We are talking about a miniature plot - only 0.32 hectares, 30 acres, on the second line of Dolgorukovskaya Street, in an extremely variegated and equally interesting historical environment, to the north of the St. Nicholas Church, full face of the semicircular square of the Italian quarter of Mikhail Filippov, behind a patch of local dog park playgrounds. In 1904, a brick refectory and a bell tower in the neo-Russian style, transitioning from eclecticism to Art Nouveau, were added to the church of "Naryshkin" architecture of the late 17th century. The church stood until the 1930s, when it was transferred to the Museum of Atheism, and then demolished, replacing it with the Soyuzmultfilm building, which is, in fact, a good monument of post-constructivism; in 2018 it was handed over to the church community. Now the ensemble looks strange, like many of the results of the Soviet invasions of temple complexes, but at the same time it is extremely romantic, mainly due to the dark brick bell tower covered with a century-old patina; to an ignorant person, it can remind a brick Gothic, although the architects Voskresensky and Kurdyukov at the beginning of the 20th century were inspired, of course, by the prototypes of the end of the 17th century. But the main thing is that the bell tower definitely "holds" the surrounding urban space.
Further, everything around here is arranged in no less Moscow-style. The church and the territory to the north of it belonged to Soyuzmultfilm and was occupied by small buildings of different times and degrees of abandonment. Most of them are planned to be demolished, one - a small, three-window, wooden house of 1821, overlooking Dolgorukovskaya - has the status of a newly discovered monument. In fact, the buildings of the new club house will occupy the territory of the city estate of State Councilor Andrei Alexandrovich Petrovo-Sokolovo, who built this house; in the middle of the 19th century there was a small pond, and by the 1880s there was a factory. Soyuzmultfilm used the house as a development room, but in 2004 the log house collapsed by half, so, according to the architects, the best solution is to rebuild the house on a new foundation.
But back to the environment. The closest neighbor of the Petrovo-Sokolovo estate, the house of the Prussian citizen August Siebert - early, 1891, the work of Roman Ivanovich Klein, master of the neo-Greek style, author of the Museum of Fine Arts on Volkhonka and TsUM; the house is somewhat spoiled by recent renovations, and yet the neighborhood is more than obliging. The next one, if you count from the center, is the apartment building of the Fischer partnership, the neo-Gothic style of the 1910s. Opposite, across the street, are the Brezhnev and Luzhkov giants. So, almost all variants of Moscow development are grouped around the miniature patch of the site under consideration. The authors, therefore, had to consider the diverse neighborhoods - but above all, what background the new clubhouse would become for the house of 1821, and for the neighboring house of Roman Klein.
With such a level of responsibility, a small plot and a height limitation of 23 m, the architects decided to design carefully, sculpting the future house gradually - showing the customer options, sweeping aside and modifying. A total of 9 versions turned out, quite different - with the console of a "suspended" urban villa, with a pointed avant-garde nose, with a modern facade of respectable vertical windows, or with a long "prominence", a kind of curious "head" in the alignment between the estate of Sokolov and Nikolskaya church. We considered extended volumes, zigzag and with a courtyard, and similar to an armadillo bionically nonlinear.
The initial data, however, are common for all options - we emphasize once again, the authors carefully analyzed the surroundings both from the point of view of architectural points of reference, and in relation to views - both to the house and from it. Literally trying to extract as much information as possible to work through in the project. We even examined in retrospect the nature of development in the XX and XIX (!) Centuries, having received curious schemes. They did not forget about the Pimen Church, and about the trade rows that were once on Miusskaya Square. In a word, the work was carried out meticulously.
And the main results are as follows: the most interesting neighbor is the bell tower of St. Nicholas Church, at one time Mikhail Filippov understood this perfectly, focusing his huge residential complex on it concentrically and thereby once again emphasizing the role of the brick tower. Further - the two closest neighbors are very miniature, and the pre-Brezhnev buildings here were basically on the same "Moscow" scale. Fischer's tenement house is larger, but it has the "rhythm of human-scale courtyards." And finally, one of the main problems was the building faced with porcelain stoneware, adjacent to the northern border of the site, more precisely, its deeply removed risalit, approaching directly to the border; now there is a bank.
It was required to retreat from the projection, and on this side a small courtyard was formed, which the architects turned into a courdoner - cour d'honneur, "courtyard of honor", an invariable belonging of castles and palaces, both French and Palladian.
The analogy with the bell tower, merchant Moscow and Paris helped to stop the choice on one option out of nine: we got two compact rectangular cases of close parameters, deployed at right angles to each other. Between them there is a courtyard, receding from the bank projection, to the south it continues with a path towards Pykhov Lane and the bell tower. Under the yard, as well as under the entire building area, there are 2 tiers of underground parking. Closer to the courtyard and projection of the northern “neighbor”, the entrance lobbies are grouped on the first floors. The first floors are public, in the western building, set in the depths of the territory, the ground floor, in addition to the entrance zone, is occupied by the offices of the management company, in the east a cafe is planned. Its continuation - the steps of the "amphitheater" going down from Dolgorukovskaya into the courtyard, they separate the space of the club house from the noise of the street.
Apartments on 2-4 floors - two-three rooms, from 39 to 78 m2… But at the top, two-level penthouses are conceived - they surround the center along the contour, hiding the protrusions of the technical floor behind them (the authors consider it important that the technical structures should not be visible). The outer walls of the penthouses are inclined inward, the resemblance to the attic - the Parisian component of the image - is emphasized by decorative glass-fiber-reinforced concrete shutters; they also unite the top for greater integrity of the volume.
The slanted silhouette gave the house a clearly readable resemblance to an ancient Russian casket, of which there are still many in local history museums, and this similarity pleased the authors, since it was consonant with the merchant-philistine Moscow and their search for a historical context - a kind of "return of the merchant city" was obtained, but not in the form of one from the many one- and two-story mansions lost here, but indirectly, as is now customary, through the image of a thing enlarged to the size of a house.
The affinity with the main accent - the bell tower - is emphasized by the brick cladding. The brick was chosen solid, handmade, seamless, with a notch along the edge, emphasizing the edges of the joints. The authors emphasize that its use is necessary to achieve the desired effect - of course, not only to fit houses into context, but also to emphasize their “preciousness” through kinship with the most interesting object of the environment. By the way, emphasizing the “preciousness” of the house, the proposed interiors use a golden hue, which is echoed, the slopes of the windows are made of panels imitating copper; as if the golden glow of the treasure seeps a little from the inside, throwing a copper "flare".
By the way, at the bell tower, there is a level difference between the second and third bells, a jump characteristic, in principle, for the “Naryshkin” silhouettes - it also echoes the attic slope of the club buildings. Now, however, the architects have a new cause for excitement: the restoration of the St. Nicholas Church has begun, what if the bell tower will be plastered? However, one must think, the fear is groundless - its facades have always been only brick, and the security organs in their right mind should not allow plastering.
The brickwork is diluted with ornamental inserts: floral, reminiscent of the beetles of medieval caskets, and a meander, which serves as a kind of bow to the neighbor, Klein. It turned out similar to Igumnov's house. The outlines of the casket houses are somewhat squat due to height restrictions and a "tower" typology with a communication core in the center of the volume, as the authors of the project admit. However, on the one hand, such a shape is even suitable for the "caskets", and on the other hand, the architects fought against the squat by all possible means: they removed almost all horizontal articulations, except for meanders, and slightly raised the overall height.
In a word, construction has begun, and by 2019 two casket houses should appear in the courtyards on Dolgorukovskaya, reviving the diversity of the surrounding city with their atypical silhouette.
