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A House Without Right Angles
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a house without right angles
In a house for his family in Moscow,
Konstantin Melnikov translated the innovations of Russian avant-garde
artists into architecture - By Aleksandra
Shatskikh
A house with the words “Konstantin Melnikov
Architect” incised on its facade is situated in a leafy lane
in the very center of Moscow. With that inscription, Melnikov himself
transformed the house into a monument. It is a rare gem of the last
century in Russia—a home built for himself and his family
by one of the most brilliant and innovative of architects.
 The
Melnikov house is a monument in trouble. Its dilapidation is all
too visible. Its concrete walls are crumbling and water-stained,
and some of its windows are blocked up. The World Monuments Watch
recently listed it as one of the 100 Most Endangered Sites of 2006.
The architect’s son, Viktor Melnikov, who is 90 years old
and frail, still lives in the house and is concerned with its preservation,
but disagreements within the Melnikov family have cast the future
of the structure in doubt.
Konstantin Melnikov (1890–1974) rejected traditional styles
and construction methods in his search for a new kind of space for
the new world. At the beginning of the 20th century, when the Russian
avant-garde was at the forefront of the international art world,
it was Melnikov more than anyone else who translated the innovations
of the visual artists into architecture. Vladimir Tatlin’s
counter-reliefs, for example, were the inspiration for Melnikov’s
Russian Pavilion for the International Exhibition of Modern and
Decorative Arts in Paris in 1925.
Melnikov was an heir to the Russian art tradition, which emphasized
the expressive, emotional elements in creativity. His forms hint
at images and are rich in associations. His famous Rusakov Club,
built for the Moscow Municipal Workers Union (1927–29), has
three cantilevered wedges that suggest the teeth of a gear. Inside,
they provide the slope for the seats of a theater.
To realize such buildings in an era dominated by ideals of functionalism
and rationality required determination. During his golden age of
1927 through 1929, Melnikov succeeded in erecting six buildings
in Moscow, all of them workers’ clubs. Each one is unique
and strikingly original. He started planning to build a house for
himself and his family at the beginning of the 1920s, but construction
didn’t start until 1927 and wasn’t completed until 1929.
The structure of the house is extraordinary. It consists of two
interlocking upright concrete cylinders, the northern one taller
to give access to a terrace on the roof of the southern one. The
entrance facade, in the southern cylinder, is a wall of glass flanked
by square corner pilasters, while the northern cylinder is illuminated
by 56 hexagonal windows inserted into the diagonal brick grid of
the frame. It was part of Melnikov’s plan that these windows
could be filled in, or that new ones could be punched out of the
brick grid at any time (he added a window while the house was in
construction).
To build a house without right angles had been Melnikov’s
idée fixe. Fortunately, his wife supported the idea, although
initially she was concerned that the odd-shaped rooms would make
people dizzy. It was difficult to organize the internal spaces for
a family to live and work in, and the house isn’t without
its awkward spots. In certain rooms, as the Finnish architect Juhani
Pallasmaa wrote, “orientation within the two cylinders with
the diagonal and skewed walls becomes very confused indeed. Circularity,
rectangularity, diagonality and axiality are in a constant interplay
and tension.”
The kitchen and dining room are on the ground floor, along with
day rooms for the two children, a wardrobe room, a housekeeping
room, and a bathroom. Above them, on the second floor, are the living
room and the sleeping area. At the top of the taller cylinder is
Melnikov’s studio, which has a balcony opening to the roof
terrace.
The living room and Melnikov’s studio are the largest and
most impressive rooms in the house. The lofty living room is dominated
by the glass wall of the facade, whose four central glass panels
could be opened in summer to the garden and the street. I visited
the house with a group of students from Moscow State University
when Melnikov was still alive, and he told us that when the scaffolding
was removed from the living room, he stood in the center of the
room and shouted as loud as he could. Why? Because “when the
construction of Saint Peter’s Basilica, with its unique gigantic
dome, was completed, the great Italian stood under it and shouted.”
Afterwards, Michelangelo explained that if the dome had collapsed,
it would have buried only its luckless creator. Fortunately, both
Michelangelo and Melnikov were good architects, and their domes
survived.
The sleeping area is a more intimate space, lit by 12 hexagonal
windows, with a much lower ceiling than the adjacent living room.
The whole family slept here because Melnikov had complicated theories
about sleep—he considered it to be restorative in an almost
miraculous way. The only objects in the room were a concrete sleeping
platform for the architect and his wife and smaller platforms for
the children. (These were long ago replaced by conventional beds.)
The parents’ platform was separated from the children’s
by diagonal partition walls on each side that stopped just short
of the ceiling. Melnikov’s esoteric ideas about sleep were
behind another unusual feature of this room. He told us that it
had originally been gold: walls, floor, and ceiling were painted
gold, and the bed linens were all gold. “When we woke up in
the morning,” he said, “we felt as if we were floating
in thick golden air. It was an extraordinary feeling.”
Melnikov later elaborated his ideas about the curative value of
slumber in his “Sleep Laboratory,” proposed as a component
of his utopian Green City. This was to be a workers’ dormitory,
environmentally controlled in every aspect by a team of technicians.
The architect’s studio is another large public space, lit
by 38 hexagonal windows. It was originally painted a deep purple
violet, which, according to Pallasmaa, gave it a strange, mystical
atmosphere. The studio is used now by Viktor Melnikov, whose impressionistic
pictures hang on the walls of the house.
Ironically, this most modern and unconventional of houses was furnished
with antiques, purchased for almost nothing in the 1920s. But Melnikov’s
insistence on cleanliness and a dust-free environment kept the furnishings
sparse.
From 1930 to 1950, Melnikov was ostracized, and all his buildings,
especially his house, were harshly criticized. It’s a miracle
that he wasn’t arrested and that the house wasn’t torn
down. Not until 1965, when an exhibition was grudgingly devoted
to him in the headquarters of the Moscow branch of the Union of
Soviet Architects—the organization that had destroyed his
career so many years earlier—did it become acceptable to appreciate
him. Although the exhibition closed after four days and publicity
was forbidden, it sparked the revival of interest in Melnikov. The
house in Krivoarbatsky Lane became internationally famous.
The structure has been deteriorating for a long time. A few days
after the German invasion in 1941, a bomb fell nearby, and the shock
waves shattered most of the glass. Not long after, the heating system
failed, causing problems with dampness. A misguided attempt at restoration
in the 1990s resulted in serious water damage. Now the house is
in even greater danger from Moscow’s unbridled development
boom. Its drainage system has been destroyed by the construction
of an underground parking garage next door, and it faces the prospect
of being hemmed in on all sides by new buildings. At one time the
Kremlin was visible from the terrace, and sunlight flooded the rooms,
but today the sun can no longer reach most of the house’s
windows.
The fate of the structure is a subject of concern to all those
who want to see Moscow’s modernist monuments preserved. In
March Viktor Melnikov held a press conference to announce that he
had made a will leaving the house to the state on condition that
it become a museum dedicated to the architect. His elder daughter,
Ekaterina, supports him, but his younger daughter, Elena, claims
that the house belongs to her. According to Mikhail Revzin’s
report in the newspaper Kommersant, Viktor stated that Elena had
tricked him into signing a document giving her the house and that
she wanted to sell it, but that his will revoked all previous documents.
So the fate of the house may ultimately be decided in a courtroom.
In the meantime, it continues, sadly, to fall apart.
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