The first ATS building on Zubovskaya Square appeared in 1930, quite small. A larger, seven-storey building facing the Garden Ring was built according to the design of Kasyan Solomonov by 1939. The pylon in the center of the facade helps him to "hold" the square and does not look too much like a telephone exchange, since there are quite a few windows between the triangular pylons, and they exist since the 1930s. The pylons also set the predominance of verticals and emphasize the belonging of the facade of the architect Solomonov to the so-called post-constructivism. On the other hand, the square niches flanking the pylonade, which also clearly connect the building with the architecture of the thirties, bear an additional load - they remind of a more famous neighbor, the Academy named after Frunze Rudnev and Muntz (1932-1934), emphasizing their neighborhood ensemble, serving, let's say, a representative of the architecture of the 1930s, a time when the area of Devichy Square was intensively built up, in a row of motley, at that time noble-bourgeois, buildings of the Garden Ring. ATS on Zubovskaya looks like the "head" of a "wedge" of early Stalinist buildings, which is expanding towards the Novodevichy Convent, merging with the buildings of the 1920s and sprouting out of it. Perhaps that is why it turned out to be so lavishly decorated despite its technical function.
It would be surprising to demolish such a building, and Pavel Andreev, an architect who worked on the reconstruction of such architectural monuments as Manezh, GUM and Detsky Mir, proposed to preserve the two external facades of the automatic telephone exchange, despite its lack of protection status. The function is radically changing - now, as you know, this is the fate of many automatic telephone exchanges in Moscow, digital technologies do not need large boxes, they are replaced by hotels and residential buildings, and the histories of these devices are very different (with and without demolition, see, for example, one and two). In this case, the telephone exchange itself will remain on the site, but it will fit in a small building built in 1930 in the back of the courtyard, and a hotel will take its place. Consequently, it is necessary to replace the "filling" of the building, the appearance of an underground parking and an increase in the height of the lower public floor.
The external facades of the building overlooking the Garden Ring, according to the project, remain authentic (now the building is covered with a grid, but apparently, the walls behind it are intact), but instead of gray they acquire a somewhat more optimistic color in the spirit of both Stalinist and avant-garde architecture - the main tone is fawn, warm light gray, the second brick-red, almost burgundy: it marks the attic, the outlines of the balconies, the fields of square niches. “By proposing a new color scheme and introducing red, we wanted, on the one hand, to make the facade more noticeable, and on the other, to emphasize its proximity to avant-garde buildings,” explains Pavel Andreev. The windows in the pylon increase in height; the pylon itself, being emphasized by a light shade, visually protrudes forward and becomes more like a portico. A low technical floor appears at the top, associated with the new function of the building.
The first floor, the height of which has been increased to 5.25 m, will retain the zigzag contour of the 1930s, echoing the triangular contours of the pylon ribs, but will receive, while retaining the structure, a stone cladding suitable for the hotel with large frameless glass panes. About two-thirds of the first floor will be occupied by a restaurant, and a third by a hotel lobby. On the ground floor, the zigzag of the historic wall gives the interior spaces an additional advantage when arranging tables in the resulting bay windows; the plan of the minus-first floor clearly shows that the foundation of the historical zigzag wall is not included in the supporting structure, the frame and walls of the new "filling" of the hotel recede into the depths. The same technique is repeated in the upper floors - the external, historical wall is not loaded, on the contrary, the frame supports, installed along the contour of the walls, stretch supporting beams to it.
The first underground floor is occupied by the technical premises of the restaurant and hotel, and a small parking lot is located below. In a low building along Dashkova lane there was a place for a fitness center and one apartment, not too large, 83 m2… By the way, the side wings are being reconstructed more radically - the western building should be dismantled and restored in the same parameters with imitation, the small eastern one will also be rebuilt, but with modern facades - this is the only place where they face the city.
The façades of the courtyard are modernized and in the same manner: thin horizontal strips of RAL ceramics in light beige. The new one-story volume with large stained-glass windows, continuing the hotel lobby inside the courtyard, is also covered with ceramics, but its stripes are wide, vertical and maroon - thus the modern parts echo the proposed colors of the historical facades and paraphrase them. Two ceramic colors are complemented by inserts that imitate wood panels.
Initially, it was planned that the hotel would be managed by the Mariott chain, then it was decided to transfer it to the AccorHotels chain. The hotel has 119 rooms, with the rare exception of one-room, with a total area of 750 m2, large rooms on the upper seventh floor overlooking the Garden Ring.
The authors of the project - and this was their first experience - proposed an image-concept of the hotel's interiors in the spirit of avant-garde works: the reception area inspired by the things of Lyubov Popova, a restaurant and bar in the style of Varvara Stepanova, rooms and corridors from Malevich and Rodchenko - they touched everything, including not only bedspreads and carpet on the floor, but also staff uniforms and dishes. With photographs of 1920s athletes in the gym and pool.
The energy of the avant-garde with its desire to master all areas of life is a favorable area for design. Huge material allows you to immerse guests in the mood and culture of the "era".
However, we note that the building was completed in 1939, it is later than the avant-garde and somewhat (perhaps in scale, volume and symmetry) resembles the Moscow Hotel.
And although stucco molding on the ceiling and bronze chandeliers are more characteristic of the 1930s, the more interesting is the idea of the authors of the project "to turn to the origins", to break the sequence, emphasizing the proximity of the avant-garde. Generally speaking, this liberty and violation (for us, people who firmly know that constructivism and postconstructivism are rather antagonists) is a different kind of view of history: we often forget that the super-saturated 1920s and 1930s are just two decades, today the same has passed since 1998. And if a part of the avant-garde masters really could not accept the reality of "post", then the other part did - it happened, then both were done by the same people, although the heroes of the two directions were, of course, different.
In addition, the building of the automatic telephone exchange, a technical building, by definition not suitable for housing and requiring for the sake of its preservation not only thoughtful engineering measures, but also a figurative "justification", perhaps allows such liberty. In other words, what is the difference according to the "Hamburg score" of heritage preservation, whether to turn the former ATS into an early Stalinist micro-palace, or immerse it in an extravaganza of an earlier time - both will be an assumption, since the function has been lost, and it is not possible to insist on its preservation.
The image concept inspired the customer, the project was accepted, approved and agreed upon, but, as it often happens now, this is where the relationship between the parties stopped and the plot develops today without the participation of the authors. Working documentation, interior designs, construction control - everything was transferred to organizations that had nothing to do with the creation of the project. In a situation of lack of attention to copyright and author's supervision, one can only hope for a respectful attitude to the project and for an acceptable result. Still the city center.
