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The dream of a separate house-workshop of his own appeared in Konstantin Melnikov even during his years of study at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. At first he intended to acquire a ready-made house and rebuild it, in connection with which he had been looking for a suitable building in Moscow for a long time. The plans for the restructuring of one of the old Moscow stone houses in neoclassical style created by the architect in 1916-1917 survived. The traditional approach to the layout and appearance of his own house in the first sketches of Melnikov is explained by the influence of the academician of architecture I. V. Zholtovsky, with whom Melnikov worked at the architectural department of the school and under whose leadership he worked since 1917 in the Architectural and Planning Studio of the Construction Department of the Moscow City Council - the first State architectural workshop of the Soviet era. However, by the beginning of the 1920s, KS Melnikov intensively sketched projects for the construction of a house in an innovative style. In the personal archive of the architect, various versions of projects of his own house have been preserved, but they all imply the construction of not just a residential building, but a home-workshop in which household and working environments would be combined. Melnikov was so attached to his family that he could not imagine a different, except for home, atmosphere for creativity.
Unlike other buildings of Melnikov, his own house-workshop was designed by the architect taking into account his own taste and ideas about housing and the working environment. In the process of sketching the house, Melnikov appeared in two roles at once — the customer and the designer, and could afford the maximum freedom of form-making.
The first of the well-known projects for the construction of a new house is a two-story, square in terms of construction, in the center of the first floor of which a large, angled Russian stove was located. On 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 inclined walls are suspended. At the same time, both in the first and in the subsequent versions of the project of the house, Melnikov paid more attention to the interior and the layout of the rooms than to the external appearance of the house, trying on the space for himself and his family.
Experiments with a circular plan appeared in Melnikov’s drawings by 1922. The architect draws sketches of an oval and even egg-shaped building, while continuing to work out the interior. The final version of the project, which provides for a combination of two cylinders embedded into each other, according to the works of KS Melnikov, comes from an unfulfilled project of the Zuev club. In 1927, participating in the design competition for this club, K. S. Melnikov creates, by his own expression, an “organ of five cylinders”, and then, when the building was built according to the project of Ilya Golosov, he decides to at least partially implement his ideas a series of vertical cylinders inscribed into each other in their own home
«Нас — претендентов — было двое, и два объекта, — вспоминал Константин Мельников, — и решили в проект Голосова ввести цилиндр, который и сейчас одиноко звучит декоративным соло. Так поступили люди, хорошие люди, но Архитектура не простила им растерзанной идеи и вернулась ко мне в блестящем дуэте нашего дома»[1].
“There were two applicants and two objects,” recalled Konstantin Melnikov, “and they decided to introduce a cylinder into the Golosovo project, which still sounds lonely with a decorative solo. So did people, good people, but Architecture did not forgive them for a torn idea and returned to me in a brilliant duet of our house. ”
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| Эскизы квадратного в плане дома-мастерской, 1920-1921 годы | Один из «круглых» вариантов проекта, 1922 год | |
It is possible that the choice of the curvilinear structure of the new house was also influenced by the fact that the Melnikov family for a long time (from 1919 to 1929, that is, before moving to their own house in Krivooarbatsky Lane) lived in a communal apartment, one of the rooms of which represented a quarter of circle and five windows over the corner of st. Petrovka and Passion Boulevard. In the apartment on Petrovka a type of family structure was formed, which was taken into account by the architect when designing the mansion, and the main piece of furniture was acquired, which became the basis of the house-workshop furnishings.
Building. Design features of walls and floors
editWhat is unique in Melnikov’s house is that at the end of the 1920s, when the NEP collapsed in the USSR, and the construction of commune houses began throughout the country, one person was allowed to build a private house in the center of the capital. There are several explanations for this fact.
First, the Melnikov House was officially recognized as an experimental structure. Here the architect tested the idea of a round house, which he then wanted to use in other projects, including the construction of communal houses.
Secondly, in the mid-1920s, Konstantin Melnikov was one of the largest and recognized not only in the USSR, but also in the world of Soviet architects. World fame brought him the construction of the USSR pavilion for the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts and the Art Industry in Paris.
Thirdly, the architect built his house-workshop in 1927-1929, when he had a large number of real orders and could allocate funds for construction from the family budget. The construction of the house was carried out by the construction organization of the Moscow municipal services exclusively at the expense of the architect (K. S. Melnikov received a loan for the construction of a house for a period of 15 years). Due to the fact that the building under construction was considered as an experimental construction, Melnikov was also exempted from land rent.
Finally, there is a version that the architect received a plot as a reward from the Soviet government for his work on the first sarcophagus of V. I. Lenin in 1924. [[Category:1929 establishments]] [[Category:Tourist attractions in Moscow]]