Krivoarbatskiy pereulok 10
Subway: Smolenskaya
The Melnikov house or the house-workshop of the architect Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov was designed and built by the famous architect for himself and his family in 1927 - 1929. This cozy single-family house has also become a workshop for the artist.
Melnikov house is a unique building, almost hidden
by office buildings. It was designed by Konstantin Melnikov
(1890-1974), one of the largest constructivist architects in Russia,
in 1927. It is built of brick covered with white plaster. The
Melnikov house consists of two interlocking cylinders. They are
dotted with rows of hexagonal Windows, creating a curious honeycomb
effect. A spiral staircase rises through the space where the
cylinders overlap, connecting the light, living spaces. Melnikov's
house was built for his family, but it was also intended to be a
prototype for the future development of similar projects. However,
his career was overshadowed when Stalin encouraged architects to
adopt a new monumental style. Although he won a Gold medal at the
Paris world's fair in 1925, Melnikov's work was ridiculed or
ignored. However, he remained in his home for the rest of his life,
one of the few Central Moscow residents allowed to live in a private
home. Melnikov's son, Viktor Melnikov, had a Studio in the house
until his death in 2006.
Construction Of The Melnikov
House
The dream of a separate house-workshop appeared in
Konstantin Melnikov during his studies at the Moscow school of
painting, sculpture and architecture. At first, he intended to buy a
ready-made house and rebuild it, so he spent a long time looking for
a suitable building in Moscow. The architect's plans for rebuilding
one of Moscow's old stone houses in the neoclassical style, created
in 1916-1917, have been preserved. The traditional approach to the
layout and appearance of your own home in the first sketches of
Melnikov is explained by the influence of the academician of
architecture I. V. Zholtovsky, with whom Melnikov studied at the
architectural Department of the school and under whose guidance he
worked since 1917 in the Architectural and planning workshop of the
Construction Department of the Moscow city Council — the first state
architectural workshop of the Soviet era. However, by the early
1920s, K. S. Melnikov was intensively sketching projects for the
construction of a house in an innovative style. In the personal
archive of the architect there are still various designs your own
home, but they all involve the device not just homes, but home and
Studio, which he combines domestic and working environment. Melnikov
was so attached to his family that he could not imagine anything
other than a home atmosphere for creativity.
Unlike other
buildings of Melnikov, the architect designed his own house-workshop
taking into account only his own taste and ideas about housing and
the working environment. In the process of sketching the house,
Melnikov acted in two roles at once-the customer and the designer,
and could afford the maximum freedom of form-making.
The
first known project for the construction of a new house is a two —
story, square-plan building, in the center of the first floor of
which there was a large, angled Russian stove. In other sketches,
the total volume of the house is a truncated pyramid, in a single
internal space of which small mezzanine rooms embedded in the
sloping walls are suspended. At the same time, both in the first and
subsequent versions of the house project, Melnikov paid more
attention to the interior and layout of the premises than to the
external appearance of the house, trying on the space for himself
and his family.
Experiments with a round plan appeared in
Melnikov's drawings by 1922. The architect draws sketches of an oval
and even egg-shaped building, continuing to work out the interior.
The final version of the project, which provides for a combination
of two cylinders embedded in each other, according to researchers of
K. S. Melnikov's work, comes from an unrealized project of the Zuev
club. In 1927, while participating in a competition to design this
club, K. S. Melnikov creates, in his own words, "an organ of five
cylinders", and then, when the construction of the building began to
be carried out according to the project of Ilya Golosov, he decides
to at least partially implement his ideas about a number of vertical
cylinders inscribed in each other in his own house.
"There
were two of us — applicants — and two objects," recalled Konstantin
Melnikov, " and we decided to introduce a cylinder into Golosov's
project,which still sounds lonely as a decorative solo. People did
this, good people, but Architecture did not forgive them for the
torn-up idea and returned to me in a brilliant duet of our house."
It is possible that the choice of curvilinear structures new
home is also influenced by the fact that the family Melnykovych a
long time (from 1919 to 1929, before moving to his own house in
Krivoarbatskom lane) lived in a communal apartment, one room of
which was represented in terms of a quarter circle and went five
Windows on the street corner Petrovka and Strastnoy Boulevard. The
apartment on Petrovka formed a type of family life, which was taken
into account by the architect when designing the mansion,and the
main part of the furniture was purchased, which became the basis of
the interior of the house-workshop.