About the history of the house. About the upcoming reconstruction

A huge number of publications are dedicated to the legendary House of Narkomfin. In Western sources, its descriptions are often accompanied by the definitions “utopia” and “utopian” English utopian housing project. In 2006, the Narkomfin House was included in the “World monuments watch list of 100 most endangered sites” - List of world cultural monuments that are in danger of extinction. Since 2010, some of the empty apartments have been rented out as workshops or residential premises, which were mainly occupied by “creative youth who are not indifferent to an architectural masterpiece.” Yoga classes are held on the roof, a co-working space and a cafe have appeared, lectures and seminars are also organized, and they will even give you a manicure there. At our request, Sergei Sokolsky remembered the history of the building and looked at what is happening there now. In the photo above—Narkomfin House in December 2015. In the foreground is a utility block, in the background is a residential block.

IN project documentation the house was called the 2nd House of the Council of People's Commissars and was planned as a multifunctional complex consisting of four parts performing different functions: a residential block, a communal block (which included a library, a dining room and a gym), a children's building (kindergarten and nursery) - was not built and subsequently partially occupied a communal block, and an independent service yard with a mechanical laundry, drying room and garage located on its territory. According to the plan, the house was to be surrounded by a vast park area. The photo above shows the view from Maly Konyushkovsky Lane.

Yes, this building looks unusual even now, but in the early 1930s - the house was completed in 1931 - it shook the imagination. Flat, laconic facades are a sign of avant-garde architecture, strip glazing put Muscovites into a stupor - they could not understand how the walls in the house could rest on glass. The entire Narkomfin House seemed to have stepped out of Malevich’s canvas - geometric figures, suspended in empty space, captured and captured in the forms of the architectural complex...

“Residential building, former Narkomfin. Novinsky Boulevard, 25, building 1. Architects Moses Ginzburg, Ignatius Milinis. 1928 - 1930s. Cultural heritage site of regional significance. Subject to state protection. Condition: emergency.»

What is the reason for his unusual appearance? The authors of the house are architects Moses Ginzburg And Ignatius Milinis, members of the creative organization “Association of Modern Architects” (OSA). The program idea of ​​the Association was that the appearance of the building was now entirely determined by its internal content, in short, by its function. The architects of the “new” Moscow created from the inside out: first the filling, the form as a consequence. This approach was radically different from the previous one, according to which Moscow had been built for centuries, and in which the external attractiveness of the building was put at the forefront. Muscovites, accustomed to lordly palaces with lion faces on the facades and fancy mansions in the Art Nouveau style, looked with amazement at the Narkomfin House. Everything in his appearance embodied the service of Function - the muse and goddess of the constructivists.

A parallelepiped is a residential block with “cell” apartments, a cube is a communal or public block (library, dining room, gym, rooftop cafe). The kindergarten was never built, but an automatic laundry appeared on the edge of the yard - its building is still intact (a small house closer to the Garden Ring, near the Shalyapin estate). The Narkomfin House has become a real, in the full sense of the word, residential complex - the first in Moscow! For Muscovites in the early 1930s, he was something completely out of the ordinary...!

What else was new: initially, when the house was first built, it seemed to hang in the air at a height of two and a half meters. There was no first floor; its place was taken by round pillars - load-bearing structures on which the house rested. This was done for several reasons. Firstly, the architects did not want to disturb the existing landscape. The Narkomfin House stands on the territory of the ancient park of the former Chaliapin estate, which smoothly goes down from the Garden Ring into the Presnya River. By removing the first floor, the architects ensured that the park was visible from anywhere around the house; moreover, one could freely walk around the park without bumping into the house. Secondly, Ginzburg himself believed that the first floor of a house (in any house, not just this one) was unsuitable for living in principle. The Narkomfin House has only two points of contact with the ground - two entrances at the ends, through one of which you and I will now enter.

In the 1940s, due to an acute housing shortage, all the spans between the support pillars of the first floor were built up with additional apartments, with them partially recessed into the basement. You could get into the common vestibule of these apartments (one for two apartments) from the street by going down four steps. So, almost immediately, the project of the social and everyday life of the first residential complex in Moscow, developed by the authors, was violated. In the photo above - on the left is the Narkomfin House, straight - shopping mall"Novinsky Passage".

Park of the Chaliapin estate. Or rather, what was left of him. The estate itself is in the distance, behind the trees, with its façade facing Novinsky Boulevard.

The photo above shows a warm transition between residential and utility blocks. It is now in disrepair and not in use.

Z and the counting of the columns of the first floor and the open space between them created the visual impression that the residential block was floating in the air. Together with the bridge superstructure on the flat roof and the snow-white color of the facades, this gave it a resemblance to a ship, which was fixed in the unofficial name of the house - “house-steamer”, “house-ship”. The photo shows the south-facing balconies of the end cells of type 2F.

Residential block, east facade .

It should be noted that the population of residents was to some extent homogeneous only in the first years after the house was occupied. After the arrests of the late 1930s and World War II, it changed significantly. Almost all three-room apartments on the lower floors have turned into communal apartments. As Ekaterina Milyutina writes in her memoirs about the Narkomfin House: “...apartments for singles were occupied by families, family apartments were made communal. Instead of a closed dining room (communal building), a communal kitchen with rows of stoves and troughs was installed on the fifth floor. The kindergarten was closed, the communal building turned into a printing house. The laundry was preserved, but it gradually ceased to serve residents. In the end, the house was handed over to the housing office, painted with unimaginable yellow paint, and repairs stopped.”

In the photo above is the first floor, immediately behind front door. On the left is a security post (it must be said that she very vigilantly guards the passage to Narkomfin). On the right, on the wall, is a photograph of the Narkomfin House and the surrounding area in the late 1930s - early 1940s.

The appearance of Commune Houses in Moscow in the second half of the 1920s had several preconditions. First - social. After 1917, peasants flocked en masse to the cities. The population in cities, and even more so in Moscow, has grown sharply. The newcomers settled in former apartment buildings, mansions, barracks, dugouts - wherever they had to. Housing, however, was sorely lacking. There was a lot to build. Prerequisite two - economic. It was not possible to build as they had built before - long, expensive and “for centuries” - in the new conditions. The war-ravaged country could not afford this. It had to be built quickly and cheaply.

Prerequisite three - ideological. The directive from above said: the new, Soviet man abandons the old way of thinking - bourgeois, individualistic - renounces private property and, with his head held high, steps into a bright, socialist, socialist tomorrow. “From below” there was a process going on: people began to live in communes. The reason for this, however, was not so much ideology as banal pragmatism: it is easier to feed ten people than two people. Young workers, rabfakov workers, students flocked into communes and settled in empty basements, taverns, abandoned taverns... there is a known case when a commune of six people managed to settle in the bathroom of a former tenement building.

Thus, the architects of the 1920s received a social order: to develop a project for a residential building, “tailored” for collective living. Their response to this order was a communal house. Short story of the construction of communal houses in the USSR knows both successful and unsuccessful examples. Among the successful ones - house-commune near the Donskoy Monastery(2nd Donskoy proezd, 9) by architect Ivan Nikolaev - a dormitory for students of the textile institute, a “factory” for the production of a new type of person (suffice it to say that the “sleep norm” in the dormitory was three square meters per person - this is what a deceased person in a cemetery is entitled to) . The hostel is considered a successful example because it existed as a commune for almost thirty years, until the early 1960s, and only then was rebuilt into a simple hostel.

One of the unsuccessful ones is the commune on Lesteva Street (Lesteva, 18) - they tried to accommodate adults with children in it, in a similar format of residence. Only “cells” for sleeping were individual in the house, but the rest of life - housekeeping, meals, sports, leisure - was carried out into public space. The residents didn’t like this format: people bought primus stoves and cooked with them right in their bedrooms, the bedrooms smoked, no one went to the common dining room... in a word, the idea failed. This failure prompted the architects to think that people, no matter how ideological they are, are not always ready to immediately take up and start living in a commune - a transition period is required, and with it a different kind of housing - a “transitional type” house.

The House of Narkomfin became such a house. Moses Ginzburg, who headed the typification section at the Construction Committee of the RSFSR (its task was precisely to develop projects for “transitional type” houses), called it that because it did not completely destroy the family structure, as was assumed in communal houses. The cells of the Narkomfin House are not “coffin” bedrooms, but some kind of personal space in which a tenant can hide and take a break from collective life. If a resident becomes bored in his individualistic “kennel,” he has at his disposal a carefully thought-out public space: a communal block with its benefits and the corridor in which you and I are now standing ( in the photo below).

In the constructivist language, such corridors were called “streets” and were designed so that the inhabitants of the cells, walking along them, would get to know and communicate with each other. The cells (doors in the photo) can only be entered from the corridors, and there are two of them (corridors) in the Narkomfin House - on the second and fifth floors. The photo shows a second floor corridor with K-type cells, hung with posters with the creations of famous constructivists. Previously, its right wall was glazed, and behind the windows there was a balcony - a backup corridor along the street. The balcony and windows are still there, but the wall prevents them from being seen.

The concept of a “cell” apartment was developed by the typification section in connection with the acute shortage of housing in Moscow. Actually, the section itself was created in order to invent an approach that would allow placing as many apartments as possible inside a residential building in such a way that it would be inexpensive and convenient. In search of this approach, entire scientific research was carried out, and one day - insight! - it was found: Ginzburg came up with the idea of ​​a “cell” - a new type of economy-class housing, in which not only the area, but also the cubic capacity of the room would matter. In total, the typing section developed seven types of cells - A, B, C, D, F, 2F, K.

There are two types of cells in the Narkomfin House - with upper and lower rooms located relative to the corridor. In cells with an upper location of rooms (black doors lead into them from the corridor), the staircase from the entrance goes upstairs (to the living room) and again upstairs (to the bedroom), with a lower location (white doors) - one long staircase down into the living room and bedroom, located on the same level. The ceiling height in the living rooms is 3.6 meters, in all other rooms (in the hallway, bathroom, bedroom and shower) - 2.2 meters. The creators of cell F rightly reasoned that there is no need for high ceilings in bedrooms - we still spend most of our time in them in a horizontal position. As a result, bedroom F is very modest in size (and is not even called a bedroom, but a sleeping alcove), but the living room is bright and spacious. Note: All bedrooms in the Narkomfin House face east, All living rooms - windows to the west. Hence - maximum illumination of the premises during the day plus cross ventilation...

Tetris 1920s: Narkomfin House in section. The connecting element is a corridor that runs through the building and connects the cells in a horizontal plane. Ginzburg believed that this was much more practical than stairs from bottom to top, as in modern high-rise buildings (in the Narkomfin House, let me remind you, there are only two stairwells). The cells behind the black doors (three-level) are to the left and above the corridor, behind the white doors (two-level) - to the left and below.

Furniture. An entire faculty (wood and metal processing) of VKHUTEMAS, which was headed by Lazar (El) Lissitzky- famous Soviet avant-garde artist. Lissitsky believed that furniture in new Soviet homes should be, firstly, transformable (folding beds, tables) - to save space, and secondly, built into cells at the construction stage - for the general unification of life and as an additional incentive to refuse private property. Lissitzky himself worked on projects of “combinant” furniture (analogous to modern IKEA) - sets of several elements that could be combined with each other.

Kitchen. Separate kitchens were not provided in type F cells for the reason that, according to the architects' plans, their residents would have to eat in the dining room of the communal block. However, the Narkomfin House is still a house of a “transitional” type, and not a commune, and it was decided to equip cells F with a “kitchen element” - a tiny, grotesque kitchen with an area of ​​1.4 square meters (exactly as much, as it turned out, the housewife needed for performing all necessary manipulations related to food preparation). The kitchen element is essentially a large cabinet with kitchen equipment built into it: a sink, a stove, a folding table and a folding screen, with the help of which the kitchen with one movement of the hand turned... back into a cabinet! ( in the photo above). Kitchen elements were supposed to be in the living rooms, however, they never appeared in the cells of the Narkomfin House - not in a single one. As a result, residents of cell F installed kitchens in their shower rooms next to the sleeping niche, and kitchen elements could be seen in other constructivist residential buildings - for example, in house No. 8 on Gogolevsky Boulevard. By the way, the Soviet painter Alexander Deineka lived behind the door in the photo above from 1931 to 1959. And we visited his cell.

The color scheme of the interiors deserves special attention. ( and it's really great! - editor's note). It was handled by the head of the painting department Bauhaus, Professor Hinnerk Scheper, specially sent to Moscow for a year for this purpose. Scheper developed two color schemes - cold for the “upper” cells and warm for the “lower”. The warm range was based on shades of yellow and ocher, the cold – blue and gray. Both were implemented in two versions - with strong and weak color saturation.

Options for the color scheme of F cells according to Scheper: cold gamma for the “upper” (left) and warm for the “lower” (right). Curious! In his comments on the warm colors, Scheper notes that the brightest thing in the room is the ceiling: unlike the walls, it is almost always in our field of vision, but very rarely before our eyes. Consequently, its bright color does not irritate or oppress, but pleasantly diversifies your stay in the cell. As for the cold palette, Scheper believed that the chosen colors visually expand the space.

The area of ​​cell F is about 30 square meters, but its cubic capacity, thanks to the multi-tiered layout, corresponds to the cubic capacity of an apartment, one and a half times larger in area.

We leave cell F and go to cell type 2F at number 18, located at the end of the residential block. The same one where I lived Deineka. Cell 2F is a two-story cell, essentially a pair of F cells—with upper and lower rooms—combined into one. In 2F there is a huge double-volume living room, a hallway, a bathroom, a kitchen and a dining room on the first floor, another bathroom and two bedrooms on the second. Plus there is a balcony on each floor. The ceiling height is 5 meters in the living room, 3 meters in the bedrooms, and 2.3 meters in other rooms.

The photo above is a view of the living room from the second floor of cell 2F. A chic space, as the architects say... until now. The main detail in the top photo is black column from floor to ceiling from among those on which the house rests. These columns are connected using reinforcement to the floors into a reinforced concrete frame - the only, in fact, load-bearing element of the Narkomfin House. Everything else in it rests on this frame, like a skeleton. This feature allowed Ginzburg to embody in his creation the five principles of modern architecture formulated by Le Corbusier: the house is raised above the ground, its facades are free of structure (the entire structure went into the frame), as a result - a free layout of the premises, strip glazing and, finally, usable, flat roof. In a word, thanks to the frame...

In the photo above, bentonite blocks of the “Peasant” type are visible through peeling concrete. Fibrolite and xylolite are somewhere nearby.

And - thanks to one more person, without whose participation the Narkomfin House might not have been built at all. This man is engineer Sergei Prokhorov, who developed not only the frame, but also the filling for it - lightweight and cheap to produce bentonite blocks of the “Peasant” type. Almost all the internal floors in the Narkomfin House and all the external (street) walls are made of these blocks, and the blocks themselves were stamped directly on the construction site. Betonite - concrete mixed with construction waste - held heat perfectly, but was no good in terms of sound insulation (the inhabitants of cells F with the lower location of the rooms could easily determine by the sounds of footsteps overhead, in the corridor, who had passed along it and where). Cheapness is perhaps the main reason why they built from it in the first place.

Prokhorov reduced the cost of construction as best he could, and, in addition to bentonite blocks, invented several more inexpensive innovative building materials, the use of which, alas, was one of the reasons why the Narkomfin House looks so terrible today. These materials are reeds, fibrolite and xylolite. Kamyshit is dried (sic!) grass mixed with cement and pressed into slabs. Fibrolite and xylolite are approximately the same, only instead of grass, sawdust and shavings are used, respectively. The slabs made from plant materials, of course, turned out to be very short-lived, and the house quickly fell into disrepair without regular renovation. We are seeing the traces of this decline now... The house is in terrible condition.

The photo above shows the living room of cell 2F. In the foreground are bentonite blocks “Peasant” in whitewash, to the left is the exit to the lower balcony, and even further to the left is the space of the dining room and kitchen.

View from the upper balcony of cell 2F. Direction - south. You can see the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building, Lotte Plaza and a residential building on Bolshoi Devyatinsky Lane. And a bathroom in cell 2F.

In terms of the number of repressed residents, the Narkomfin House is comparable, perhaps, only with the House on the Embankment (the first building of the Council of People's Commissars). The residents—all of them Soviet nomenklatura at the republican level—of at least twenty apartments were shot or exiled to the Gulag. And in the late 1950s, adult children of families evicted from it in the 1930s visited the house, wanting to look at their apartments and those who now lived in them. In the collage below- the southern end of the house from the upper balcony of cell 2F and a hookah bar, in the past - the first penthouse in Moscow, the residence of the People's Commissar of Finance of the RSFSR, Nikolai Milyutin.

Without whom the House of Narkomfin would definitely not have appeared, it was without Nikolai Aleksandrovich Milyutin, who was the People's Commissar of Finance of the RSFSR from 1924 to 1929. Actually, the house got its name due to the fact that it was built by order of the People's Commissariat of Finance represented by Milyutin, who decided to acquire his own departmental housing. The estimated cost of construction was 10 million rubles. The fact is that Nikolai Milyutin, in addition to being in charge of finance, was passionate about architecture and urban planning. Before the Revolution, he studied to become an architect, but after 1917 he abandoned his studies, becoming a statesman. However, Milyutin did not give up his passion for architecture, and in the mid-1920s, already as People's Commissar of Finance, he became friends with constructivist architects from the OSA and personally with Moses Ginzburg. If not for Milyutin, it is unlikely that the constructivists with their experiments would have been allowed to develop so widely in Moscow... Having given the go-ahead and allocated 10 million rubles for the construction of the Narkomfin House, Milyutin agreed with Ginzburg that he would design housing for himself - this very penthouse. Milyutin's penthouse - today a hookah bar - was built in a room planned for a ventilation chamber, the equipment for which was not purchased due to lack of money. This is not a typical cell, although many of its elements have found a place here: a two-story living room, rooms with low ceilings (kitchen, bedrooms), two balconies with access to the roof. The ceiling in the living room was painted a bright blue, making it seem like the sky was overhead.

The commissioning of the Narkomfin House in 1931 coincided with a critical turning point in the fate of architecture in the USSR: all professional associations were dissolved, and in their place the Union of Soviet Architects emerged, designed to determine the appearance of the new Soviet architecture. Constructivism and rationalism were branded as “formalism” and foreign borrowings, alien to the Soviet people. In architecture, a course was announced towards “mastering the classical heritage.”

The “exploitable, flat roof” of the Narkomfin House (pictured above) was supposed to become part of the public space.

Superstructure in the form of a “captain’s bridge” ( in the photo above) was conceived as a terrace for charging, the roof itself - as a natural solarium for residents to sunbathe. Also here, at the roof level, several dormitory-type rooms were designed, from 9 to 12 square meters, for one or two people. Now in these rooms (in the photo there are illuminated windows under the “captain’s bridge”) there is something like a children’s language school.

And the roof of the Narkomfin House is an ideal point for viewing the territory of the American Embassy.

It was almost completely dark in Moscow, and in the wooden houses scattered around the construction site on Sadovoy, like boats around a ship, the evening light was shining, paler in places, brighter in places—the unquenchable light of Moscow windows.

In reality, the fate of the Narkomfin House did not turn out at all as planned by its creators. This became clear already at the stage of moving into the house. Housing in the cells was provided not at all according to the principle invented by Ginzburg (cells K and 2F - to married couples with children, F - to bachelors and childless couples), but simply according to the principle of proximity to power. The Narkomfin House very quickly became a nomenklatura house, and, along with representatives of the People's Commissariat of Finance, people who had no direct relationship to the above-mentioned People's Commissariat lived in it - for example, cell No. 14 went to the People's Commissar of Health of the RSFSR, Nikolai Semashko, and in cell No. 18, as It has already been said that Alexander Deineka lived.

As for Ginzburg himself, there is still debate about whether he ever lived in the Narkomfin House or not. Some believe that yes, he lived with his family, but was forced to move out after the residents, dissatisfied with the original and not always convenient architectural and planning solutions of the experimental house, began breaking the windows in his cell. Others claim that he never lived, but that his workshop was simply located in one of the cells during the period of finishing the building. According to the recollections of old-timers, when moving into the house, Ginzburg was allegedly offered an apartment there, but he refused, preferring housing of traditional architecture.

Which of this is true, we do not undertake to judge, especially since it (the truth) is most likely scattered in these opinions in pieces, as always. One thing can be said with certainty - the people who settled in the Narkomfin House in the early 1930s were, for the most part, very far from understanding what kind of house it was and how unusual it was. People simply wanted a comfortable life. They didn’t like the lack of kitchens in the apartments and elevators in the hallways, they were irritated by the constant running along the corridor overhead, they didn’t understand why the roof was leaking in a newly built house, and in the bedrooms you hit your head on the ceiling. Behind all these inconveniences and shortcomings, few people bothered to see the main thing - the bold plan of the Narkomfin House, the first residential complex in Moscow, intended for a person with a new, fresh, unfettered look, which, apparently, was ahead of its time by about fifty years and maybe and one hundred.

Now the monument is in poor condition and is close to complete destruction. Of course, there are plans for its restoration (the first appeared in the 1980s), there are also projects (the author of one of them is Alexey Ginzburg, grandson of Moisei Ginzburg), but until recently investors were not interested in them: the cells are small, redevelopment The security status interferes, and besides, the house is full of owners. Thus, the first floor (the built-up space between the columns) and the utility block belong to Moscow, the laundry building belongs to the bank, four or five cells belong to the owners “from the previous ones.” Finally, about 30 cells (approximately 2.2 thousand square meters - more than half of the entire area of ​​the complex) are in the hands of private investor Alexander Senatorov, who began buying them back in 2006. Senatorov claims that he plans to restore the house with a complete restoration of its original appearance, the demolition of the elevators that appeared in the house after the war, the demolition of the first floor... It is unknown when the long-awaited restoration will begin, just as it is still unclear what it will be - restoration or commercial redevelopment. So, everyone who is not indifferent to the legacy of the Soviet avant-garde can only keep their fingers crossed and believe in the best. The photo below shows a view of the House after restoration according to Senatorov’s design. You can learn in detail the history of the Narkomfin house from the book ARCHIVE | RESIDENTIAL COMPLEX “NARKOMFIN HOUSE”, authors - Elena Ovsyannikova and Ekaterina Milyutina (the same one!). UPD In the summer of 2017, restoration will begin in the Narkomfin House, under the leadership of Ginzburg’s great-grandson.

Photos and text by Sergey Sokolsky.

The opening photo shows the legendary Narkomfin house as it was built in 1930, what it should be like and what it might become after the restoration, which recently began and will end in two years. In the meantime, the creation of architects Moses Ginzburg and his student Ignatius Milinis looks much worse.

But avant-garde architecture is something we can rightfully be proud of. In general, objectively speaking, architectural innovation is not our strongest side (unlike, say, literature or ballet). Almost all the best that was built in Russia, with the exception of rare and brief bursts like Bazhenov’s romanticism, was built either by foreign architects (starting from the 12th century cathedrals in Vladimir, the Moscow Kremlin and St. Basil’s Cathedral, ending with the palaces of St. Petersburg and its environs), or ours , but reproducing (sometimes brilliantly reproducing) the European tradition. And no matter how much we love, say, Moscow Art Nouveau, we still have to admit that it was more likely that he experienced either Franco-Belgian or Austrian influence, rather than vice versa - in France or Austria they built, focusing on or. And therefore it is difficult to imagine a foreigner who would specifically go to Moscow to watch modern art. But avant-garde - easily. And, in particular, the Narkomfin house. Because from the mid-20s until 1934, Russia experienced a short but turbulent period when it was we who dictated architectural fashion and were, one might say, at the forefront of the avant-garde. And the Narkomfin building is a wonderful example of this.

From the memoirs of the client’s daughter and partly co-author of the project - People’s Commissar of Finance Nikolai Aleksandrovich Milutin, Ekaterina Nikolaevna Milyutina: “Already entering the courtyard and seeing it [the house] from afar: white, on black columns, with blue ribbons of glass in which the sky was reflected, with flowers above the windows, with the brick-red “chimneys” on the roof, with its amazing proportions - I felt joy, uplift. The lower corridor (on the second floor) was always mysteriously dim with a row of doors leading to a balcony-gallery, along which it was so cool to run, play, hiding behind the columns, from which it was so tempting to jump into the snow with your heart freezing in horror.

The upper corridor, on the contrary, was bright and cheerful: white, with a row of black and white doors, it seemed sunny even on cloudy days. Two wide staircases connected the street and corridors. These stairs with wooden railings, platforms and benches, on which the most secret secrets were confided and terrible stories were told, led to the roof. The roof is a place for children to play with nooks and secret places, with a spiral staircase on which competitions were held: who can go up and down the fastest and the most times without getting dizzy. The stairs led to the solarium, where the height was breathtaking. Because the pipe railings were completely transparent, it seemed that they were not there, the wind would blow stronger, and you would fly down. ... It was visible from there very far - especially to the west (to Kuntsevo) and to the south (to the Novodevichy Convent). And in the morning and evening the Kremlin chimes could be heard.”

Home arrangement

People's Commissar of Finance Nikolai Milyutin, when starting the construction of a departmental house for his employees, formulated the terms of reference for the architects as follows: “The living cell should serve as an office for work and individual rest during the day, and as a bedroom at night. A person will spend about half of his life in this cell. This entails the requirement for special attention to issues of aesthetics and hygiene when equipping and painting residential cells. All the achievements of modern architecture and applied arts must be mobilized to create a healthy and joyful human life. As much light, air, cheerful joy, simplicity as possible. Wide corridors and staircases illuminated by direct light. Cross-ventilation and two-way illumination of all apartments without exception. It is unacceptable to construct any premises that are not illuminated by daylight.”

And the constructivist architects Moses Ginzburg and Ignatius Milinis found a very original planning solution that met the task. Actually, the most interesting thing in the Narkomfin house is not outside, but inside. And that's exactly the plan! Let's look at a residential cell of type F (by and large, this is, of course, an apartment, but it is very unusual, so it is better to adhere to the terminology of the avant-garde and call it what the creators called it). And before we talk about the deep socio-philosophical meaning of all this, we need to understand how the cell works. That is, before we understand why, let’s discuss how.

To get into a residential cell of type F, you need to enter the only entrance and go up to, relatively speaking, the second floor. “Conditionally” - because the number of storeys in the Narkomfin building is a complex issue. There are two common corridors, accessible from the stairs, and in this sense there are two floors. But there are five levels (and this is not counting the ground floor, formed by the walls that were completed much later, covering the empty space under the house, which initially did not stand on the ground at all, but rose above it on “legs”-pillars). And, strictly speaking, the second common corridor is on the fourth and a half floor. In any case, you have to climb there up nine flights of stairs (in Figure 1 there is a red zigzag). The level of cells of type F that interest us (and there are always a pair of them: top and bottom) in the diagram is indicated by intersecting green and red ovals (green is the top cell, red is the bottom). Blue indicates the level of type K cells. Just don’t panic, now we’ll gradually sort it all out. For now, just admire how it looks.

Both cells F, the lower and the upper, are entered from the same upper common corridor. On one side there are pillars and windows (what kind of pillars we’ll talk about later), on the other there is a wall, and in the wall there are doors, alternately black and white. The black one leads to the upper cell, and if opened, you will need to climb an internal staircase 1,125 m into the living area. A white door leads to the lower cell, and behind it there is an internal staircase leading 2.25 m down.

Different colors of doors are needed for color navigation, and before, until the walls themselves were painted white, and they were gray, this worked even better, now white on white is somewhat lost. Here it is, the common corridor in Figure 2 - indicated by a red oval. The green line is the internal staircase of the lower cell, colored pink (go down from the common corridor). The blue line is the internal staircase of the upper cell (go up from the common corridor). The deeper section of the stairs in the upper cell is shaded yellow.

Moreover, each cell consists of two rooms: a living area (marked with green and blue stars in Fig. 3) and a sleeping alcove (marked with green and blue triangles in Fig. 3). Thus, when you walk along a common corridor, across its entire width there is someone’s bedroom below you and someone’s bedroom above you. Entrance to the lower and upper cells from the common corridor in Fig. 3 is marked with green and blue arrows. As we can see, the upper cell is two-level, the sleeping alcove is located above the living area. But the bottom cell is single-level (and therefore not so interesting, although the functionality is exactly the same).

“Residential block”, “cell”, “sleeping alcove” and even the “bathroom” familiar to our modern ears (type F residential cells also have it) - all these are words from the vocabulary of the architectural avant-garde of the 20s. The photo shows a view from the living area to the stairs leading to the sleeping alcove. And at the bottom right in the same photo, through the open door, a common corridor located one level below is visible. A niche is visible even further to the right. There is just a bathroom in it, or rather, half of it is a toilet. The shower stall is another invention of the avant-garde and another word of it - exactly above it, on the upper level, behind the yellow wall, next to the alcove.

By the way, shower cabins (then just very small showers, about 1.5 by 1.5 meters, exactly the size of a tray on the floor) were invented specifically for the Narkomfin house and it was here that they were first used. Now it is difficult for us to be amazed by this circumstance. But try to look at it through the eyes of a person at the turn of the 20s-30s. In small, cheap apartments there were never any showers; people went to the bathhouse to wash, and only the inveterate bourgeoisie had bathtubs in their homes.

As for the ceiling height, in the living area it is quite large - 3.5 m, and in the common corridor, bedrooms and showers - 2.25 m. But these are auxiliary rooms. You're supposed to sleep in the bedroom, and you won't sleep standing up. You can save money on auxiliary premises and use them to carve out space for a corridor, on which you don’t need to spend extra square meters. The house is very narrow, only 10.5 m wide. Why this is important – we’ll talk about this a little later. But the high ceiling of the living area and the full-wall window create a feeling of spaciousness and large space, although the footage of the F-type residential cell is only 34 square meters. Smaller than the Khrushchev-era building, although in terms of perception it is more comfortable (not to mention the fact that the Narkomfin building was built 25 years before the Khrushchev-era buildings began to be developed).

Cell type F was designed for one person, maximum for a couple without children. But below the level - on the first (or should I say - one and a half?) floor of the Narkomfin building there are cells of type K - for families. The footage there is no less than 78 meters. And they are also two-level, and the ceiling height in the living area is 5 meters. The photo shows a view from the second level of the residential area of ​​the K-type cell of the Narkomfin building.

In Figure 4, the window of the residential area of ​​the K-type cell (there are eight of them in total) is highlighted with a green oval. And red and blue are the windows of paired upper and lower cells of type F (there are 16 of them at the top and bottom, that is, 32 in total).

But perhaps the most remarkable thing here is the glazing. Due to the large glass area, there is no feeling of enclosed space even in small rooms - the sky is always before your eyes. The shadow from the window frame in the evening light, falling on the floor, gives a wonderful Suprematist graphic. The room is lit from two sides: good insolation is an important point for the avant-garde. In addition, in 1930 tuberculosis had not yet been defeated. This means that through ventilation is very important.

And the sleeping alcove was clearly visible from the living area and vice versa. A very comfortable feeling of open space, in a small bedroom you don’t feel locked in. And, of course, the play of geometric shapes is wonderful - it’s practically Suprematism, practically Malevich. This was always emphasized by the coloring of the walls. Because if the house was designed in black and white on the façade and in the corridors (white walls and black pillars), then color appears in the cells. To develop a color scheme, architect Ginzburg invited a German specialist from the Bauhaus school. And he created two options for painting the walls: in warm colors for some apartments (yellow and ocher) and in cold colors (blue and gray) for others. Each wall, each ledge was painted differently, which enhanced the picturesque effect.

More precisely, the effect of Suprematist sculpture. Avant-garde architecture does not work like painting, but rather like sculpture - there is no one point from which it can be viewed. In classical architecture, houses are built along the red line; approach from the street and look at the facade. Avant-garde architecture must be viewed from movement, walked around from different sides - and then geometric forms will begin to play. For the avant-garde, the principle of the so-called architectural promenade is important. The same is true indoors - the avant-garde is very suited to two levels, you can look from above and below, and there will be a different effect.

And yet, the residential unit lacks something compared to the apartments we are used to. What, you ask? There is a bedroom, there is a bathroom, there is a living room. There is only no kitchen! In fact, there was a kitchen. A built-in kitchen element was hidden in the wall of the living area. The table moved forward if necessary. The kitchenette is small, of course, but the most necessary equipment there was.

Moreover, the small size of the kitchenette is not about saving space. After all, even in 78-meter type K cells, the kitchens are 5-meter long. In Figure 4 you can see that the rhythm of the large square windows of the two-height residential areas is broken up by small windows - these are the kitchens . The question is, why not make a larger kitchen at 78 meters? This was done absolutely deliberately, this is the most important point! To explain this, let's talk about what architectural avant-garde is in general.

Avant-garde: philosophy of architecture

Before the First World War, the most striking phenomenon in architecture was Art Nouveau. Modern architects were not just aesthetes, they were great innovators. Previously, the design principle was somehow reduced to a parallelepiped, decorated in one way or another in accordance with the current fashion. The parallelepiped is a city mansion. A parallelepiped and two symmetrical parallelepipeds on the sides - a house with risalits. Modernism, on the other hand, offers a complex spatial composition, a combination of asymmetrical volumes of different sizes of different shapes. In addition, the design is based on the principle from the inside out (first the internal space is designed, then, like a tree, it grows into rings of external walls). The house in Art Nouveau style was delivered turnkey, with ready-made furniture. Everything, including fittings and plumbing, was designed by the architect. Chic style! But the first World War killed the chic styles. Not to say that she also killed art as such. After the gas attacks, the world could not remain the same. They even name the exact date of the death of old art - 1915, when Malevich’s “Black Square” was written, which put a convincing end to it. However, it soon became clear that art is a tenacious thing. And only old, classical art was killed. Avant-garde is what replaced it. And for some time he pretended to be anti-art (it is now obvious to us that there is no “anti”, and the avant-garde is also art).

So, all over the world the pathos of the avant-garde is the denial of art. The German Bauhaus school states: architecture is a type of design. That is, it is no longer art, it is only about function and design. One of the geniuses of the avant-garde in architecture, Le Corbusier, puts it this way: “A house is a machine for living.” The photo shows a model of Le Corbusier’s living cell in his Esprit Nouveau pavilion at the 1925 Paris Exhibition of Decorative Arts.

The prototype was the artist's traditional Parisian studio - a two-story workshop with a mezzanine for sleeping. These were not uncommon in Parisian attics. But it never occurred to anyone to build an apartment building out of these. An illustration in the Esprit Nouveau magazine (the magazine was published by Le Corbusier himself) clearly shows the idea of ​​the cell as an element of assembling a house.

So the author of the idea of ​​residential cells is not the Soviet architects, the creators of the Narkomfin building, but Le Corbusier. Although it was Ginzburg and Milinis who managed to assemble the cells into a single body in the most optimal way. Le Corbusier is an excellent theorist; he formulated 5 principles of constructivist architecture, which everyone agreed with. But despite all his merits, it is impossible to say that Soviet architects trailed behind the brilliant Le Corbusier. Here at the same 1925 exhibition in Paris is the Soviet pavilion built by Konstantin Melnikov:

It was this that became the sensation of the exhibition, and not Le Corbusier’s living cell. The latter went unnoticed altogether - Le Corbusier had to wait 30 years before implementing his project in Europe. At the same time, having seen the Melnikovsky Pavilion, he got ready to go to Russia. Here is a project by another genius of the Soviet architectural avant-garde, Ivan Leonidov: the building of the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry.

Reminds me of Moscow City... The legacy of the avant-garde is also interesting because they are starting to build according to the designs of Soviet architects of the 20s only now - when it finally appeared technical feasibility realize all this. The building of the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry is beautiful. One problem - it should have been built on the site of our beloved GUM. “Urban planning surgery,” as Le Corbusier called it. Give free rein to the avant-garde artists - there would be little left of Moscow. Yes, in fact, Le Corbusier himself, when he arrived in Moscow, went to Kaganovich, the then chairman of the Moscow City Party Committee, and made a terrible noise, shouting: why aren’t you afraid to turn the world upside down, to destroy all the old foundations, but hold on to its ruins, historical buildings. Demolish everything to hell and rebuild it (however, Le Corbusier proposed doing the same thing in Paris, which is why he was sent away from Paris). Kaganovich accepted Solomon's solution: Don’t give Moscow to the European rebel for destruction, but let him build one thing. This is how the Tsentrosoyuz building on Myasnitskaya came into being, next to which there is now a monument to Le Corbusier. It’s a pity that a monument was erected to him, one of all the avant-garde architects. Not Melnikov, not Ladovsky, not Ginzburg...

Because while Le Corbusier was just getting ready to go to Moscow after the Paris Exhibition, Ginzburg’s workshop had already built the first house where the idea of ​​residential cells was realized - on Gogolevsky Boulevard (1927-1929) and then the Narkomfin house (1928-1930) . Because in the USSR in the 20s there was a demand for architectural avant-garde, but there was none in Europe. At that very exhibition of decorative arts in Paris, a style was presented that immediately became fashionable: Art Deco (that’s exactly what the name of the exhibition itself sounded like in French). It is interesting that throughout the world, Art Deco was ahead of the implementation of avant-garde ideas in architecture, only in our country everything turned out the other way around, and Art Deco became a transitional form between the avant-garde and Stalinist neoclassicism. In Art Deco, for example, all the first stations of the Moscow metro were built (Park Kultury, Kropotkinskaya, Airport, Mayakovskaya, and so on).

But in the 20s, Art Deco could not appear here. Unlike Paris, where after the war people wanted beauty, they wanted to rest their souls. There was no time to rest in the USSR. We were building a new society, we needed radically new art and radically new architecture. In our country, the era of the avant-garde coincided with the revolution. The pathos of the Russian avant-garde is not so much a negation, not so much a funeral of old art, but rather the creation of a new, unprecedented world.

That’s why the Russian avant-garde is the coolest. He did not hang in the airless space of pure search; he had reliable ground. The search for new forms in architecture went hand in hand with the search for new forms of life. It was not enough for the architect to build a house - he built a new society, created a new Soviet man. That's who had the ambitions of engineers of human souls!

No, of course, the avant-garde architects also had purely pragmatic considerations. After all, there is a housing crisis in Moscow. After the capital was moved to Moscow, a wave of newcomers poured here: this included the new bureaucracy and peasants fleeing collectivization. We needed housing. What kind of housing? Before the revolution, everything was clear: some huddled in barracks and barracks. Others who could afford it lived like Philip Philipovich in seven rooms. After the revolution, Filipp Filippovich was “densified” - this is how communal apartments appeared.

In these communal apartments, the first spontaneous communes appeared in the 1920s. It’s just that under the influence of the communist idea, people began to live by sharing. True, this initiative quickly faded away: too many domestic squabbles arose at once. But the architects decided that the communes did not take root because the premises were unsuitable. And if you come up with suitable premises, then...

This is where avant-garde artists take the stage with their incredible, revolutionary ideas new architecture and a new society, which should live according to the principle of commune. The idea of ​​socializing everyday life appears. Architect Ivan Nikolaev is building a communal house on what is now Ordzhonikidze Street - a dormitory for the textile institute.

The principle of architectural constructivism: first determine the function of the room, then design. This, however, came from Art Nouveau, where the house also “grew” from the inside out. And so Ivan Nikolaev is not building a building, but inventing a way of life for students. Sleeping cabins - 6 square meters for two. It is forbidden to stay in them during the day, it is forbidden to store personal belongings - and there is nowhere there. All life should take place in a social block. The daily routine is as follows: in the morning everyone got up at the signal, emerged from their cells and walked along a long corridor in pajamas to exercise, then to the showers and only then to the lockers where personal clothes are stored. They changed their clothes and everyone went to the dining room together. Need to wash? There is a public laundry. There is a kindergarten for children. All life is mechanized and socialized! Perhaps now the idea of ​​a kindergarten, a nursery and a laundry is no longer very striking. But we must understand that all this is an invention of the avant-garde era; nothing like this simply existed before. And avant-garde architects specifically thought about all this in order to free women from kitchen slavery, so that there would be universal equality and unity of citizens of the new country... In the 20s, Soviet sociologists, together with Soviet architects, seriously discussed whether it was necessary for children to know their mothers at all. There was no talk about dads - the fact that in the USSR the family would soon die out as an atavism - this was a practically resolved issue.

This act went well with the students. They were not averse to living in a commune and, in general, becoming material for a great social experiment. But when they tried to build similar communal houses for adults family people- nothing came of it. Soviet people refused to readjust to new way. They refused to eat in public canteens, spend most of the day in a public block, sunbathe in public solariums located on the roofs (perhaps due to the eternal slush, rain and snow - the climate in Moscow also turned out to be intractable to the bold communist experiment, just as and human psychology). These irresponsible people, by hook or by crook, brought some kind of primus, ficus and other petty-bourgeois nonsense into their living cells. And off we go...

So the creators of the Narkomfin House, intended for employees of the People's Commissariat of Finance - architect Ginzburg and his customer People's Commissar of Finance Nikolai Milyutin - were people, although also very creative and daring, but still wise. They took a step back. And the Narkomfin house is still not a commune house, but a so-called transitional house.

Returning to the Narkomfin house

Even the smallest living cells of the Narkomfin house are by no means a sleeping cabin; they are 34, not 6 meters. On the other hand, the principle that housing layout should dictate the way of life and forge the new Soviet man remained. Let's return to the layout and windows. The windows of all sleeping alcoves are located along one wall and face east. If the bedroom is small, and the windows face east, and it is impossible to place the bed so that the light does not fall on it, how long will you sleep? Moreover, curtains were excluded in such a fashionable avant-garde house. Well, there’s no point in lying around for Soviet people! We need to boost industry. In the case of the People's Commissariat of Finance - distribute the money. And the low ceiling in the sleeping alcoves comes in handy here. If you took a nap, don’t stay in the alcove, go to the living area. And in the living area there is a huge window, almost full glazing, facing west. In the evening after work you come - it’s light here, you can somehow useful activities surrender. Read, educate yourself. Well, in order for women to also educate themselves, and not hang around the stove, we need to create a kitchen in which the most that can be done is to heat something up. The house had a public dining room at the end of the upper corridor. And in the lower corridor there was a cafe. “Many ate in the cafe, and many came to the dining room with bowls and brought home a hot lunch,” recalls Ekaterina Milyutina. “So if you dined at your neighbors’ house, the food was exactly the same as at home.”

As in the communal houses, in the Narkomfin house it was planned to place a public canteen and premises for various types of joint leisure in the public building. True, in the end a kindergarten was located there, for which a separate building was never built, although it was planned.

From the memoirs of Ekaterina Milyutina: “A kindergarten was adjacent to the residential building. We walked there through the passage on the second floor, without leaving the house on the street. In the center of the kindergarten there was a large room - a hall, where the walls were four floors high - up to the roof, one wall (northern) was glass, the other (eastern) was decorated with a fresco, and along the western there was a winding overpass with railings, from where there was an entrance to small premises. There the children ate, slept, and walked on the flat roof, from which the surrounding courtyards and the sky were visible. It was fenced with a net so we wouldn't fall. In bad weather, all the children were in the large hall on the first floor, looking at the huge fresco, playing, singing, listening to music, watching performances.” Doesn't it amaze you? And if you consider that before there were no kindergartens at all, and it was all invented on the fly?

In general, a lot was provided for the convenience of a person who had just got out of the barracks. For example, the same laundry - although not exactly in the courtyard, but near the Garden Ring, it takes 3-4 minutes to walk to it. Otherwise, you didn’t have to leave the house at all. You could even breathe some air and take a walk without leaving your home. At the level of the lower corridor, the open terrace is intended specifically for walking (however, it was very difficult to force the residents to stop storing all sorts of rubbish there. The idea of ​​the avant-garde architects - to leave as little storage space as possible so that the new Soviet man would not be a slave to things - was once again met with bourgeois psychology). The second place to walk was the roof. Flat usable roof - essential element avant-garde architecture.

By the way, this is what a house in Marseille looks like, which was already well after the Second World War, built in the 50s by Le Corbusier, who finally tested the idea of ​​his cells. The house has the romantic name Housing Unit, but, as we already know, this is normal for the avant-garde.

And this is what the layout of this house looks like. Le Corbusier's composition is different, less economical, than Ginzburg's. As a result, the house is much wider. Common corridor in the middle. And it also provides public space - in the French style, shops. Agree, the avant-garde is more suited to the Soviet version with its social awareness and daring attempt to radically restructure life.

What is the Narkomfin house built of?

So why is the Narkomfin building in such a deplorable state? Deputy Mayor Marat Khusnulin claims that this is because the building materials of the avant-garde are straw, reeds and garbage. This is, of course, not true. Or rather, a half-truth.

Concrete in the late 20s in the USSR was significantly more expensive than brick. After all, there are still few concrete plants in the country. But concrete is in fashion because, unlike brick, it allows architects to experiment. The five principles of constructivism formulated by Le Corbusier (at least four of them) cannot be implemented without concrete:

1) frame structure, in which the facade does not function as load-bearing walls and can be designed in any way;

(In the Tsentrosoyuz building, built by Le Corbusier, as well as in the Narkomfin house, the frame is the pillars on which the house stands and to which the floors are attached. External walls from a structural point of view do not matter, they are just cladding).

2) open plan;

(If there are no load-bearing walls, then what’s stopping you from installing partitions inside as you like?)

3) continuous horizontal strip glazing;

(If the wall is load-bearing, how can it consist of solid glass? But if the outer wall is just sheathing, then why not).

4) the house must be raised above the ground on pillar supports (which, in fact, are the frame).

Those poor architects who were unable to knock out fashionable reinforced concrete for themselves could only camouflage their “orphan” brick under it.

The illusion of reinforced concrete was created not only by a generous layer of plaster, but also by continuous glazing - however, vertical and placed outside, beyond the load-bearing wall.

Well, the People's Commissariat of Finance had more money. True, they also had to save. That is why the house should be made as narrow as possible. And the concrete blocks used were not solid, but hollow. Which is even good for floors - communications fit perfectly inside. But it’s bad for walls, because they need thermal insulation. The cavities were filled with reeds and straw - these are compressed blocks of reeds and straw filled with gypsum. It is this insulation, you need to understand, that Khusnulin had in mind... As a result, the house turned out to be very warm. True, sound insulation is a problem. But we remember that the architects of the avant-garde did not want to isolate people particularly from each other, but, on the contrary, dreamed of socializing everyday life. The trouble is that reeds and straw absorb water too much, and the water destroys the concrete. Ginzburg foresaw something in this sense: narrow “balconies” were made under the windows, where grass was planted - its roots sucked moisture from the walls. Still, a concrete house requires constant maintenance: it needs to be plastered and painted from time to time.

In the hungry 20s, not all of the grandiose plans of the Narkomfin House were realized. For example, it was planned to make standard furniture specifically for the house - the great avant-garde architect El Lissitzky himself developed the project. These were multifunctional elements - like IKEA produces now. There wasn't enough money for this.

But all these shortcomings are minor compared to the grandiose event: in the Narkomfin house they managed to implement all five of Le Corbusier’s seemingly purely theoretical principles!

The frame (black pillars that run through the open gallery and common corridors) is there. There is continuous strip glazing, there is an open plan, there is a flat usable roof (Le Corbusier’s fifth principle). And the Narkomfin house was raised on poles into the air. The idea that human habitation should float and not be nailed to the ground has been realized!

Residents of the Narkomfin building

Such a fashionable house simply could not remain purely departmental. There are not too many residential cells in it anyway: 8 family and 32 for singles and a couple more double three-level cells at the ends... The RSFRS finances would clearly not be enough for all the workers of the People's Commissariat. And then, by hook or by crook, the residential cells were occupied by the new Soviet nomenklatura. People's Commissar of Justice of the USSR Krylenko, People's Commissar of Justice of the RSFSR Antonov-Ovchienko, Chairman of the Board of the State Bank Sokolov, Chairman of the State Planning Committee Karp, People's Commissar of Agriculture Lisitsyn, Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Sulimov, former People's Commissar of Health Semashko, artist with his wife, soloist of the Bolshoi Theater Insarova, chief surgeon Soviet army Vishnevsky, actress Bgan, etc. and so on. And, of course, the creators themselves: architect Moses Ginzburg and People's Commissar of Finance Nikolai Milyutin. From the memoirs of Milyutin’s daughter: “The house was our world - the whole company moved from one apartment to another. ... We often visited the Vishnevskys. The famous surgeon's wife taught us to play Scrabble and read us English children's books. But the most strong impression communication with the Deineka family made an impact on us. His wife Sima showed us his paintings, but what shocked us was not the paintings, but the car in which she was driving. The car was low, with an opening top and a bunch of buttons and levers. Usually she was kept in the garage, but if Sima needed to take something from the apartment or take it there, she would jump out of the car and, without taking off her helmet and huge glasses, would run into the house. We were already hanging around the car, looking at it, touching all the levers and buttons and honking the horn, feeling like absolute Americans.”

The apartment of the Milyutins themselves is probably the most interesting thing in the house. This was the first penthouse in the USSR. Initially, nothing like this was planned on the roof - only a solarium and a shaft for ventilation equipment. But when it turned out that funds for construction had been exhausted, and there was no money to purchase imported ventilation equipment, the booth was not needed. And Milyutin decided to use it, dividing it between a small hostel and his own apartment. He designed and paid for both himself. At the same time, if Milyutin, being a family man, had simply taken one of the “family” cells of type K, he would have gained significantly in footage. There, as we remember, 78 meters. And Milyutin’s entire penthouse is 50 meters away.

The second level was an L-shaped mezzanine in the form of a narrow gallery above the living room and a wide residential “wing” above the kitchen. Decorative plants hung beautifully from the gallery.

There was a special color scheme. From Ekaterina Milyutina’s book “Renaissance Man”: “Father spent hours and hours until he achieved a range that suited him. The dining room and gallery had an ultramarine ceiling with a lilac tint. At sunset, in good weather, the ceiling merged with the sky. Gray-blue and gray-green walls, almost invisible to the eye, expanded the space. This color scheme was so complex and rich that no one could repeat it. After the war, we managed to make repairs only because the paints mixed by my father, dried, ground into powder and hidden under the bathtub miraculously survived. The space in the apartment “flowed” from floor to floor, maintaining the symmetrical coloring of the walls. The southern and northern walls were grayish-bluish, the eastern and western walls were grayish-greenish. The exceptions were the grayish-greenish belt (separating the gallery from the dining room) and the two bedrooms located on the second floor. The bedrooms were painted in a checkerboard pattern: one had a blue ceiling and greyish walls; in another the ceiling is grayish and the walls are blue. The proportions of the rooms were such and the windows were made in such a way that no matter where you were, you always saw the sky.”

Milyutin also designed the furniture himself. For example, a swivel chair (an unprecedented innovation at that time), or an oak sideboard in the form of a hanging wall. It had a window, so food was served from the kitchen through the buffet. “Having been a carpenter in his youth, he [Milyutin] retained his love for working with wood throughout his life,” writes Ekaterina Milutina. — Made furniture for Dina Matveevna’s bedroom (his wife - SDH note), bookshelves to the gallery, a five-seater sailing yacht. ... An inventor who has a number of patents (for example, he invented a system for attaching a theater curtain, created a ventilation device used in the Narkomfin house, invented a device for enhancing shadow lighting and patented a double-sided door handle, which reduced the cost of mass construction" ...

Nikolai Alexandrovich truly was a man of the Renaissance. What was missing from his rich biography! It would be a shame not to tell a little about her. The son of a fish shop owner, he ran away to a ship as a boy and circumnavigated the world as a cabin boy. Learned carpentry. Then he entered the Free Polytechnic, Faculty of Architecture. There he headed the Bolshevik group of the Social Democratic circle. In 1909, leaving architecture, which he later regretted terribly, he entered the art school Stieglitz, specialty: sculptor, decorator, painter. He painted wonderful landscapes. Then he went on to study more - at Chernyaev’s General Education Courses, after which he became secretary of the board of the Health Insurance Fund at the Putilov plant. He prepared the October uprising in Petrograd and personally commanded the Red Guards storming the Winter Palace from under the headquarters arch (his memories of this event). Then he became the Minister of Finance (even though he only had experience in managing a health insurance fund). And a smart minister! He successfully carried out cash and budget reforms... And yet, architecture became the great love of Nikolai Alexandrovich’s life. He became the main ideologist of Soviet architecture, and his book “Sotsgorod” is a monument to the history of urban planning (for example, “The Linear City” by Le Corbusier was written under the great influence of Milyutin’s theory of the linear city). This book is still cited in urban planning textbooks.

Nikolai Alexandrovich’s ideas were completely in the spirit of the architectural avant-garde: “We will have to solve the problem of a new settlement of humanity by destroying the senseless centralization of industrial production for us, which will give birth to modern cities. Along with the destruction of the centralization (concentration) of production, the centralization of housing (city) will also disappear. ... The city and the village will extend their hands to each other. ... The planning of new settlements and the redevelopment of existing ones will come down to the establishment of main stripes - zones of the future settlement. ... These zones should be located in the following order:

1) territory of railway tracks (right-of-way);

2) zone of industrial and utility enterprises, warehouses, station buildings, as well as related scientific and technical

educational institutions;

3) green strip (protection zone) with a highway;

4) residential area, where in turn the following will be located:

a) a strip of public institutions (canteens, dispensaries, city council premises, etc.)

b) a strip of residential buildings;

c) children's area (i.e. nurseries, kindergartens, boarding schools)

5) a park area with recreational facilities, grounds for physical education, water pools, etc.

6) zone of garden and dairy farms (irrigation fields, farms and similar agricultural enterprises).

Meteorologists must answer where and how to build... in order to create a healthy, sunny life for people. Let's say we have chosen a more or less favorable place and are going to build a city. But the question is, when we build it, won’t something change there? For example, the creation of a lake 30-40 km away will not change the climate of the area, or the construction of the Magnitogorsk plant will not affect insolation and air humidity (fog) and even the direction of the wind and temperature conditions. If science can provide answers to these questions, then we need to know them. ...

If the green zones are connected, if they close together, they mutually suck air and ionize it. If this is not the case, their role decreases, 9/10 of the value of this zone disappears. This does not mean at all that it is necessary to organize a special system of parks, but the neighborhood greenery should flow in a continuous stream and this must be emphasized in the plan. Thanks to the change in temperature on the stones and greenery, a certain air flow is obtained and thus the areas are ventilated, which gives extremely beneficial results. ...

A new way of life must be born as a natural consequence new organization labor and housing, as a result of the good organization of institutions for the socialized service of the everyday needs of the population.”

This wonderful book suffered a sad fate. The fact is that Nikolai Alexandrovich always stood up for some persecuted people. And persecuted from the first years Soviet power there were quite a few... It was because of this, realizing that all this intercession would not end well, that Milyutin’s first wife left him. But he, who stormed the Winter Palace, felt in his right and refused to understand that times had changed. So Nikolai Aleksandrovich dedicated his “Sotsgorod” to a friend over whom clouds hung - a member of the Central Committee and the Politburo Smirnov, who opposed the policy of dispossession, and even had the imprudence to say: “And how is it that in such a large country there is not a person who could remove Stalin? In 1933, Smirnov was removed from the Central Committee and removed from business (he would soon be arrested and then shot). And a book dedicated to him - “Sotsgorod” - has just seen the light of day. And now it is already being removed from libraries and stores. It’s good that someone managed to take the book out of the USSR - so that at least “Sotsgorod” was preserved as a bibliographic rarity.

Milyutin himself is being removed from some positions and demoted from others. He's about to get arrested. “For several years, Nikolai Alexandrovich has been sleeping with a pistol under his pillow, declaring “I won’t be given up alive,” recalls Ekaterina Milyutina. — From our apartment there are three exits to the roof. At the dacha, he lived in a tent with a tunnel to the street, the role of the dog was played by the she-wolf Mara, who had raised him and was endlessly devoted, and who would not let anyone in unnoticed. In one year, Milyutin has aged twice as old.”

At the same time, since he now has plenty of free time, he is fulfilling an old dream - he is graduating from the Moscow Architectural Institute as an external student. At the same time, he works on the construction of the Palace of Soviets as a deputy. Chief architect and head of the design workshop. And when the war begins, he tries to come up with a new line of activity: the rehabilitation of severely disabled people. They need to be retrained for those specialties that are within their capabilities. Get a job. Create colonies for them. Milyutin, however, did the same thing in the Civil Code - and then Lenin supported his initiative. Now Milyutin’s letter to the Soviet government remains unanswered. He, however, soon falls ill and dies almost immediately. Less than 53 years old. His second wife Dina Matveevna recalls the funeral: “It was a cold autumn day in 1942 during the most difficult time of the war. Many Muscovites were still evacuated, and it was difficult to expect that many people would gather for the funeral. Suddenly appeared at the Novodevichy cemetery large group people with flowers and wreaths. These were representatives of the disabled people’s cooperation.” In general, the customer of the Narkomfin house, Nikolai Milyutin, was an interesting person...

As for the fate of the house, after the war it began to fall into disrepair. From the memoirs of Ekaterina Milyutina: “Because of the housing crisis that came after the war, the first floor was built up, even basements were dug, which contradicted the very idea of ​​​​light, hygienic, ventilated and illuminated housing on both sides. Apartments for singles were occupied by families, family apartments were turned into communal apartments. The canteen serving the residents of the house ceased to exist. Instead, on the fifth floor they made a communal kitchen with rows of stoves and troughs. The kindergarten was closed, the communal building was turned into a printing house. The laundry was preserved, but it gradually ceased to serve residents. In the end, the house was handed over to the housing office, painted with unimaginable yellow paint, and repairs stopped.”

That's why the house looks bad. Not because the materials are bad, but because they weren’t repaired... Now all hope is for restoration. The outer walls are unlikely to be saved, but we remember that this is only cladding. The frame is in good condition. The cells inside can also be put in order. Enthusiasts took up the matter, in particular the grandson of Moses Ginzburg, architect Alexey Vladimirovich Ginzburg. The models in the photo illustrate his restoration project. Well, let's wait! Maybe it is this masterpiece of the era of constructivism that will be saved, unlike many others...

Irina Strelnikova #A Completely Different City tour of Moscow

P.S. The era of the avant-garde in architecture ended abruptly and overnight - in 1934. However, as in cinema, and in music, and in literature. Each type of art had its own “nail in the coffin of the avant-garde” (for example, for cinema it was the film “Chapaev”). For Soviet architecture, such a highlight was the house of the architect Zholtovsky on Mokhovaya. This house, very similar to the Loggia Del Capitani by the 16th century architect Andrea Palladio, was, of course, a throwback in the history of architecture. But it was much more in line with Stalin’s tastes and the new ambitions of the Soviet empire. And since then it became possible to build only this way: with columns, capitals, arches, classical or empire decor... As a transitional option - art deco. The vanguard was killed on takeoff. But still, amazingly much was built in such a short time. And amazingly innovative. Actually, we now live according to the developments of the avant-garde, although we do not always realize it.

P.P.S. And here it’s not bad documentary about the Narkomfin house - in the video you can clearly see how everything works.

It's hard to believe that this preserved corner of old Moscow is located on the Garden Ring. All these houses belonged to the famous singer F.I. Shalyapin. I talked about the house in which he lived in the previous part; he rented out the rest of the houses.

House No. 25-27с7- outbuilding of the 19th century estate, now located here Art Gallery house-museum of F.I. Chaliapin.

End view.

House No. 25-27с8.

House No. 25-27с10- this museum also included a mansion at No. 27. A one-story wooden house on a stone foundation with mezzanines and a mezzanine, covered with iron, in 1829 belonged to Lieutenant Gubarev, and in 1835 to retired Lieutenant K.A. Tersky. A friend of Pushkin lived here Stepan Petrovich Zhikharev, official of the Collegium of Foreign Affairs, in 1823 - 1827 - Moscow provincial prosecutor. Stepan Petrovich knew Pushkin from Arzamas: Zhikharev was one of the founders of this literary society. At the beginning of November 1826 I.P. Bibikov reported to Benckendorf that the house of prosecutor Zhikharev was “most often visited” by Pushkin and that conversations there “revolved, for the most part, on literature.”

If you look on the Internet, you can come across the following phrase: “At the beginning of the 20th century, the house belonged to the wealthy merchant Alexander Nesterovich Ivanov.” This is true, but not quite until 1911 - 1912. the mansion belonged to Nikolai Pavlovich Rogozhin, and in 1913 it passed to his heirs, who probably sold the house to Ivanov. Why is this important, the fact is that it was the merchant Rogozhin Nikolay Ryabushinsky rented a house for the editorial office of his magazine "Golden Fleece" ().

A monument to F.I. was erected in the park nearby in 2003. Shalyapin. Sculptov V.M. Tserkovnikov.

The sculpture of the monument depicts the singer depicted in the famous painting by Ilya Repin. In this sculptural composition, Chaliapin sits, leaning on a log. It is symbolic that it was torn out at the root and chopped off at the top. Monuments in the form of trees with chopped branches are typical for the tombstones of Polish cemeteries - this is a symbol of eternal peace and eternal memory. A tree uprooted indicates that, despite emigration, the singer’s roots remained in native land. In the sculptural composition, Chaliapin looks inspired and thoughtful. The singer sits as if listening to the nightingale trills in the spring garden. Live music from nature is the greatest source of creative inspiration!
Generally sculptural composition ambiguous. Popularly, this sculpture received the unenviable name: “alkanaft in search of the fifth point.”
Personally, I like the sculpture, I think it’s in place, if we also take into account that in the time of Fyodor Ivanovich, in front of him was not the Garden Ring, but Novinsky Boulevard, and behind him was the so-called. "Chaliapin's garden"
This is how Boris Marcus remembers about this garden in his book: " In Chaliapin's garden itself, apple trees grew earlier. But now there is no trace of them - they were cut down or something. And they grew at the very end of the garden, closer to Konyushkovskaya Street. There is now a wasteland and only isolated trees. In general, the garden is terribly neglected. No one seems to be caring for him. But for us, for our games, none of this is a hindrance. The main thing is not to get kicked out.
Later, around 1927-28, large construction began in the garden. And a huge house grew. Long on legs, with an extension facing forward and connected to the house itself by a glazed passage at second floor level. The windows of the new house were in the new fashion, like continuous long ribbons. But the extension was almost without windows. Much has been written about this house as “the house of a new way of life.”
House No. 25k1- house-commune of Narkomfin. This is one of the most famous houses of the Russian avant-garde, built by architects M. Ya. Ginzburg, I. F. Milinis in 1929 - 1930.

Over the years of the house’s existence, a huge number of articles have been written about it, it is also written about in all textbooks on the history of Soviet architecture, so I will write only about the most important, interesting and sad.
The house was conceived as a “communal” house for 50 families - 200 people. The territory of two gardens of city estates was allocated for its construction (while the estates themselves were preserved along the red line of Novinsky Boulevard). The complex was supposed to include 4 buildings: a residential building, a communal center consisting of a dining room, a gym and a reading room, a children's building - a nursery and a kindergarten, a service building - a laundry and a drying room. As a result, due to lack of funding, the children's building was not built, and the house itself was built from cheap materials, due to which the house is now being destroyed.
Almost all apartments in the building are two-tier. There were kitchens only in 3-room apartments, and even then they were very small, because... it was supposed to eat in a public canteen. Not all apartments had bathtubs either; in small apartments they were replaced with showers.
They write that the residents of the house at one time were academician and physiologist L.A. Orbeli ( I’ll clarify: I lived in building 25, the building is not specified) and People's Artist of the USSR A.A. Deineka (I’ll clarify: I lived in building 25b, now there is no such numbering, so it’s not clear what building this is).
But for the customer of the house, Moses Ginzburg designed housing of increased comfort.
On the roof of the house there are 2 penthouses, in which two people's commissars settled: finance - Nikolai Alexandrovich Milyutin, and healthcare - Nikolai Alexandrovich Semashko(see link), but the resident of this house who sent me a comment ( see comment. below) writes that Semashko did not live in this house ( however, the encyclopedia “Faces of Moscow” indicates that Semashko still lived in this house, but since 1930 he has had a different address, i.e. it turns out, given the year the building was built, that he lived here only for a few months).
This is what these penthouses look like now.

There are makeshift structures on the windows, which make the house fall apart even more.

Ginsburg originally built the house on legs at a height of 2.5 meters to preserve the garden, but they were built on in the late 1980s.
View of the house from the end with the transition to the public building: the dining room and gym.

Public building.

In 1987, the residential building and public buildings were placed under state protection as architectural monuments of regional significance. Despite this, the house continues to deteriorate and has burned several times.

View of the public building with reverse side.

There were long discussions about what to do with the house, and finally, in 2008, a project was adopted to restore the house while preserving the original building materials and interior details. In the future there was to be a hotel here. In the main 8-story building, where Ginzburg designed apartments of different types for different families, there should be hotel rooms, a reception, a hall, a wardrobe, a shop, a lobby bar. The area of ​​the 4-storey communal building will accommodate a meeting room, a business center, a conference room, a foyer, a restaurant, and all of this is naturally of an intimate scale, since the exclusive “avant-garde attraction” is designed for a very small number of guests. Model of the future hotel.

They promised to complete the restoration by 2011, so that in a few years foreign fans of the avant-garde, who previously came here to look at the dilapidated building with layers of fallen plaster, could live here and, as they say, experience all the delights of socialist life.
However, 2011 is over, my photos were taken at the very end of 2011, but things are still there. The project remained only on paper. From a world-famous monument, the Moscow house of Narkomfin is rapidly turning into a national disgrace.
House No. 25k10- stands perpendicular to Novinsky Boulevard. In the magazine "Moscow Construction" for 1935 in No. 1 it is written about it - "The residential building of the employees of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR. Architect S. Leontovich. It was built with significant changes during the construction process. Construction of the house began with a four-story one-section building, and ended in the form "A seven-story, three-section building. According to the author of the review, D. Aranovich, it is one of the best architectural residential buildings of 1934."

A pathologist and academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences lived in this house from 1934 to 1961. Soviet psychologist, professor Platonov K.K. recalls how he was here visiting Alexei Dmitrievich - “I remember well one of the evenings with the Speranskys in their apartment on Tchaikovsky Street (next to the current American Embassy). The comfort of this apartment, in harmony with the elegance of its owner, did not strike me. He cannot be "It was impossible to imagine otherwise! But the presence of two pianos in it - a concert one and a cabinet one - in the adjacent rooms shocked me, who was then living in a semi-basement with a swamp under the floor!"

Continuation.

Other streets of Moscow and their attractions. Table of contents.

Modern apartment buildings, Stalinist high-rise buildings, communal houses and high-rise buildings of the 1970s are not just residential buildings, but real city symbols.
In the “” section, The Village talks about the most famous and unusual houses of the two capitals and their inhabitants. In the new issue we learned how life works in, perhaps, the most important Russian monument constructivism - the house of Narkomfin.

The Narkomfin House is one of the main Moscow buildings in the spirit of constructivism, which, according to the plans of its creators, was supposed to help rebuild the life of Soviet people in an exemplary communist manner. Architects Moses Ginzburg and Ignatius Milinis wanted Narkomfin to become not a communal house in the traditional sense, but a building of the so-called transitional type.

The experimental housing was intended for officials of the People's Commissariat of Finance of the RSFSR and their relatives. The customer for the construction was Minister of Finance Nikolai Milyutin, a great lover of the avant-garde and unusual architecture. This is also where his legendary penthouse was located, the layout of which he designed himself. It was precisely because of the abundance of officials that the Narkomfin House largely repeated the fate of the House on the Embankment.
During the period of Stalinist repressions, several officials living there were shot.

House of the People's Commissariat of Finance of the RSFSR

Address: Novinsky Boulevard, 25, building 1

Architects: Moses Ginzburg, Ignatius Milinis

Construction: 1930

Height: 6 floors

The Narkomfin house consisted of three parts: a residential building, a communal block (with a dining room, a library, a gym) and a service yard with a laundry room and a garage. Previously, the building had five floors, the house stood on columns, but after a few years they were surrounded by walls, thus creating an additional floor.

The top three floors were filled with two-story “F” cell apartments with an area of ​​37 square meters, designed to accommodate one or two people. On their first floor there was a living room, and on the second floor there was a bedroom and a bathroom.

Cells of the “2F” type (a double version of the “F” apartments) were placed at both ends of the house. In addition, the house has eight apartments with an area of ​​90 square meters, which were conceived as “K” type cells - with a corridor, kitchenette and living room on the first floor, as well as two bedrooms and a bathroom on the second. In addition, several rooms without an individual bathroom and toilet were equipped under the roof - in the best traditions of hostels. And sun loungers were placed on the roof so that residents could sunbathe.

All apartments in the Narkomfin building are two-story, and their windows face both west and east. As a result, all the bedrooms in it face the sunrise, and the living rooms face the opposite direction, towards the sunset.

The Narkomfin house also preserves wide corridors. It was assumed that in them residents would be able to communicate with each other. The household block, or communal building, looks like a closed four-story square connected to the living quarters by a ground bridge at the second floor level.

In the first years of its existence, the Narkomfin house housed a dining room, a library and a laundry room. But after the residents moved in, it quickly became clear that the Soviet nomenclature elite was not ready to live according to Ginzburg’s utopian precepts. The walking area was closed with walls, and the household unit stopped working in the mid-1930s. Residents sought to cook and eat in their cells, and even if they used the dining room, they preferred to take the food with them. And the gallery running along the lower floor was quickly equipped with storage rooms. As a result, the progressive utility block was first converted into a printing house, and later adapted into a design bureau.

Pavel Gnilorybov, historian, Moscow specialist,
project manager "Mospeshkom"

The “Executions in Moscow” database contains 19 records about the owners of apartments in the Narkomfin building who died during the years of Stalin’s terror. And this despite the fact that only those who were executed are included in the database, but those taken to the GULAG are not.

This monument of constructivism was inhabited almost at the same time as the House on the Embankment, and there were about 300 people executed there for 505 apartments! Sometimes people were simply taken in batches. Soviet architecture is always two-faced: delighting from the front façade with discussions about a new way of life and a free life, it shows its sad side when you realize that half of the tenants lie in the Donskoy cemetery, and half in the execution range in Kommunarka. The case, I note, is exceptional, because housing was given to representatives of the party or production elite. In neighboring “peaceful” houses, the specific “density” of repression is less.

The situation with the house noticeably worsened after the Stalinist repressions of 1937–1939 and the beginning of the housing crisis. Large three-room apartments were turned into communal apartments, the facade of the building was painted yellow instead of the avant-garde white and red color. Since then, the Narkomfin house was transferred to the housing office and it stopped functioning as an experimental building, and therefore gradually lost its original appearance.

Until 2016, the Narkomfin building was planned to be reconstructed several times - international experts have long recognized that the monument of constructivism is in critical condition. But due to problems with the owners, none of these projects were ever implemented. At the moment, the reconstruction was finally approved, so the work, according to the plan, will begin in the spring of 2017. The restoration project is led by Alexei Ginzburg, grandson of the architect Moisei Ginzburg.

Alexey Ginzburg, professor at the International Academy of Architecture

My father tried to restore this house back in the 80s, and I, being a student at the architectural institute at that time, helped him. So the restoration of the Narkomfin house became for me a debt of memory not only in relation to my grandfather, but also in relation to my father.

The restoration of the Narkomfin house is practically a scientific project. His goal is to accurately restore the original appearance of the building.

In the post-war period, the house was painted over and greatly changed, so we are carrying out archaeological work - in parallel with the design, we are making soundings and examining the original layers of paint. We have already managed to find the original color of the house - a warm milky shade - and we will try to get as close to it as possible during the restoration.

One of the tasks that I set for myself was to completely restore the original colors of the interior of the cells. Ginzburg conceived several color schemes together with Bauhaus professor Hinnerk Scheper, and used them in different cells different colors. I wanted to do a color restoration in each apartment, as well as restore the original layout of the engineering equipment - so that future residents of the house could not change anything, but only put in their own furniture. Most of all, I am afraid of the monstrous renovations that have been done here in the last five or six years - everything was redone in the most barbaric way.

Initially, the Narkomfin building stood on columns, thus uniting the spaces in front and behind the building. So we will be lowering the ground level to historic and removing walls on the first floor to restore the appearance of the 1930 structure. In addition, we will dismantle the ugly superstructure over the communal building in order to restore the roof terrace that was originally there.

At first it seemed that restoring a house was a fairly simple task, but gradually difficulties began to arise. Firstly, this is not a commercial story, so finding investors was not easy. Also for a long time the house had several owners, and only in the summer of 2016 it almost completely passed into one hand, which simplified the approval process. Well, the most important thing is the attitude of the authorities towards the era of the avant-garde. The previous Moscow mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, considered himself his ideological opponent. He never tired of repeating that this is a harmful and erroneous architecture. Many investors who were ready to invest in restoration left because they knew how the city authorities treated the project.

However, for recent years six the situation became different. I see how the attitude of Muscovites towards the avant-garde of the era of the 20s of the last century has changed. More and more people are interested in constructivist architecture. For 20 years I have been bringing architects and students to the Narkomfin house - mostly foreigners who ask to see the house. But recently, many enthusiasts have appeared who organize excursions themselves. This is a real breakthrough! The era of the avant-garde, in my opinion, is Russia’s main contribution to world artistic culture, when we did not follow fashion, but set it.

It is difficult to determine the exact timing of the restoration - maybe it will take a year and a half, or maybe all three, because we are faced with complex technical tasks. We will probably restore the house in two parts so that a certain number of residents can stay here. But in general, the restoration will begin with the communal building, which stands empty and does not disturb anyone.

The most important thing is the attitude of the authorities towards the avant-garde era. The previous Moscow mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, considered himself his ideological opponent. He never tired of repeating that this is a harmful and erroneous architecture

About the lecture hall and Ginzburg's color schemes

Quite recently, we rented one of the cells in the Narkomfin building in order to equip a lecture hall for the “Moscow through the eyes of an engineer” project. Renting a cell costs 50 thousand rubles per month. The space was in a rather deplorable state, but we still managed to make renovations in the spirit of the color schemes of Moses Ginzburg .

This is one of the interesting features that Ginzburg and his comrades came up with - a study of the influence of color on a person’s perception of living space.

The German Bauhaus school also participated in the project, together with which Russian avant-garde artists discovered that cold colors visually expand space, while warm colors, on the contrary, narrow it. As a result, the Narkomfin house was decorated in a mixed color scheme.

In cells of type “F”, to which our lecture hall belongs, there is a fairly small bedroom with a low ceiling and at the same time a spacious living room with three-meter ceilings. So we painted the bedroom in cool colors and the living room in warm colors.

Avant-garde artists also believed that the ceiling should be a richer shade than the walls. Accordingly, we tried to recreate these color schemes, but, probably, it turned out not so authentic. We assume that Ginzburg meant more pastel shades. However, due to the fact that Narkomfin will begin to reconstruct in six months, they decided not to bother too much. But the connection with the era in the design is still obvious, since in the 20s Suprematism with its bright spots of color had just died down.

About the upcoming reconstruction

We are talking with Alexei Ginzburg, the grandson of Moisei Ginzburg, who is leading the reconstruction project of the Narkomfin building. He said that they would probe the building in order, firstly, to get to the communication systems, and secondly, to find out what colors the walls were originally painted.

A really strange thing happened with the reconstruction of the Narkomfin building. After all, in an interview with Afisha-Gorod a couple of years ago, the former owner of the building, Alexander Senatorov, said that he would do whatever he wanted with it, and was not going to coordinate anything with the Moscow City Heritage. Fortunately, the house has been passed on to other people, so restoration can now begin. There were reconstruction projects before - they were just lying around just in case, but now there is an opportunity to seriously invest money in this. By the way, restoration of the building will begin in the spring; the stated period for remodeling the house is three years.

On the one hand, I want this work to begin and proceed faster. But on the other hand, of course, it’s a pity - after all, we will not only be left without a lecture hall, but also will not be able to give excursions. By the way, they are very popular now; we conduct five to six excursions a week. Upon completion of the work, we plan to rent the cell for a long time and equip it with something like a museum or cultural center.

Cell type "F"

37 square meters

Ceiling height in the bedroom

2.3 meters

Ceiling height in the living room

3.6 meters

About the party

The social content of Narkomfin has changed a lot in just a year and a half. Just recently it was a very creative get-together, but later the standard dynamics of gentrification of the loft space took hold. First, artists and who knows who move in, then a more or less institutionalized art space emerges. As a result, rental rates rise, turnover begins, and eventually everyone takes over the offices, making the place quite boring. Of the last creative giants, the poster artist and designer who made T-shirts for the Chaikhona employees still sits here. The studio of the artist Anton Totibadze also remains.

The process of renovating the house started two or three years ago. A strong impetus for change came from the launch of yoga classes on the roof - before that the house was considered closed. Then on the fourth floor there was a cafe with very tasty falafel, but, unfortunately, it closed. The editorial office of Colta magazine was also located in Narkomfin, and employees of the N+1 website still sit here.

About the history of the house

The Narkomfin House is a real architectural puzzle, a transitional building, something between an ordinary apartment building and a communal house. All local units were provided with a custom kitchen element with a built-in stove and sink. And at the same time, in the household block there is a common garage, a laundry room and a drying room for clothes.

Unfortunately, most of the avant-garde houses were painted over with faceless ocher during planned renovations in the 70s of the twentieth century. Before this, Narkomfin had an interesting color scheme on the outside - white columns and black window frames, which gave the impression that the house was hanging in the air.

There is another important idea that Ginzburg managed to implement: he put the house on legs so as not to tear single space garden belonging to Chaliapin's estate, on whose territory it was located. Ginsburg wanted the house not to dominate environment, but was organically integrated into it. The architect took care of everything - color, texture, even designed the handles for the windows himself. In the corridor, which was perceived as a public space, Ginzburg wanted to place tables so that neighbors could communicate - such a step towards communal life.

The architects of the Russian avant-garde were greatly influenced by Le Corbusier with his principles of new architecture, which were all implemented here. On the other hand, our architects had a reciprocal influence on Le Corbusier. When he came here in 1929 to build the Tsentrosoyuz building, he met Ginzburg and perhaps even envied him. After all, Ginzburg managed to implement all the principles of new architecture in one house before Le Corbusier. Narkomfin is a huge social experiment that Le Corbusier could only dream of. This architecture belongs to the international style, because the speed of movement by that time erased regional differences.

On the influence of Finance Minister Nikolai Milyutin on the House of Narkomfin

It is important to understand that Ginzburg was terribly lucky with his customer - Nikolai Milyutin, the then Minister of Finance of the RSFSR. Milyutin was an amateur architect, was interested in architecture, urban planning, and also wrote a book in which he proposed an interesting idea of ​​\u200b\u200bsettlement of people in cities.

Milyutin wanted to create ribbon cities, formed according to the following principle: first there is a strip of factories, then a strip of sanitary forest strip, then a highway, followed by an even row of residential buildings, then a line of public spaces, and finally recreational buildings. According to his idea, the cities were supposed to stretch out into huge lines that would merge over time. An interesting but utopian idea that is known even abroad.

It was very cool that such a utopian and visionary as Milyutin found himself in a major government post during the life and work of Moses Ginzburg. If the Minister of Finance had been another person, instead of the Narkomfin building we could have seen another boring Stalinist building. Milyutin, by the way, also lived in Narkomfin - in a cell that he himself designed. For some time there was a hookah bar there and we took excursions there, but after that the place was occupied by an office.

When we lead excursions, we try to concentrate on three heroes: Moses Ginzburg, Minister Nikolai Milyutin and Sergei Prokhorov, the popularizer of reinforced concrete. The latter, in the 20s, managed to create his own franchise for the production of reinforced concrete structures with 76 branches throughout the USSR. He came up with frames that, from an economic point of view, made it possible to make houses very cheap, and thus was 80 years ahead of his time.

About other projects of Ginzburg

There were six projects similar to the Narkomfin house in the USSR. Two of them have not survived to this day - for example, only the public building remains from the dormitory of the cotton factory in Rostokin.

Two more Ginzburg houses are located in Saratov and Yekaterinburg. In general, Saratov has a very interesting case, because the local transitional type house is still residential. Some families have lived there for generations. Of course, the example of the house on Gogolevsky Boulevard in Moscow is important, but it was taken over by hipsters and made fashionable renovations in the cells, so there can be no talk of any authenticity. Ginzburg anticipated the idea of ​​a studio apartment, which had never been thought of before. All the hipsters who come to Narkomfin for the first time immediately get excited about the idea of ​​moving here.

Moses Ginzburg built a lot in the Urals - residential towns for Uralvagonzavod, houses in Nizhny Tagil. In general, his team served the great construction projects of the first five-year plans. It is also worth remembering the Gosstrakh house on Malaya Bronnaya. But there were still many projects that were never brought to life. I remember the idea of ​​​​building a Synthetic Theater in Yekaterinburg, comparable in size only to the opera building in Novosibirsk. But the project never saw the light of day.

Anna, architect

About the move

My husband and I teach at the Moscow Architectural Institute, and I also work in an architectural bureau and collaborate with Alexei Ginzburg, who is working on a project for the reconstruction of the Narkomfin building. He is very cool, loves everything modern and new, so we get along well.

We are part of a large group of architects who love unusual places for housing - for example, houses on Rozhdestvensky Boulevard or Novy Arbat. Our friends tried to get into the Narkomfin house five years ago, then it was quite difficult. But one day our friend finally took the building by storm, and everyone else followed her. As a result, four years ago our friends occupied several cells in this house, and we constantly hung out with them.

But a couple of years ago, everyone’s rent was raised, and many of our friends moved out. And when almost all the cells were free, we found out that we could move in for adequate money. Rent here fluctuates around 50–65 thousand per month.

At first we looked closely at the lower cells, which are more spacious, but the upper ones turned out to have a nicer view from the window, and the condition of the room was more adequate for further renovation. When we moved into the cell two and a half years ago, there were only smooth walls. It's good that the roof didn't leak. Our cell is the only one on the floor that does not have tall trees growing in front of the window, so the Garden Ring and all the surrounding houses are clearly visible.

Here, of course, there is complete trash with all communications - there is no normal ventilation, it is not clear where the water flows. Once a faucet burst in the house and we had to look for a very long time for the apartment in which this happened. The pipe system is very confusing, and the results of the amateur activities of the previous residents negatively affect the situation. They also say that the sound insulation here is poor, but we don’t have neighbors next door, so it’s hard to say for sure. Sometimes you wake up in the morning and realize that there is no water because someone has a leak. In two and a half years of living here, we’ve had this happen three times.

Overall, we think everything is cool here, but maybe that’s because we did some cool renovations here.

Rumors about reconstruction have been circulating for a long time, and it is clear that after it it will be much more difficult to get here.

Cell type "K"

80 square meters

Ceiling height in the bedroom

2.3 meters

Ceiling height in the living room

4.6 meters

About changes in the house

We are so-so commune residents because we leave early in the morning and arrive late in the evening. And perhaps we miss local parties. There used to be more architectural studios here, which gradually disappeared. The falafel shop also closed. There is a clear feeling that there are fewer public and creative initiatives. Of the neighbors, we communicate only with our friends, and even then we see each other once every six months.

We have a car, and parking it here is very convenient, because there is a closed area and security guards with whom we communicate well. By the way, this was one of the decisive factors when we chose an apartment. Plus the house is very close to the metro, and the ride to work is only two stops.

The Krasnaya Presnya area is cool in itself, and we have long dreamed of living with a view of the river. The cell has a convenient layout; you can stand on the ladder and look out of the window in both directions at the same time. And at sunset, the apartment has beautiful shadows from windows and trees - this is a pleasant plus.

In the summer we often go out to the roof where yoga classes take place. I would also really like to get into the penthouse of Commissioner Milyutin. I used to want to join the excursion, but there were always other things to do. And on the second floor there is an exhibition with archival photographs of the house, which was carried out by the guys involved in the reconstruction.

The common space in the house has now been slightly renovated. When we first moved here, the corridors were in terrible condition, the house resembled a typical Berlin squat - dilapidated and dirty. My family were shocked when they saw him. They seemed to understand that constructivism was cool, but they constantly asked if the house would fall apart, if a piece of the facade or slab would fall on me.

Even earlier, all residents had trashy doors different colors, but after the renovation, the corridors were decorated in strict black and white, so now there is no shame in inviting mom to visit. And all our friends, when they find out that we live in the Narkomfin building, immediately ask to visit and are surprised that it’s even possible to rent an apartment here.

Cell type "2F"

70 square meters

Ceiling heights in the front and dining rooms

2.3 meters

Ceiling height in rooms