Dipped your brushes in blue

Residential complex on Kremenchugskaya street. Architect Andrey Chernikhov. The name "Malaya Zemlya" was given to the complex by realtors, and it has nothing to do with the architect's plan (Photo: Ivan Yezersky )

Having built St. Basil's Cathedral, Russian architecture considered the color task completed. Or even overfulfilled. And for four centuries she made do with gray, yellow, and red. Makeup is a woman's business (architecture, of course, is a man's), graffiti was considered a form of hooliganism, and the Viennese Hundertwasserhaus was considered the ravings of a crazy artist in the fat-fucking city of Klimt and Olbrich.

Art Nouveau was the first to think about color, but its palette was faded, “swampy”. Then the icons cleared at the turn of the century burst into color, city signs became the subject of admiration for the “Jack of Diamonds,” and the futurists painted everything they could find, right down to the grass of the Alexander Garden. “The streets are our palettes,” said Mayakovsky, and together with Rodchenko he painted a house in Kalashny Lane: “Nowhere except in Mosselprom!” Then everything was covered up, two years ago it was restored, but today it has peeled off again. It’s impossible to make life brighter: bad climate, bad paint and the country’s general reluctance to materialize utopias.

Somewhere between futurist artists and constructivist architects, there existed in the early 30s the brilliant graphic artist Yakov Chernikhov. The “Piranesi of the Russian avant-garde” built almost nothing, but his luxurious architectural fantasies became a source of inspiration for many generations of architects. True, only inspiration, since, apart from the idea of ​​a movement, it is difficult to glean any constructive ideas from his works (unlike, say, his colleague Ivan Leonidov, from whose unrealized projects the entire world “international style” emerged). An attempt to once again bring together architecture and painting was made by his grandson Andrei Chernikhov, famous for being the only one of our architects who wears a bow tie all the time.

His genetic inclination towards bright architecture dictated a simple move for him: to dip his brushes where Okudzhava had bequeathed, and paint the facade as no one had ever painted in Moscow before. Of course, this is pure decoration, and, of course, it is completely utopian. German paint is much more reliable than domestic paint, but it also has a service life of 5 - 10 years. That is, before the residents of the new residential complex have time to send their children to school, they will have to call the painters again - and it is not a fact that the plan will be repeated exactly. Nevertheless, such an attempt to introduce color into residential architecture is certainly interesting. And although this is an obvious challenge to the bleakness of the environment (on one side of the complex there are Khrushchev houses, on the other - standard block houses), but at the same time it is also a kind of tribute to the historical context: these two buildings were rebuilt from dilapidated buildings of two-story kindergartens. That is, the kindergarten was a “kindergarten” and remains.

This pathos of “childish and fun” also justifies the architectural quirks of buildings, which in any other case would be called cheap postmodern. A huge column with stained glass and a rough capital (there is a flight of stairs inside); another capital, already simply painted on the facade; two bay windows, round and square, hanging heavily from the third floor; extravagant round trim; radical window shapes (with a completely traditional balcony); a series of painted squares that seem to be a quotation from Ivan Chuikov, a classic of the Russian “second avant-garde”. However, this whole pictorial circus is happening not in the plane of the wall, but is superimposed on it separately - and in combination with the broken line of the stone plinth it becomes like an example of competent scientific restoration: when the surviving pieces of some 14th century are carefully restored, but what was lost is not completed, and leave it as is. It turns out that the irony required for postmodernism lies not only in the use of classical forms (the consumer demands housing of “beautiful architecture,” and the column is its symbol), but also in a hint at the genesis of the “new Russians”: scratch anyone and you will find a banal scoop.