ModernSovietArch - МАРХИ - Московский Архитектурный Институт

Московский Архитектурный Институт (Государственная Академия)

MODERN SOVIET ARCH **** * * * Enrique Cilleruelo García e.cilleruelo@alumnos.upm.es

INDEX

Ryabushinky Mansion .................p.5 Melnikov House ..........................p.7

Conclusions .........................p.13

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Enrique Cilleruelo GarcĂ­a

Copper House ...........................p.11

Modern Soviet Architecture - MARHI

Ryabushinky Mansion, Moscow, 1900-1903 Fyodor Schechtel 0 Floor and 1st Floor

Main entrance Ryabushinky Mansion

Park GĂźel, Barcelona, 1900-1914 Antoni GaudĂ­

Ryabushinky Mansion _Intro_

Also known as Gorky’s House, this mansion was built in 1900/3 by the architect Fyodor Schechtel. It was an order from the banker and industrialist S.P. Ryabushinsky whose was living there until 1917, then he had to emigrate.

From 1917 to 1919 the State publishing house was there. After, from 1925 to 1931, the National Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries managed the mansion. In 1931 Maxim Gorky was transferred the mansion by Stalin but he passed away in 1936. Finally, in 1965 it was opened a museum dedicated to the writer that nowadays can be visited.

Framed in the Art Noueveau style, this house takes the spirit of this famous movement from this days trying to be special and unusual avoiding symmetries or classicism details.

The Art Noueveau style answers to the social demands that the developed bourgeoisie needed as a way to distinguish itself from the rest. In this way, this style was widely shared and developed not only in Europe but in many parts of the world.

In Spain it can be found as a clear exponent Antoni Gaudí that in the same way as Schechtel, his works with singular style were commissioned by the high economic spheres of society. It is important to highlight that, in the case of Gaudí, the desire to distinguish themselves from others within a wealthy social class is accompanied by a specific cultural and social context, in which the Catalan feeling needed to express their own ideas and show its singularities. In this way, Gaudí’s architecture was gaining popularity allowing him to continue growing with his work. From Park Güel, a hillside development with several points of interest, to residential buildings, reaching the commission of a cathedral, the Sagrada Familia.

We can feel a clear heritage from the Arts and Crafts movement revealed in the late nineteenth century with Victor Horta in care for the details. In the Ryabushinky Mansion and in the interiors of Gaudí’s residences, we can see how, from the expressive façades with curved cornices to the interior rooms, the smallest detail is studied and designed. Also the vegetal and marine motifs abound, the staircase core become important with iron forged railings, individual lamps and even the door handles are considered by the architect.

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Enrique Cilleruelo García

_Points of interest and relation with other architectures_

HĂ´tel Solvay, Brussels, 1898-1900 Victor Horta Balcony detail

Modern Soviet Architecture - MARHI

Ryabushinky Mansion interior stair and lamp

Ryabushinky Mansion exterior vegetation

Melnikov House, Moscow, 1929 Konstantin Melnikov 0 Floor plan + Main section

The interior layout, while answering the demands from the high society, its developed in a simple way in which the succession of rooms gives the architecture a functional-domestic spaces taking advantage of these changes to add decorative elements and references and allegories and forms of natural shapes and curves.

Nature is expressed in the architectural forms from the design but, when it is possible, a literal nature is involving the architectures of trees and gardens. This can be seen in the Rryabushinky Masion where view from the street is not very evident hidden by several layers of trees in the garden. In Gaudí’s work, when it occurs in areas with a more extensive development, it is also possible to find the embraced architecture of vegetation and natural paths.

_Intro_

Designed and built for himself and his family in 1929, the Konstantine Melnikov’s House is framed in the expressionist style within the constructivism of his works from 1923 to 1933. This house, stands out within the context since it is innovative at a formal level as it were most of the works of this architect. This is understood thanks to the fact that he was not only an architect but that his influences come from being a painter and understood the political context, where architecture sought to reflect with new forms that would satisfy the conditions of the new socialist state.

With rationalist nature, together with Ladovsky, Melnikov was part of the Asnova Foundation, where the least possible programmatic architecture was sought. In this way the geometry of spheres and cubes was used to reflect ideas and states evident within the context. This makes the Melnikov house have a strong formalist component but breaks with the geometric conventionalism making interesting proposals in the composition and interior order. _Points of interest and relation with other architectures_

In the well-known district of Arbat, in Moscow, this single family house grows exempt between two block walls, this fact is striking since from the beginning it creates a uniqueness with the environment in which it is located.

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Enrique Cilleruelo García

Melnikov House

Modern Soviet Architecture - MARHI

Melnikov House Axonometry + Main facade Melnikov House Exterior courtyard view

Melnikov House 1st Floor stair

Melnikov House Double high studio floor view

Ville Savoye, Poissy, 1929 Le Corbusier interior framing window

Melnikov House windows in brick construction

Melnikov House floor construction

Apparently easy in volume, the space is created by making intersect two cylinders, in wich the one close to the back part of the house is higher, that allows placing a terrace on the top of the lowest gap. The facade facing the street is a stright cut with a curtain wall window inside this first volume, which makes the curved geometry being not so evident from the outside street. The smooth and clean finished white exterior can be related with the architect Le Corbusier’s works as the Villa Saboya for his sobriety of forms, although the use of the curve from the circumference, it speaks to us abput that geometric simplicity far from a compositional wealth also common in the Swiss architect.

The relation in this work between the interior and exterior is evident in the back part facing the small garden. From the outside view, honeycomb windows are located with a rhythm that is fading when it reaches the low level. This arrangement of the outside part of the windows tells us about an interval of internal division of the heights that, when we study the house in the section, we realize that it is not really related with the interior rooms’ heights.

The next floor was the architect’s painting studio. Here takes place the second double height that takes advantage of the offset of heights of the cylindrical bodies creating an access to a terrace on the roof. The space is flooded with light filtered by three levels windows in bands creating beams of light and shadow that remind us again how Le Corbusier understood the interiors in which light starred the scene creating unexpected changing effects at every moment with the light. With these windows, in a certain way, the outside view is framed wich situates the person here as an observer from within, same way how Le Corbu framed views form the landscape to potentiate them with architecture.

The interior feeling in this house looks for free and wide spaces as the modern movement does. This make a contrast with the construction itself which, being innovative in the brick’s layout and adapted to the criteria of the architect, uses traditional techniques and resources that optimize the architecture, such as the thickness in the walls that creates thermal inertia.

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Enrique Cilleruelo García

When we enter from the street the space instead of expanding as it will happen later, it guides us to the right where we accede either to a staircase that goes up to the floor above or to a corridor that leads to the different domestic rooms. When we reach the first floor, a double height is opened in our back, which effect only happens in this ground part of the first cylinder. From there we access an open space on the floor that is only divided with two walls, symmetrically arranged, allowing freedom in the distribution of those spaces. Here we can appreciate how the rhythm of the windows that we mentioned before is not fulfilled in the interior, here we see that the lower level of windows intersects with the floor line so there must be a small space in the section when it reaches window.

Modern Soviet Architecture - MARHI

Copper House, Moscow, 2003-2004 Sergey Skuratov Architects Main section, 0 Floor , 1st Floor and main render

Copper House North face

Building in Tessinkiy Pereulok Street, 2, Moscow Unknown

House Y, Catskill, 1999 Steven Holl

Copper House _Intro_

This residential complex known as ‘Copper House’ was designed between 2003 and 2003 and builtbetween 2003-2004. This singular complex located near the center in Moscow has won many awards.

_Points of interest and relation with other architectures_

The development of the three volumes in height is united with a glass corridor on the ground floor with the free floor goes through each building. Thus the volumes are unified while creating a parallel path as a screen with the public space that is left in front which crosses the block reaching the river.

The rhythm of the windows reminds us of the openings of the Melnikov House in its discontinuous rhythm and narrow gaps. They zigzag appearing of balconies as attached boxes which we can also see in other current buildings such as that of Tessinskiy Pereulok Street, 2, between Kitay-gorod and Taganskaya stations, where the composition of facades is related. This formality in the balconies also reminds us the house Y, from Holl in New York where here instead of balconies they are terraces that seek to open themselves to the horizon.

The greenish color of the main façade plays an important role in the expression and understanding of the volumes since it is used when these settle on the street level by creating a cantilever in the accesses that highlights the facades with curtain walls.

If we go to the northern part backwards we realize that the green copper covering fades with light brown, or just disappears totally or partially in each of the buildings. With this contrast the volumes are telling us different stories, such as the staircase core that is ascending, the appearance of windows from servant rooms or the low-level corridor that crosses each group of flats.

The set is surrounded by green areas and when the buildings are connected with the main access band, two semi-patios are created helping to articulate the volumes while also opening them towards the pedestrian section.

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Enrique Cilleruelo García

The modern style of the complex is seen in the compositional simplicity that even with sober shapes and perpendicular planes is able to take the attention from everyone who walks by.

Modern Soviet Architecture - MARHI

Copper House pedestrial way parallel to the complex

Ryabushinky Mansion

Cooper House

Melnikov House

Moscow City Plan

Copper House common corridor access connector

Interestingly, being geometrically similar prisms, each of them plays a role within the set. The first one where we arrive to when we access from the main street, receives us with a modulated facade like the others, but the functional detail of the tinted glass for protecting yourself from the western sun creates an interesting, somewhat unpredictable pace.

The building in the middle has more compactness so it becomes more evident by not having a cantilever and also with a similar width and length, while the last of the three, although being volumetrically like the first one turned 90 degrees, breaks the linearity of the exterior route, emphasizing this last part.

Conclusions

In the one hand, since the Gorky House, the Melnikov House and the Cooper House belong to moments of high development within their own currents, they create striking peaks within an architectural generality that we can say that tends to homogenize architectural currents more over centuries than in specific moments as it can happen over several decades. In this context, a main trend in the city of Moscow, needing to accommodate a large density of population, tends to build in closed blocks with large inner courtyards and in height, in this way, the three objects of study are breaking this when being located within of the city in an exempt and independent way, although it, is true that each one fulfills its main purpose for which it was designed.

I also think that, in their own way, each one makes an interesting contribution to the dominant architecture in the city, which began more than a century ago, like all large cities almost worldwide, to develop modernist and avant-garde architectures that have led to the heterogeneous era of differentiated influences and styles in which we live today.

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Enrique Cilleruelo GarcĂ­a

Approaching to these three unique building complexes in the center of a big city like Moscow has attracted my attention. Highlighting each one on its specific location, by one characeristic or another, contrasting with the constructions that frame them around and stressing them as examples of very concrete architectural movements, I see points on common that even with the temporary and architectural disparity that they possess, can connect them.

Modern Soviet Architecture - MARHI

Moscow City view, common city buildings, one of Stalin’s Towers and MIBC in the back part

Moscow City’s layers of buildings with roads connecting

In the other hand, their location in central areas in Moscow makes them more accessible to urban culture and with this they are influencing in a greater way. Even though Art Nouveau had its greatest development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was gradually turning off leaving clear exponents of this trend, if I believe that has laid new foundations in the perception of architecture in the search of singular spaces and new expressions that break with centuries of formal tradition and architecture perception. I can see this spirit with the Melnikov house, which, even formally moving away from Art Nouveau, is able to pick up those new social and cultural ideals that were awakening in the societies of the beginning of the 20th century. With these influences, the Cooper House complex seems to me to continue reflecting a modern character in its search for resolution of functional situations, a relationship of elements without leaving aside a composition sensibility that one century later still continues to develop very strongly.

With these three examples, a framework of understanding of the reality that took place in Moscow and in the world is reinforced at various times not too distant in time that continue to influence us today. In this way, the result of the city in which we are living and the projection of this future is a sample of historical layers that are superimposed adapting and coexisting with the gaps that remain and opening new horizons and new realities.

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Enrique Cilleruelo GarcĂ­a

It is interesting and nice to stop and think about how architecture has progressed through the ages, opening up new paths and resolving issues of very specific cultural and social situations and how its social and avant-garde work of new realities are still valid today. With the material condition intrinsic to it, each architecture can be understood as a photograph of what reality meant at the time it was taken and what the dominant concerns were.