"There is a grain of a joke in every joke."
Sigmund Freud. "Interpretation of dreams"
Discussing this house at the expert council of the Archives, we almost had a fight with Totan Kuzembaev. He said something like this: Archi.ru is a big responsibility, you cannot vote for such a house. You can't publish something like that - they'll still look and decide that you can do this, [but you can't do that] - that's what our great experimenter, the guru of wooden houses, roughly said. Therefore, of course, I decided to start publishing the objects that were configured in 2020 in the short-list of the ArchiWOOD award from this house in Suzdal. Stubbornness is not in vain given at birth. By the way, let us give out one more small secret: Alexey Rosenberg supported the "crazy thing" of the Suzdal house in the same place.
"Dacha Suzdal", as the authors call it, the FORM bureau, is located in the historical part of the city - not in the very center, but between the Alexandrovsky and Spaso-Evfimiev monasteries, on the high bank of the Kamenka River, opposite the Pokrovsky Monastery. That is, in a wonderful environment and with beautiful panoramas. There are many hotels in Suzdal, there are also nearby, but this is a private house on a plot of about 0.3 hectares, stretched along the edge of the hill.
The history of the project is as follows: somewhere after 2004, they began to build a house here in the "Suzdal" hut spirit: three village gable facades were placed side by side and connected with bulkheads, walls are made of foam concrete, outside there is a wooden lining. In general, this is a common type of Suzdal construction: since the 1970s, the city has been positioning itself as a resort town, famous not only for its monuments, but also for its quiet district atmosphere. In the seventies, this is why a residential microdistrict was built here on the outskirts, from three, not even five-storey buildings, and even with pitched roofs, and the administration with a hotel on Lenin Square did not grow more than three floors. [By the way, the Kamenka river was also dammed up to take tourists along it, and there is every reason to believe that Vysotsky's verses: “but there is no point in swimming for us yet / because our river is all sour,” - about this initiative]. In the last twenty years, many hotels and private houses have been built here, but all without breaking the format. Suzdal is a special city, it has many security zones, rules and approvals (see.
here and here).
So, a couple of years ago, the architects of the FORM bureau got an unfinished house that looked like three village houses lined up in a row. There were set: triangular pediments, a characteristic attic in the southern volume, a terrace on the side of the river, light “towers” between the volumes of three “huts”.
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zooming 1/3 View of the house in Suzdal before reconstruction courtesy of FORM
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zooming 2/3 View of the house in Suzdal at the beginning of the reconstruction courtesy of FORM
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zooming 3/3 View of the house in Suzdal before reconstruction courtesy of FORM
That is, if we choose the right words, we have before us the history of not reconstruction and not restoration, tk. the first assumes a building that has survived and somehow functioned, and the second - a monument, formal or informal. Here, rather, we are talking about work from the category "we got an unfinished house, which needed to be brought to mind." In this case, there are usually two main ways: full preservation of the original traditionalist idea - or a complete redesign in a modernist way, it all depends on the author's principles. The FORM bureau chose, however, the third way: they combined "history" and modernity, stringing three "wooden" volumes on a concrete ridge - well, roughly like a shish kebab.
Everything is white concrete - laconic and undecorated, although it is covered with a "fur coat" with a rare thin cut and flat frames around the windows. These are the light turrets, ledges at the ends and one more ledge on the courtyard facade, where the house turns at an angle of fifteen degrees. The twist was given in the original project, perhaps for the illusion of being natural, repeating the line of the river, but probably also for better views.
In fact, the structure is, of course, more complicated - the authors understand it as a kind of conglomerate of three wooden houses and outbuildings that make up a string that looks a bit like the fur of a harmonica, and is covered with a common roof, the broken configuration of which echoes the longitudinal and transverse axes of the house. Inside there are two large living rooms, an extended two-part kitchen, several bedrooms and a staircase connecting the floors in the "midway" pivot space, under one of two skylights.
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Image 
zooming 1/4 Dacha Suzdal © FORM
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zooming 2/4 Dacha Suzdal © FORM
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zooming 3/4 Dacha Suzdal © FORM
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zooming 4/4 Dacha Suzdal © FORM
Terraces: large on the river, smaller on the rear, plus one more visor at the corner of the turn, - made of painted black metal. Very remotely, they can recall the cast-iron balconies of merchant houses of the 19th century, and they also look like a kind of frame waiting to be filled. We also note that the window frames in wooden houses are white, and in white volumes, wooden frames are also a sign of interpenetration, almost an exchange of genes. And everything is in the contrast of the poles. I once heard the wisdom from a geneticist: “crossing of very opposite genotypes is good in the long term for the population, but not always for the individual” - this is no offense to the house, the house is good, but there is a feeling that this kind of crossing is taking place here, pole prototypes.
The authors borrowed all the carvings from the Suzdal prototypes, primarily in the Museum of Wooden Architecture, painted it from beginning to end, focusing on rather old examples (certainly not post-war and not even Ropet's ones), in places "holding out" the detail and sculpturality. Those who are not specifically interested in the history of Russian carving will not be able to tell the difference, although in fact here we see rather a hybrid of the 18th century with the Arbamtsev-Talashkino fantasies.
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zooming 1/12 Dacha Suzdal © FORM
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zooming 2/12 Dacha Suzdal © FORM
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zooming 3/12 Dacha Suzdal © FORM
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zooming 4/12 Dacha Suzdal © FORM
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zooming 5/12 Dacha Suzdal © FORM
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zooming 6/12 Dacha Suzdal © FORM
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zooming 7/12 Dacha Suzdal © FORM
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zooming 8/12 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / provided by FORM
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zooming 9/12 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / Courtesy FORM
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zooming 10/12 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / provided by FORM
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zooming 11/12 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / provided by FORM
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zooming 12/12 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / provided by FORM
Except for one column, which was taken by the FORM architects as a quote from Constantin Brancusi, an Italian sculptor of Hungarian origin, avant-garde modernist who experimented with ethnic motives. The column stands in a row of metal supports of the terrace, burned to black, which showed the texture of the wood. It must be assumed that it serves as a kind of generalizing sign of the approach, as if speaking for the authors in its geometric language: we do not renounce the avant-garde, but we are also interested in heritage. The metal frame of the terrace pierces the column, again like a skewer, turning it into a kind of "knot", a pivotal statement - a sign of the idea laid down by the authors in the architecture of the house as a whole. It would be nice for Sergei Tchoban to look at this example of interaction between the old and the new.
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zooming 1/3 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / provided by FORM
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zooming 2/3 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / provided by FORM
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zooming 3/3 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / provided by FORM
The authors say about the column as follows: “partly endless, partly just a column, decorated with 'our' traditional melons. Brancusi also drew inspiration from folk art, reinterpreted it without direct borrowing, which is very nice and close to us. In addition, we are always in favor of treating architecture with a little bit of humor and play."
In the interiors, according to the authors, they were guided by the image of the professor's dacha: “their vivid image was formed from motley furniture given away by friends or transported from a city apartment. To get this impression of randomness from scratch, furniture and decor were collected from various brands and vintage shops, with some custom made for the project.”
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zooming 1/12 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / provided by FORM
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zooming 2/12 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / provided by FORM
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zooming 3/12 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / Courtesy FORM
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zooming 4/12 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / Courtesy FORM
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zooming 5/12 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / provided by FORM
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zooming 6/12 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / provided by FORM
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zooming 7/12 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / provided by FORM
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zooming 8/12 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / provided by FORM
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zooming 9/12 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / Courtesy FORM
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zooming 10/12 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / provided by FORM
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zooming 11/12 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / provided by FORM
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zooming 12/12 Dacha Suzdal Photo © Yuri Palmin / provided by FORM
The house occupies the middle of the plot, on the right in the south there is a house that existed here before, facing the street, which feels like post-war. On the left, at the northern end of the site, it was balanced by the red volume of the technical designation, there is a small garage and a shed in it, completely "Melnikov's", if not to say "Kuzembaev's" kind. It forms a modern pole and a contrasting pair of the old house, as if it emphasizes that all other germinations are between the yellow old and the red new (note, moreover, that the main house is monochrome, combining the "naturalness" of the wood color, black and white).
In other words, the message is clear. The authors got a kind of conglomerate house from volumes already interpreting the modern Suzdal - typically Suzdal - approach to new construction. The houses imitated the streets of the old Russian city: two pseudo-Empire style, one “psvedo-period-historicism”. FORM, firstly, completely got rid of the Empire connotations, removing the semicircular windows, brought the houses closer to the Museum of Wooden Architecture. And saturated their history with contasts. It's contextual and beautiful, with Brancusi's quote - perhaps even subtly.
Here I want to say two, maybe even three things. First, Suzdal, like many Russian cities, in the 17th – 18th, and especially the 19th century, was built up, as we know, in the center with houses combining stone and wood. Stone basement and wooden top, the top burns down - can be restored; plus wooden stairs, galleries, technical outbuildings, latrines there all sorts. That is, if they could, then they combined wood and stone. A textbook example is the house of the merchant Likhonin, 500 m away from him here in a straight line, he stands on the edge of the same steep bank of the river; stone part white and wood. Secondly, Suzdal itself, its urban space consists of a combination of wood and stone: stone monuments and wooden residential buildings. But what is there, here recently the XIII century was strengthened with pieces of wood, and a metal fence was covered from tourists - did not the architects spy on their combination of stone / wood / metal there? Although, of course not.
Thirdly, on the contrary, there is the Intercession Monastery, where, back in Soviet times, behind white brick walls, to the west of a completely white cathedral, a hotel was built - several log houses with deliberate shutters - in an attempt to stylize exactly what the old wooden houses are not quite the ones in the city, but older, but a little generalized. For me personally, the FORM bureau's house most of all resembles the Intercession Monastery, in some way it serves as its “mirror”, in a very figurative and figurative, of course, sense. It is difficult to say whether a "fur coat" should have been used on the white walls - it would have looked better in whitewash; on the other hand, the "fur coat" emphasizes the theatricality and frivolity of the effect obtained, since it resembles a decoration, as well as the metal frames of terraces - to a part of a stage structure. Even the turn of the volume seems to hint at a mechanized theatrical circle. Is this not the metaphor of modern Suzdal, the Russian tourist "Venice"?
