In the center of the Aptekarsky Prikaz, a cell of the RZHSKT house was built from plywood on Gogolevsky Boulevard, 8. Ignatius Frantsevich Milinis lived in this house with his family from 1931 to 1955. The architects A. Pasternak, I. Leonidov, M. Sinyavsky, A. Burov, Vyach settled in the same house. Vladimirov, S. Orlovsky, S. Lisagor, - explains the curator Irina Chepkunova. The population of the house on Gogolevsky Boulevard thus turned out to be much more "architectural" than in the house on Novinsky, intended for the employees of the Finance Addict, and where Moisei Ginzburg lived with his family.
The point, of course, is not that - the cell has been built as a standard one, and entering the plywood enclosure we find ourselves rather inside the abstract-numerical experiment of Stroykom than in Milinis's apartment. The first thing you can feel is the scale. However, there is no ceiling and it is impossible to feel the height, but next to it is a fragment of a staircase, hinting at the second tier, and we see tables lining up in a row, in the place of which we can imagine workers, a stove, a toilet and a shower. The pencil-box room is small, but double-sided and with through ventilation: the views from the windows on both sides were painted by Ilya Utkin, and one, detailed, view is provocative, on it is HXC, demolished in 1931, when the Milinis family settled in the house. If the architect found this modern view in his apartment, it was barely, perhaps, when he just moved into the house.
On the walls and showcase tables there are already quite exhibition information, diplomas (Milinis studied in Kiev, then at the Moscow VHUTEIN), early works, sketches, plans, photographs. Among them is a portrait of Corbusier with a congratulatory inscription: "According to Milinis, Corbusier holds in his hands a project for a department store in the Bauman district of Moscow (1928)", we read in the explanation. The department store received the second prize in the competition, but it was an independent work of Milinis, without Ginzburg's co-authorship.
The exhibition is timed to coincide with the 120th anniversary of Milinis (he was born in 1899 and died in 1974), and in the process of preparation, in 2018, the museum received its archive from the granddaughter of the architect Evgenia Episkoposova. That, together with the things previously stored in the museum's funds, made it possible to make the exhibition a monographic one, turning its catalog into the first monograph about an architect whom the curator calls "one of the most significant avant-garde architects."
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zooming 1/4 Exhibition: “Heroes of the VanguardStroy. Architect Ignatius Milinis , Museum of Architecture, 2019 Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 2/4 Exhibition: “Heroes of the VanguardStroy. Architect Ignatius Milinis , Museum of Architecture, 2019 Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 3/4 Exhibition: “Heroes of the VanguardStroy. Architect Ignatius Milinis , Museum of Architecture, 2019 Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 4/4 Exhibition: “Heroes of the VanguardStroy. Architect Ignatius Milinis , Museum of Architecture, 2019 Photo: Archi.ru
The leitmotif of the exhibition, like the books, is the role of Milinis's works as a transmission link from constructivism to post-war modernism in the search for a typology of housing. It is known that Ignatiy Frantsevich is the second author of the Narkomfin House, the main experimental house of the Typification Section of the Construction Committee of the RSFSR, the co-author of several other experimental houses, a student and colleague of Moisei Ginzburg. It is less known that in the 1930s he continued to design and build, mainly sanatoriums and housing, with almost no decor, although thin columns and experiments with form, for example, with stepped and star-shaped volumes, decorative sculpture and there are absolutely no massive "flowers of totalitarianism" in his buildings and projects: see the partially built complex of residential buildings ZIL in Moscow. In the very mid-1930s, Milinis adheres to a "clean" architecture, in general echoing the club built by his teachers Vesnins. However, post-war projects: the unrealized Nizhny Novgorod sanatorium in 1951 and the partially realized residential complex of the Karacharovsky plant in Moscow on the Ryazanskoye highway, already belong to the style of the “Stalinist Empire”: at that time it was probably already impossible to avoid the abundant sculpture.
But in the 1960s, after the decree on excesses, Ignatiy Frantsevich returned, as an experienced professional, a member of the OCA and the Construction Committee Section, to experiments with the typology of housing - he raises the banner slightly lowered earlier and pretends to personally pass the baton to colleagues, young architects of the post-war modernism. He designs public service homes with duplex quarters in both 1965 and 1970. It is a pity that the main line of development of Soviet housing did not absorb his searches. As we can see, there was an opportunity.
All this is presented at the exhibition - in the form of a laconic tape with pictures and comments on projects, similar to a scan of a book. And in a book that you can buy at the museum shop.
We remind you that the exhibition is open for another day and a half, today and tomorrow.
