Sergei Skuratov announced the death of Andrei Meerson yesterday, 2020-29-01, on his facebook page: “Today, at the age of 89, not having lived 2 months to 90, having lived a long and creatively rich life, a wonderful architect, my teacher, died in America and a mentor, the most intelligent and kind person - ANDREY DMITRIEVICH MERSON, author of "Swan", a house on Begovaya and other beautiful buildings of Soviet modernism and non-rutalism."
Architect Andrei Meerson is known primarily as a master of modernism, the head of one of the "main" workshops of Mosproekt-2 - workshop No. 22, which was entrusted with working with one of the most important, if not the most important, of Moscow "rays" - the northern: Leningrad and Frunzensky districts and the Khimki-Khovrino region, - the expensive Sheremetyevo international airport.
Residential complex "Lebed", which appeared in the early 1970s between the Khimki reservoir and the Leningradskoye highway, Anna Bronovitskaya and Nikolai Malinin called in their guide to Soviet modernism "one of the most successful attempts to create atypical residential architecture from standard elements" [M., 2016. P. 136]. It can probably be considered one of the successful attempts to combat typification in the search for comfortable urban housing: many public functions were placed in the stylobate, from a nursery to a library, underground parking, residential towers are raised even higher on support legs, the exploited roof of the stylobate replaces yard. U-turn of houses and supports in the lower tier make the view from the highway towards the reservoir permeable.
Another landmark project by Andrey Meerson was implemented a little later - by 1978, at the intersection of Leningradka and the current Third Transport Ring, and is known as a house on Begovaya or a house on legs. This is probably the most spectacular legged house in Moscow - the rest look less sculpted and more typical. The pillars of the first floor, as well as the trapezoidal base of the house carried by them, are cast from concrete with the preservation of the texture of the formwork boards, have a silhouette sharpened downward, which makes it - even for those who look at the house from a car driving along the TTK, which looks like some kind of insect, either a centipede, or still a grasshopper. Oval stair towers, as has been repeatedly noted, give the house a fortress-like appearance, as does the "scaly" stacking of overlapping exterior wall panels. In a word, if "Swan" is the result of a functional and typological experiment, the house on legs is an example of a very figurative, plastic approach to architecture.
During his work, Andrei Meyerson designed about 500 buildings, and built about 200. In 1992 he created PTAM - a personal creative workshop “Meyerson with partners”, then, together with Victoria Voronova, founded the Meyerson & Voronova Architectural Company. Among the most famous buildings of this period is the Ritz Carlton at the beginning of Tverskaya Street on the site of the Intourist Hotel, work on which began in 1991 with the reconstruction of the National Hotel (1992-1995, A. Meerson, I. Fedorov, Yu. Safronov) and the building "Ararat Park Hayat" on Neglinnaya (1999-2003).
