The building on the border of Gorky Park near the Crimean Bridge, to the right of the main entrance to the park or to the left of the entrance to it along the embankment does not attract much attention; at some point, at the beginning of the reconstruction of the park, it was even planned to demolish it for the sake of expanding the Garden Ring. Meanwhile, after the building was given over to the headquarters of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, which had moved from the Bakhmetyevsky garage, and the museum, in turn, invited the FORM Bureau for reconstruction and the building began to be investigated - it turned out that the building was multi-layered, with about nine periods development. The building appeared at the end of the 19th century as part of the Bromley shipyard, was rebuilt into the pavilion of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, then served as a club for GOZNAK employees, one of the first sound cinemas, a bathhouse, a warehouse and a plumbing store.
The architects, with the support of the museum, not only turned part of the building into the Garage office, but also examined it in detail - the work was shown a year and a half ago on
Arch Moscow 2017. In parallel with the research and design, they wrote a book entirely devoted to the building at 9/45 Krymsky Val. We are publishing one of the book chapters, on which the FORM architects, historians Marianna Evstratova and Sergey Koluzakov, ABCdesign publishing group, Kuchkovo Pole publishing house and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art team worked. More about the book.
Krymsky Val 9/45.
Unknown monument to Gorky Park. M., 2018
Olga Treyvas, Vera Odyn, Polina Patimova, Polina Litvinenko, Alina Yaroshenko, Kristina Timchuk, Idris Suliman, Svetlana Dudina, Konstantin Kim, Mikhail Mikadze.
Chapter 7. Administration of the park. Office of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Architect bureau FORM
“In 2011, the director of the Central Park of Culture and Leisure named after Sergei Kapkov became Gorky. From that moment on, a large-scale change in the Park began, which caused a heated debate. In half a year, the entire squatter building disappeared, almost all the attractions were dismantled - both visitors and owners of the kebabs that filled the park reacted painfully to this, but the changes continued.
At the same moment, Sergei Kapkov spoke about the demolition of the administrative wing at the Crimean bridge. It was supposed to make a road junction and solve the problem of traffic jams near Gorky Park, however, due to the futility of this idea, it was quickly abandoned.
In 2012, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art was preparing to move to Gorky Park and needed a headquarters. The administration of the Central Park of Culture and Leisure offered the museum to occupy the left half of the building near the Crimean Bridge - the one in which plumbing equipment was sold. Garage director Anton Belov invited FORM bureau as architects.
The first acquaintance with the building, and especially with the interior, was not at all inspiring: the walls upholstered with clapboard, mosaic panels and even a jacuzzi bowl inherited from the plumbing salon. The entire space was cluttered with tiny rooms, one of the stairs was completely sewn up to organize additional office space. It was hard to imagine that behind all this hides a surprisingly spacious space filled with light. But after studying the plans of the BTI, it became clear that the building has a clear and interesting structure, which is not felt due to the renovations of the 1980-2000s.
Despite the fact that from the outside the administrative building has a completely holistic appearance, for more than half a century it has existed as two separate volumes with the ruins of a cinema in the center. The ruin is visible only from the inside of the building - it is separated from the city by two blank facades. Reinforced concrete stands and beams of the cinema, which survived the bombing, are still in the open air. At the initiative of Garage, the trees that have appeared inside the ruins over half a century have thinned out, but preserved.
Working with the building, the FORM architects decided to open up the space, clear it of temporary layers and adapt the cinema layout to the office of the museum, revealing historic brickwork.
The technical expertise showed that the supporting structures were badly damaged, so the brick columns inside the building and some openings were reinforced with metal braces. The roof of the building was reassembled: the original wooden trusses were not solid, they consisted of boards and pieces of wood of different sizes and were deformed, moreover, one of the trusses was badly burned during the bombing during the Great Patriotic War. New constructions, the shape of which is identical to the previous ones, are made of laminated veneer lumber. The current insulated roof made it possible to use the under-roof space as an additional floor: two mezzanines that have appeared are connected to the rest of the space by new staircases, straight and spiral. In the course of the work, two embedded windows on the façade overlooking the park and several small porthole windows were restored.
The four floors of the headquarters are easy to view, with several open workspaces located at different levels.
With the arrival of Garage, the building has attracted a lot of attention. Guests are invited here, representatives of the creative environment from all over the world, including many famous architects and artists, gather here.
The fate of the ruin is an unfinished story. Perhaps the destroyed part of the building will acquire a new, separate function, or it will be attached to one of the functioning parts. Several Moscow architectural bureaus have proposed concept projects to understand what the ruin can be transformed into, but none of them has yet been realized.
The extensive research carried out by the authors of this book allows architects to continue their work using a vast knowledge of the historical context and the place of this unique building in it."
