution,”writes Moisei Ginzburg in the book“Housing”(Moscow, 1934, p. 66).
In search of efficiency, the tenement house, taken as a prototype, first lost the back staircase and rooms for servants, and then interesting transformations began to occur with apartments - residential cells, making them mostly two-tier with different ceiling heights: relatively low, 2.3 m, bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens - adjacent to the "residential part" with a height of 3.6 m, which made it possible to achieve the minimum, that is, the best, efficiency coefficients of the cubic capacity of the living space; living rooms height - 5.2 m. Efficiency was also achieved: by reducing kitchens and offering "kitchen niches", and in many cases replaced, but most of all - by a corridor, which, on the one hand, was planned to be bright, and on the other, served two floors. And it was calculated based on the parameters, coming to the coefficients, folded into formulas and graphs.
The Stroykom section has developed six types of cells, numbered from A to F, and the experienced transitional house of the Ministry of Finance, aka the second house of the Council of People's Commissars, is one of the first examples of the application of calculations in practice. A total of six experimental houses were built.
Experienced houses did not impose socialization of everyday life - rather, they had to offer a canteen, a laundry and a kindergarten as elements of comfort and a way to free up the working time of residents, taking off part of the household burden. The dining room was built and functioned in a communal building, but each apartment had a kitchen. Moreover, the project assumed the possibility of choosing between a regular kitchen and a kitchen cabinet, designed to warm up food and freeing up space in the apartment.
So the widespread expression “communal house of the People's Commissariat for Finance” does not make sense. By the way, Moisei Ginzburg hated communal apartments and tried to design his cells so that communal apartments were impossible in them. But nothing is impossible - after the war, communal apartments appeared here, then all possible spaces began to be gradually taken over for housing, partitioned off and built up: this is how apartments appeared on the ground floor and on the balcony.
4. Cramped apartments with a height of 2.3 m: not true
Well, or not entirely true. The main idea of Moisei Ginzburg was to use as efficiently as possible not even the usable area, but the volume of living space. Therefore, where the height is not required: in the bathrooms and sleeping cells - the ceilings are, indeed, 2.3 m. But here in the living rooms - 4.9 m. Besides, the living rooms are very bright due to the abundance of glass, there are two on the outer wall ribbon windows, top and bottom, light from the living rooms extends to the bedrooms. Cells of type F are one and a half, here the height of the living rooms is 3.6 m.
There are two types of cells used in the Narkomfin house: F and K, which is not on the list, but it is close to the cell of type D - for “families that have more fully preserved their old way of life”. Inside the house, they formed a kind of volumetric tetris, guaranteeing the interweaving of spaces and the fascination of guessing the structure (for this alone it is worth going on an excursion).
5. Two corridors on five floors: true
The main result of the voluminous and algebraic searches of the Stroykom section was the structure of the house, which is difficult for ordinary understanding. The first floor "on legs" is non-residential, the corridors are on the 2nd and 5th floors: from the second they also go to the third, and from the fifth to the fourth and sixth. The corridors are connected by two staircases from the north and south; between the stairs and the ends of the house there are enlarged apartments, modifications of cells K and F - K2 and F2.
6. Built from reed: not true
The story that the building of the People's Commissariat for Finance was built almost entirely of reeds, that is, of straw, therefore rotting and its restoration is problematic, was launched about 15 years ago by Grigory Revzin. He may not have imagined that the version would be so popular, but the word "reeds" stuck to the house firmly.
In fact, reeds are a type of insulation that both Soviet constructivists and Bauhaus architects experimented with in the 1920s. Ultimately, experiments led to the emergence of modern insulation such as mineral wool. Reeds, or straw, consists of compressed stalks of straw or reeds. It is impossible to fold walls out of it without reinforcement with a frame. In the building of the People's Commissariat for Finance and the communal building, reeds are used to insulate the ends of concrete beams that go out to remove the so-called "cold bridges"; partially - beams under the ceiling in apartments. The walls of the hinged passage from the house to the laundry-community center are insulated with reeds from the inside. And that's all. This is quite a bit.
7. Concrete frame and cinder blocks: true
Engineer Sergei Prokhorov is, in particular, considered a co-author of the house, because not only his volumetric-spatial solution, but also the construct was the result of an experiment.
The frame of the house is made of reinforced concrete, the walls are made of porous cinder blocks - "stones" of the "Peasant" type, they were made at the construction site, for which they brought waste from the metallurgical industry to the construction site (today both the production of materials at the construction site and the use of waste are considered features of ecological save a lot of energy). Slit-like cavities inside reduce the weight of the blocks and improve, due to the air gap, their thermal insulation properties. Filling with concrete chips between the blocks also improved the thermal insulation properties of the masonry.
The blocks of the 1920s became the prototype of the modern building "stone" - a widespread type of filling in concrete frames. They are so typical that architects have managed to find on the modern market blocks with the same parameters to restore the lost parts of the walls.
But the brick was not used in Ginzburg's house. The brickwork at the ends of the building, discovered by local historians, belongs to the renovations of the 1950s and later. The reason for the repairs was that after the war, the drainage pipe passing through here got clogged and collapsed, and it was repaired with bricks.
Prokhorov blocks were invented for the Narkomfin house. In hollow blocks of square cross-section, pipes of communications were laid, both between apartments and in the planes of ceilings - in some cases the communications had to bend, following the complex volumetric “tetris” of cells. The Bauhaus began to use similar hollow blocks at the same time. Communications in the building of the People's Commissariat for Finance will be replaced, but the principle of their laying is preserved, and the Prokhorov blocks, where they were lost, will be restored.
8. Interior walls made of straw: not true
As already mentioned, it is impossible to build a wall of straw or reed without additional lathing, and there were no reed partitions in the house.
The walls between the rooms were of fibrolite: particle boards reminiscent of chipboard or fiberboard of the second half of the 20th century.
Floors in apartments and stairs - self-leveling from xylotite, artificial stone from sawdust. According to Aleksey Gnzburg, such a floor - warm, almost wooden - the architects plan to recreate everywhere where it has been lost.
9. The reason for the terrible look - flower pots on the facade: true
The eastern façade with flower girls has become a separate element of the study. It is usually the eastern façade that is cited as an example of the terrible building quality of Constructivist architecture. The flower girls, which were installed on the windows of the eastern façade, had water drain holes, which were repaired in the 1960s. Since then, the water stood in these flower girls, not leaving, and began to fall into the cracks. Instead of freeing these holes for normal drainage, there were attempts to knock down and redo the plaster from the facades. In fact, everything is in order with the plaster. It's all about competent operation.
At first, the flower girls planned to completely replace them, but then it turned out that they were very deeply embedded in the wall and large sections of the wall would have to be dismantled to replace them. As a result, the flower girls have been preserved and restored.
10. The original windows are lost: not true
Another know-how of this house, which later became entrenched in the architecture of modernism, is the windows with sliding frames. The frames are wooden, with thin finger grooves, very graceful in the spirit of the 1920s, a time when the quality of handicraft products was still preserved. Some of the windows were replaced in the 1970s, some in recent years - with double-glazed windows. All the "carpentry" is planned to be restored according to the original samples.
here we end the game in believe - don't believe, and here are some more facts
11. The first to restore the pergola
When they started to reconstruct the roof of the communal building and made waterproofing identical to the historical one, they found metal railings with bolts. The pergola itself is well preserved, but there are some badly damaged fragments. Therefore, they had to be cut out and replaced with specially made new fragments so that the seam accurately showed where the new parts were, where the old ones were. Thus, the metal elements of the roof of the communal building were the first parts of the building to be restored.
12. Two buildings had a green roof
Mainly in the form of flower beds, they will be restored. The roof was designed for landscaping. When the roof covering of the communal building was dismantled in the summer of 2017, the surviving structure of the operated terrace was discovered there. And on the roof of the residential building, next to the famous penthouse of the People's Commissar Milyutin, which he arranged for himself in a ventilation shaft based on a type K cell, after the boards were removed, curbs were found that were once filled with flower beds. Although the photographs of the flower beds are not known, the drawings published in Moisei Ginzburg's book "Dwelling" helped. However, in some places it was necessary to redesign the water drainage scheme.
13. The spiral staircase had to be replaced
Almost nothing is left of the graceful spiral metal staircase. The staircase stood for 70 years, but disappeared in recent years, when everything was taken away from the house. It had to be reproduced according to drawings.
14. Open ground floor - the idea of Moses Ginzburg
The house was put on “legs of Corbusier” before Corbusier himself built them anywhere (“The Five Principles” were published in 1927, the house was built in 1928-1930). It is difficult to talk about influence or its absence here: Ginzburg and Corbusier corresponded, and the famous Frenchman, having arrived in Moscow to build the Centrosoyuz, visited the house of the People's Commissariat for Finance. Actually, Moses Ginzburg considered the first floors to be inconvenient for living, and the open first floor was a healthy solution, opening up the air flow under the house. He explained his decision precisely by these practical motives, and not by the principles of Corbusier.
15. Decided to keep the original stained glass window
Half: the outer contour is replaced with a copy. Large areas of glazing on both the east and west façades make the house light. But the most spectacular stained glass window was facing north and illuminated the communal building. It is preserved, cleansed; it has now been decided that the outer stained-glass window will be replaced with a copy, and the inner "thread" will remain genuine, replacing the destroyed parts with intact fragments of the outer frames. Igor Safronov works with stained-glass windows.
