Subtle Play

2024 Author: David Durham | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 02:26

Residential complex “Dom Bakst” is a club house, which is now being completed next to the Mikhail Bulgakov park on the corner of Spiridonyevsky and Bolshoy Kozikhinsky lanes, a stone's throw from the Patriarch's ponds. It is located on the site of two houses: one inexpensive, profitable, built in 1900-1902, the other - constructivist, 1920s. Both were resettled some time ago, did not have a conservation status, and were demolished in 2016, but at the request of the Moscow Heritage Committee, one of the houses, a profitable, older one, had to be partly repeated in the new building.

The new complex also consists of two emphatically different buildings, but if both dismantled houses were built along Bolshoy Kozikhinsky, since at the beginning of the 20th century the street developed linearly, now the situation has changed: after the war, a house was demolished at the corner of Spiridonyevsky Lane, and Bulgakovsky Square appeared there. and the corner that ends Kozikhinsky lane has shifted. Therefore, the new house turns into the depth of the block, forming the northern border of the square.

Being deployed at right angles to each other, the buildings changed their image and meaning, having made, relatively speaking, a semantic castling. The building along Kozikhinsky, which took the place of about one and a half old houses, repeats the window frames of the facade of 1902 and its centric composition with an entrance, a stained-glass window and an elevation in the middle; a semicircular notch remained from the round window. But if the predecessor house was an example, in general, of an ordinary economical construction for its time with an unplastered brick facade, then the new version of the same forms due to the stone frames of the windows received a clear "French" shade, the brick became not only a memory of the old home, but also a sign of respectability.

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1/3 Residential complex Dom Bakst, project © AB Gran
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2/3 Residential complex Dom Bakst, project © AB Gran
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3/3 Residential complex Dom Bakst, project © AB Gran

The second building is stretched along the square and across the street, to which it faces. The style chosen for him generally corresponds to the 1920s and 1930s, the time of the construction of the second predecessor house, although there is no formal similarity between them - there is nothing of laconic constructivism in the new house, it is a variant of the modern trend popular in Moscow in recent decades art deco. A small digression: there are practically no representatives of this style, which developed in the "bourgeois" America and Europe of the 1930s as a kind of counterbalance to the bold search for the avant-garde, in Moscow in the 1930s, strictly speaking, there are almost no representatives of this style - one can compare post-constructivism and the "Stalinist Empire" style with it, but all the same coincidence is inaccurate, if only because of the well-known economy of the city of industrialization. It was, it was similar, but still "not so", as the classic said.

Therefore, it is not surprising that in Moscow in the 2000s, various art deco options are popular: of course, a lot is explained by the fact that they find a response in the hearts of customers and buyers of the capital's center, but this process also sees some kind of compensation for the missed stylistic direction. In addition, it allows significant liberties, for example, the atectonic "Pompeian" interpretation of the order - and, on the other hand, fits well into the context of modern craving for ornament, carving, plastic, everything that saturates the surface of the facade. In this case, a certain historical logic is felt in the appearance of an “ardekosh” house in place of a constructivist one, one house of the 1920s is replaced by another, appealing to the same period, but in a wide range: if you look closely, the house seems to be “stretched” in the time of years a little over a hundred.

The most striking element of the complex - literally and figuratively - is the picturesque panels of the crowning floors. They were performed by the monumental artist Tatyana Kudrina using the multilayer hand-painted technique on porcelain stoneware, and the motive was borrowed from the theater screen of Lev Bakst for the ballet "The Afternoon of a Faun" staged by Diaghilev in Paris in 1912. This is no longer modern, but not entirely neoclassical, and the resulting panels show the notes of both Gustav Klimt and Max Kliger, and when viewed from below, from the street, upwards, they must, of course, remind the Muscovite of the Metropol, although there are majolica Vrubel and they appeared 10 years earlier than Bakst's screen. But the house eventually received a poetic name, which was not invented by marketers at all, but came precisely from the panels proposed by the architect Pavel Andreev - the Bakst residential complex.

The panels are accompanied by ornaments, some of which resemble Kandinsky, some of Bilibin, and others, on the risalits, are completely replicas of Byzantine mosaic decor. In this case, they form a kind of light picturesque crown, a flaming wedding, as follows from the author's sketches, where the volume of the house stretches towards the wreath of landscapes of the attic tier.

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1/6 Residential complex Dom Bakst, project © AB Gran
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2/6 ZhK Dom Bakst, project © AB Gran
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3/6 Residential complex Dom Bakst, project © AB Gran
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4/6 Residential complex Dom Bakst, project © AB Gran
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5/6 Residential complex Dom Bakst, project © AB Gran
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6/6 Residential complex Dom Bakst, project © AB Gran

The metal frames are the color of greenish patinated bronze, reminiscent of the Viennese greenhouses and passages of the 19th century. They subdue the imagery of the attic floor and the central part with elongated decorative columns - in these parts, accentuated along the central axis of two facades, a narrow slender street and a wide one facing the square and framed by two projections of the southern "park", there are living rooms, including double-height … The house, by the way, includes two-level apartments, in the upper parts of the projections.

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1/3 Residential complex Dom Bakst, project © AB Gran
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2/3 Residential complex Dom Bakst, project © AB Gran
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3/3 Residential complex Dom Bakst, project © AB Gran

All together, most of all, it resembles the era of prosperity and decadence, the subject of nostalgia is the time before the First World War "around 1913" - when Art Nouveau, "The Cherry Orchard", and even the heyday of the "World of Art" are already in the past, but not far away, when it has already appeared abstract painting, but not everyone else in the know. This is the time of hats with a veil, perfume, powder, theater, candy boxes; and photographs, yellowish, but very clear - their reproductions are so often found in modern local history publications, many people miss them, 1913 as the lost Golden Age. The architects understand the nostalgic note well and accompany the project with an illustration that resembles a faded old imprint, enveloping the house with the romance of imputed memories, forming layers of perception, and at the same time, as if checking - is it similar? Did you manage to fit in?

And it succeeded, and it seems, but the main prototype somehow escapes. Perhaps because it does not exist, and the house is assembled from several layers, separated by about a century. One of these layers is the dismantled constructivist house along Bolshoi Kozikhinsky: firstly, it had two symmetrical projections, and secondly, their windows were thin, vertical, everything is the same as here. The very fact of their appearance is surprising: if that house was actually built in 1920, then they could have been a "relic" of the 1910s, or they could have been added in the early 1930s, already as an element of post-constructivism. This structural element of the old house is receiving a response in the new building - and not just the windows of a tenement house, as requested in MCS.

All this is quite difficult, it is necessary not only to know and love the history and texture of the era, but also to have practical experience in implementing such replicas: the authors have such experience, recall, for example, the facade of the Hotel "Standart" on Strastnoy Boulevard, which uses elements from the delights of Pyotr Dmitrievich Baranovsky. There is definitely such knowledge that allows us to operate with allusions. On the real estate site, the architect - and we note that this is the case when the customer presented the author in sufficient detail on the site of the house - Pavel Andreev is called "the most subtle stylist of modern Moscow architects." Well, one can agree with that. Here the score is played on several themes, and one of them is a modern decorative style, which is indicated primarily by stone panels with carved floral ornaments.

Two elements play the role of the main connecting links - this is the stone first floor, delicately rusticated with horizontal lines, common to the two buildings; the stone in it is darker than in the main, ornamented, part. The second type of "glue" is the already mentioned "copper" -metal parts: the attic floors are united by metal and colored inserts. Metal also appears in the joints between the buildings, dividing and at the same time uniting according to the logic of the perimeter-quarterly morphotype of the building.

Arches lead to a small courtyard with an area of about 550 m², a typical quarter courtyard of a historic city. It is planned multi-level landscaping with a platform, a tree in the center and lush greenery on high pedestals, even with a miniature fountain of the nympheum type. On the first floor of the building facing the park, the building itself with Bakst's landscapes, there is a deep loggia for residents: a semi-closed space hidden from the city behind trees, which makes it somewhat private; due to its southern orientation, it can often be illuminated by the sun, which draws bizarre patterns here with the shadows of stained glass lattices. An open terrace is planned on the roof between the risalits above this central part of the house.

Inside, in public areas, bronze frames are preserved - but no longer patinated, but polished and with inserts of colored and figured glass - frames, the design of which in places resembles a generalized Secession. Modernity coexists with a retro tinge: glass colored “bubbles” of chandeliers on a gold background, although they coexist with beige panels on the walls and lamps reminiscent of the 1930s, appeal not so much to the sensuality of the interiors of the beginning of the century, but to the bright experiences of Philippe Starck. But the counter of the main reception with a "crumpled cloth" striped background and an asymmetric crystal of the bureau completely brings us back to the 21st century, shaking slightly, waking us up from nostalgia inspired by the facade. It is as if a fragment of something sharp-new was built into a house where the furnishings of the 20th century were even partially preserved, and in some places it is difficult to say where the 1910s, where the 1930s, and where the 1980s are.

Patriarch's Ponds are, frankly speaking, demanding in many ways. Not only is Bulgakov a step away from the house with a "bad apartment" on Sadovaya to the pond; that's the name of the square. Near Triumphalnaya and Moskomarkhitektury and much more, Tarasov's house, Morozova's mansion, Zholtovsky's own house, finally. And at the same time, it was in these places, in a prestigious area, that new construction turned out to be more than abundant and variegated. Sergei Tkachenko, a master of the brightest things of Moscow postmodernism, built his house "Patriarch" nearby, and directly opposite Bulgakov square and the residential complex "Bakst" under construction - the MFC "Sad-Labyrinth", which looks like a telescopic pipe from a cartoon. Around there are enough former apartment buildings of average quality, and inserts of the period of constructivism, but the degree of fantasizing, perhaps, has already been exceeded in the district. Building in such an environment is certainly not easy, there are “many stories” here. Therefore, it was required to offer something elegant, which does not argue with the environment, but does not lose its voice, which, of course, is also unacceptable for a club house. This is how the Diaghilev Seasons arose, the theme is impeccable in its own way, and the time is attractive, the Silver Age, the golden theater. Therefore, thin lines, bright accents, light verticals were required. And a rather curious effect of the point of contact between modern decorativeism and a reference to the beginning of the century - without the final retro point, and without emphasized modernity, rather a steampank, reflecting on life before the world wars.