Narkomfin Hinge

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

The laundry is the closest facility to the Garden Ring in the Narkomfin complex by Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatius Milinis. It is located behind Shalyapin's house, in the front of Novinsky Boulevard, and previously had an open area in front of it. Now there is a monument to Fyodor Chaliapin. In the 1920s, the border of the territory of the experimental ensemble of the avant-garde ran along the building of the laundry: behind it a green public space began, leading to the famous ship house standing in the depths of the site.

Before the war, the first mechanized laundry in Moscow successfully functioned in this building - on the first floor there was a hall for washing and drying machines, on the second - living rooms for staff. In the service courtyard complex conceived by Ginzburg-Milinis with social infrastructure, "taken out" outside the walls of the apartments, the laundry was the only structure built. There was also a garage for residents and a boiler room. In the field of war, the building passed into departmental subordination and, having acquired alien functions, was overgrown with extensions.

It is symbolic that it was the communal facility in the Narkomfin ensemble that took on such a "welcoming" role. It was emphasized by the composition of the building itself: the reception with the removal of a part of the first floor to the supports included the function of a kind of "checkpoint", and at the same time was a paraphrase of the main building, demonstrating similar techniques.

Recreating the volumetric-spatial structure of the 1932 laundry room, "Ginsburg Architects" returned to the building the support-"legs", which turned out to be built up for the sake of additional premises. Flowing freely under them, the space of the park, organized by two diagonal alleys, then penetrated under the supports of a residential building and ended with an observation deck. The green island is the remnant of the Shalyapin estate, which can still be clearly seen on the city map. In Soviet times, during the reconstruction of the Garden Ring, some of the mature trees from the destroyed boulevards were transplanted here. Back in the 1920s, Moisei Ginzburg tried to preserve the existing plantings as much as possible, urban greenery was an important part of the complex; in his book "Housing" he writes about the building of the People's Commissariat for Finance: "located in the park."

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  1/4 General plan of the newly built house of the People's Commissariat of Finance of the RSFSR. 1929-1930 TSANTD Moscow f.2, op.1 t.11, d.10024 p. 121.1929-1930 / Courtesy of Ginsburg Architects

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  2/4 Floor plans of the laundry building. 1929-1930 TSANTD Moscow f.2, op.1 t.11, d.10024 p. 124.1929-1930 / Courtesy of Ginsburg Architects

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  3/4 General plan of the Narkomfin complex. 1929-1930 TSANTD Moscow f.2, op.1 t.11, d.10024 p. 127.1929-1930 / Courtesy of Ginsburg Architects

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  4/4 "Household block of the Narkomfin House" TSANTD Moscow f.2, op.1 v. 11, d. 10024 p. 125.1929-1930 / Courtesy of Ginsburg Architects

“After some hesitation, the customer agreed that it was important to leave unbuilt the empty space under the part of the house, which was, of course, built up in Soviet times. Paths from the park system of the Narkomfin building come to this "loggia" and it becomes clear how this small, but not so unprincipled space worked in the general system. In this architecture, every detail had its own meaning and purpose. The area under the “feet” of the laundry was a “hinge” connecting this building with the residential and communal”. Before the restoration, the laundry was in ruins. In addition to "clearing" the later layers, Ginsburg Architects had to recreate a lot from scratch. “For almost 20 years, the building was rotted, water flowed through it, all communications were turned off, homeless people lived there. It was abandoned, not interesting to anyone and passed from hand to hand. Therefore, the issue of conservation turned out to be very difficult - there was little genuine material texture, which, in principle, survived and was suitable for conservation. And our task in the course of this project was to make sure that the laundry did not turn out to be a completely remake,”says Aleksey Ginzburg.

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  1/11 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  2/11 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Laundry building of the Narkomfin residential building" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  3/11 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Laundry building of the Narkomfin residential building" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  4/11 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  5/11 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  6/11 Laundry building September 2005 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  7/11 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  8/11 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo courtesy © Ginsburg Architects

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  9/11 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Laundry building of the Narkomfin residential building" © "Ginsburg Architects"

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  10/11 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Laundry building of the Narkomfin residential building" © "Ginsburg Architects"

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  11/11 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Laundry building of the Narkomfin residential building" © "Ginsburg Architects"

The most important step on the way to returning the monument to its original appearance was the "opening" from the later glazing of the outer staircase, where the restorers managed to preserve part of the finishing of the steps. The staircase initially led to the second floor into a common corridor with staff rooms. A fragment of the historical plaster of the western facade was also carefully preserved, which gave an idea of the coloristic solution of the facades. For the entire ensemble of the Narkomfin, it was uniform: the buildings had plastered textured surfaces of the walls in white, combined with black round columns and smooth gray ribbon windows.

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  1/7 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Laundry building of the Narkomfin residential building" © "Ginsburg Architects"

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  2/7 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Laundry building of the Narkomfin residential building" © "Ginsburg Architects"

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  3/7 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  4/7 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Laundry building of the Narkomfin residential building" © "Ginsburg Architects"

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  5/7 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  6/7 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  7/7 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

Fragments of the original texture inside were turned into “material evidence”: the best-preserved fragment of the “straw” insulation, for example, was integrated into the interior in the form of a probe designed under glass. Part of the historical masonry was left without plastering in the form of display material. Fragments of structural elements of the light pits found during the clearing of the building were also preserved.

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  1/6 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  2/6 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  3/6 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  4/6 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  5/6 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  6/6 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

“Unfortunately, the original interior decoration has not survived. We only found remnants of destroyed xylene as flooring on the second floor and multi-layer paint on the walls. At the moment, the wall decoration with painting on plaster has been recreated. The western wall has a bluish tint because this is the only original color that was found in the course of technological research,”comments the chief architect of the project, Maria Kuzina.

In terms of engineering and construction, the laundry, like the residential building, was an experimental facility. The characteristic features of the construction technology were the standardization and pre-fabrication of individual elements. The building is based on a reinforced concrete frame filled with two types of masonry. For the outer walls, which are thermal insulation, hollow cinder-concrete stones of the "Krestyanin" type were used, with filling in between with fine slag. For the internal capital walls, masonry was used from hollow stones with one row of voids, the so-called hard stones of the engineer Prokhorov's system. The system of utilities was located vertically and horizontally in the voids in the masonry of the internal walls and ceilings.

“We carried out the restorative part of the laundry work in accordance with the proprietary technology,” says Alexey Ginzburg. “We were looking for the possibilities of materials existing today, matching the characteristics of the original elements. For example, we found blocks of the "Peasant" type and when laying them, they used a fastening method similar to the original technology. We also made the reconstruction of precast-monolithic floors, sliding window systems according to the author's project. All this was important for us in order to later say that this building in its new parts was made exactly according to the technologies and intentions of its authors … ".

So, during the restoration of the masonry filling of the outer walls, the architects selected blocks with similar dimensions from expanded clay concrete; for the restoration of the covering slab, the technology of similar prefabricated monolithic floors was used, which was developed during the construction of Narkomfin.

The lost fillings of door and window openings with fittings were also recreated. The original tape windows were one of the inventions of the Narkomfin - they consisted of reinforced concrete frames and movable oak parts sliding on a roller. “We have restored the window units in strict accordance with the historical drawings - their dimensions, sliding frame system and color scheme, with the exception that the concrete frames were replaced with wooden ones, and double-glazed windows were installed on the inner thread,” says Maria Kuzina.

The "roofing pie" was also replaced, the historic seam roof covering with a seven-degree slope was restored. In order to operate the roof in the summer, the project of the device provided for a prefabricated boardwalk on adjustable supports and an external staircase, which also serves as an escape staircase from the second floor.

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  1/12 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  2/12 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  3/12 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  4/12 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  5/12 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Laundry building of the Narkomfin residential building" © "Ginsburg Architects"

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  6/12 Fragment of archival drawings. The project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Laundry building of the Narkomfin residential building" Courtesy of Ginsburg Architects

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  7/12 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  8/12 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Laundry building of the Narkomfin residential building" © Ginsburg Architects

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  9/12 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  10/12 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  11/12 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Economic block of the Narkomfin House" Photo © Ginsburg Architects

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  12/12 Project of restoration and adaptation of the cultural heritage object "Laundry building of the Narkomfin residential building" © Ginsburg Architects

“The laundry itself is an example of constructivist architecture, and it could and should have been restored at least for this reason,” emphasizes Aleksey Ginzburg. - But for us, a compositional meaning was also invested in the reconstruction of the object, since this is the most important part of the environment that we want to capture and show in the conservation mode as the idea of our avant-garde artists of the 1920s. coupled with public space."

Today the laundry and the residential building have different owners. According to Aleksey Ginzburg, the ideal solution would be to return the laundry to the restored building as a social facility for neighboring residential buildings. But this proposal did not find a response from the owner. A more likely scenario is the conversion of the building to the function of a city cafe.

“My dream was to do something like“Project OGI”here - a cafe club. In my understanding, this place is "edutainment" - "education + entertainment", an art cafe with a bookstore. But so far no tenants have been found. I think that not every restaurant can fit there due to low ceilings and small space, but a club-type cafe will fit there very well. I will try to continue to speak and suggest this to people who are involved in such projects."

In a word, the building of the "Laundry" or utility block, which at first glance is technical and imperceptible, turns out to be an important element of the complex, in a sense even a key one. The main idea of the experiment conducted by the architects of the Stroykom section in the building of the People's Commissariat of Finance, like several other buildings built in other cities, was to change life - and not so much towards socialization as "communality" - this concept differs from "commune" in that first of all, it includes comfort and serves, in essence, the forerunner of the experiences of the 20th century to create services that simplify a person's life and are able to redirect his energy from dreary daily self-service to creativity. In the Soviet model of life, the experiment, without being provided with almost anything, despite a series of attempts, rather failed - but in the world it eventually took place and it should not be forgotten that the architects of the Soviet avant-garde took an active part in it. The laundry building, in addition to the town planning significance of a kind of "propilya of the Narkomfin park", the entrance building, is also important because it was part of the life transformation project undertaken by the architects of the Moisei Ginzburg group. forgotten part of it. The completed restoration returned an element that had fallen out of public attention to the front of the Garden Ring development, and to the experimental ensemble, integrity and a certain amount of historical justice. It’s even surprising how this complex, seemingly ready to go into the ground and dissolve in it, many times mourned, boldly recovered in some 4-5 years. Although the victorious march, as we remember, was preceded by almost 30 years of desperate efforts.

The Ginzburg Architects received the Moscow Restoration Prize in 2019 for the restoration project of the Narkomfin Household Block.