Garage-Garage

Recently, Moscow saw the presentation of a project by Yuri Grigoryan, devoted to turning the truck garage on Novoryazanskaya Street, designed by Konstantin Melnikov, into the Museum of Moscow Transport. The project involves restoring the monument of architecture, adding a new underground floor and a new entrance, as well as a whole park. The implementation is already underway.

Written by:
Julia Tarabarina
Translated by:
Anton Mizonov

07 June 2023

News

This city has a habit of “presenting” architectural projects when they are in fact completed or nearly completed. This case is no exception – the reinforced wall underneath the monument has already been built, the restored structures are being assembled in their proper place – and we were shown a “sketch” project of transforming the truck garage, designed by Konstantin Melnikov at Novoryazanskaya Street, 27, into the Museum of Moscow Transport.

zooming — Moscow Transportation Museum, conceptual design, 2020-2023

Copyright: © Meganom/ provided by Moscow Transportation Museum

The museum is planned to be open in 2024; the project of the first stage of restoration was approved by the Department of Cultural Heritage still in 2019. The work on the “adjustment project” began in 2020, and the decision to hand the garage over to the museum, according to its director, Oxana Bondarenko, was made in 2015-2017, even though the mayor only signed the appropriate decree in 2022. The banner “Nam po puti” (“We’re on the same road”) has been hanging for years now, and the work is underway.

The garage is a cultural heritage site of regional importance; according to the chief architect of the Transport Museum, Natalia Vorontsova, the protected status has been granted to the “composition of the architectural ensemble, materials and the composition of the facades, and the architectural and planning solutions”. The restoration is performed by the studio “Faros”; the museum exposition by Planet9 (design), Pitch (multimedia), and Solarsense (content).

The main hero of the show, however, is the project of adjusting the building authored by Yuri Grigoryan and AB Meganom. We asked the author, and, yes, the Project and Project Documentation stages are also done by Meganom.

The project includes 9,027 m2 of new construction: the Melnikov garage is essentially a horseshoe-shaped semicircle where the trucks were parked. The “semi-bagel” of the garage is one story high; it rests on the ground; the axis of circumference includes the building of the repair shop, it is two stories high, with an underground tier.

According to the project, there is a new underground tier that is built underneath the “horseshoe” of the garage, and it will include a foyer, and the part devoted to the metro, which makes perfect sense. The visitors to the museum will get to the bottom tier through the new entrance – a triangular structure with an imposing attic, which is added to the garage from the east side. The former repair shop will host the museum’s media center.

There will be no entrances to the upper tier of the permanent exposition – i.e. to the garage – from the ground; the visitors will ride escalators, which Yuri Grigoryan places in narrow spaces between walls.

There are stairs too – they stretch along the inner arc of the semicircle, and are also present in the sector-like communication node of the central part. The stairs are also delimited by a laconic “shell” wall – it actively builds the plastique of the interior space of the museum, distancing the attention of the viewer ascending to the upper hall from the foyer and the exposition of the lower tier. A little daylight will also get down through the stairs, but since there is a “subway” down there, then a lot of light is probably not that necessary according to the logic of the original design.

The elevators and stairs take the visitors upstairs, into the space of the “monument” garage itself. The bridges above, under the floor structures here are historical, but the spiral staircases leading to them are an addition by the architects. The exposition can thus also be viewed from above.

At the back of the yard, a pentagonal (temporary) pavilion of educational vehicle workshops is planned for conducting master classes and children’s education sessions.

Let’s return to the new entrance group, however. The auto workshop pavilion is pentagonal, while the entrance, which, I remind you, leads underground to the new ground floor, is triangular – in both cases, the simple but energetic geometry serves as a paraphrase of Melnikov’s work, who, as we remember, loved bold shapes.

In addition, the architect plans to cover the facade of the attic with specially made dark bricks of concave shape, which will yield a surface of laconic “flute” grooves – because (and I quote Yuri Grigoryan’s words here) Melnikov is essentially an Art Deco architect.

Basically, the entrance turned out to be a modernist “beam”; such a solution is quite imaginable in some 1970s museum, but here I want to see concrete or metal for some reason. I wonder how the bricks will ultimately look.

My colleagues were somewhat confused by this Art Deco statement, but to me it seemed largely correct. Melnikov, of course, is far from being the most typical representative, but he loved Art Deco (or did at some point), and he was always interested in the art of plastique. Looking for hereditary grooves, I opened Melnikov’s album – I found at least the Gosplan garage. Why not add grooves from one garage to another? And the half-grooves of the Intourist garage come to mind too.

The restoration of the historical part is being done according to all the rules under the supervision of the Department of Cultural Heritage. According to Yuri Grigoryan, the brick repair covered about 7-8% of the masonry in the upper part, only where the masonry was severely damaged. In addition, when inspecting the building, the architects found wooden side windows somewhere upstairs under the trusses, which had been closed for a long time – it is planned to open them.

It was decided to restore the metal trusses not on site, but in the workshop; now, I remind you, they are being installed. According to the chief architect of the Museum of Transport, about 10% of new metal had to be added in the process of mending, the rest was preserved, “including rivets”. It turns out that the public in December 2022 was worried for nothing.

There is another, additional, story about the trusses. They are universally spoken of as the work of Vladimir Shukhov. This information goes back to Selim Khan-Magomedov’s book (1990), but according to Mark Hakobyan, who curated the 2019 Shukhov exhibition at the Museum of Architecture, there is no confirmation of Shukhov's involvement either here or in the Bakhmetev Garage – in the latter case, historians have studied the materials in the archive of the Central State Archive of Moscow, and the drawings there are signed by Melnikov, while Shukhov’s signature is nowhere to be found. Shukhov’s post-revolution works, Mark Hakobyan explains, are generally difficult to document: the sources are scarce, and you have to determine them by the type of construction: the mesh vault patented by Shukhov is more likely to be associated with him, but the great engineer was also engaged in calculations of simpler truss structures – like the cargo garage on Novolyazanskaya. Meanwhile, such a calculation could have been made by some other engineer.

The constructions of the garage are quite simple: there is no special engineering beauty, which could be seen in the exhibition pavilions of the XIX century – after all, the task was rather technical, and the main advantage of the structures was that they covered the span of 35 m without supports and allowed trucks to maneuver more freely. By the way, at first 5-ton German trucks were parked in the garage, then Soviet “1.5-ton-trucks”, then, during the war, it served as a repair shop, and finally, after the war and until its closure, it was the 4th bus park.

Another part of the project is landscaping. As it is customary nowadays, there is a special emphasis on it, especially since the museum is a public place and requires the appropriate space around it. To the east of the garage a park called Milyutinsky is planned – let’s not forget about the legendary Commissar. Besides, the alley-circumference between the “garage” museum and the former workshop (now the media center), will be opened for walks – and not to surround the museum with any fences at all. “The city will receive”, as they say nowadays, a new park, a quiet street, plus the improvement of Novoryazanskaya Street running near the museum.

Thus, the fears of the public turned out to be largely groundless: the garage is a monument, it is being restored, and the difficulties associated with the poor quality of technical construction (after all, the garage is just a garage) are being overcome. On the other hand, there is a lot of new construction in the project, a little less than half of the original area. It is not very clear why the project was shown so late – it would have been possible to calm everyone’s misgivings from the very start, wouldn’t it?

One more thing. I think it would be nice if the Museum of Transport allotted a special room for an exposition devoted to Melnikov’s other garages, because – let’s not forget it – garages were one of Melnikov’s most frequently done projects. He designed two garages for Paris, one of them with cantilevered ramps over the bridge over the Seine – in both of them, back in 1925, he proposed the famous one-way traffic. No, it’s not the first time Melnikov had it on Novolyazanskaya; it’s the core idea in all of his garages – not to make the car egress. The words written by Melnikov while designing a garage for English buses on Ordynka (not implemented) are remarkable and very textured: “... it was neither caprice nor autocratic, but the daring power of beauty to stop wasting millions on ugly things”.

In Moscow, Melnikov designed five garages, four of which were actually built: bus Bakhmetyevsky, cargo Novovyazansky, Intourist garage on Suschevsky Val, and Gosplan garage on Aviamotornaya. All of them were with straight-through traffic (or essentially one-way), only organized differently: Bakhmetyevsky garage for the sake of convenience of buses’ movement received slanted contours, and Novobiazansky – a horseshoe-shaped plan, which, by the way, if we look at the map of the district as a whole, is very similar, in shape and size, to the steam locomotive circular depots of the XIX century. For example, 300 meters from the Novoryazansky Garage, a slightly smaller, but very similar in parameters, depot of the 1890s – was it the source of inspiration that helped the great architect Melnikov to cope with the triangular shape of the site? Who knows? It is clear that there were locomotives, which were placed along the radii to reconnect to trains, and here were trucks, but still: the garage on Novoryazanskaya is quite in line with the search for transportation architecture.

Another thing that comes to mind here is the museum of the Oktyabrskaya railway, which Nikita Yavein designed in the railway depot in St. Petersburg (open since 2017 ). You can still feel some rhyme arising between the two large transport museums.

Meanwhile, the project of the Transport Museum in the Melnikov’s Garage is grand-scale, and unique to a large extent. At the same time, however, it does fall in line with modern trends. Today, Novoryazanskaya Street is being actively developed; gradually, it stops being the “backyard” of the “square of three railway stations”, and already a restaurant complex opened on it. The complex is called “Depot” (it is opened in another depot, the tram one, not the steam engine one we talked about before), and the street is being paved with granite – for all intents and purposes, the museum will also soon be completed. And life will be beautiful then. What’s next? A museum of private garage construction?

07 June 2023

Headlines now

Object

Molding Perspectives

Stepan Liphart introduces “schematic Art Deco” on the outskirts of Kazan – his houses are executed in green color, with a glassy “iced” finish on the facades. The main merits of the project lie in his meticulous arrangement of viewing angles – the architect is striving to create in a challenging environment the embryo of a city not only in terms of pedestrian accessibility but also in a sculptural sense. He works with silhouettes, proposing intriguing triangular terraces. The entire project is structured like a crystal, following two grids, orthogonal and diagonal. In this article, we are examining what worked, and what eventually didn’t.

Review

Our Everything

Who is Alexey Shchusev? In the last couple of weeks, since the architect’s 150th birthday, different individuals have answered this question differently. The most detailed, illustrated, and elegantly presented response is an exhibition held in two buildings of the Museum of Architecture on Vozdvizhenka. Four curators, a year and a half of work performed by the entire museum, and exhibition design by Sergey Tchoban and Alexandra Sheiner – in this article, we take you on a tour of the exhibition and show what’s what in it.

Object

Gold Embroidery

A five-story housing complex designed by Stepan Liphart in Kazan, responds to the stylistically diverse context with its form, both integral and agile, and as for the vicinity of the “Ekiyat” movie theater, the complex responds to it with a semblance of theater curtain folds, and active plastique of its balconies, that bear some resemblance to theater boxes. Even if excessively pompous a little bit, the complex does look fresh and modern. One will have a hard time finding Art Deco elements in it, even though the spirit of the 1930s, run through the filter of neo-modernism, is still clearly felt, just as a twist of the Occident.

Object

Reconciliation

The restoration of the Salt Warehouse for the Zvenigorod Museum, on the one hand, was quite accurately implemented according to the design of the People’s Architect, and, on the other hand, it was not without some extra research and adjustments, which, in this case, was quite beneficial for the project. The architects discovered the original paint color, details of the facades, and studied the history of rebuilds of this building. As a result, the imposing character of the empire building, the oldest one in the city, and the differences of later additions were accurately revealed. Most importantly, however, the city got a new cultural and public space, which is already “working” in full swing.

From Moscow to Khabarovsk

This year, the works submitted by the students of the Genplan Institute of Moscow included a proposal for revitalizing Moscow’s “Pravda” complex with its structures designed by Ilia Golosov, landscaping an East Siberian town, located a 12-hour drive away from the nearest big city, and three versions of turning a derelict “pioneer camp” into an educational hub, similar to “Sirius”. Two sites out of three have an interested client, so chances are that the students’ works will be ultimately implemented.

Interview

Harmonization of Intentions

We met and talked with the chief architect of Genplan Institute of Moscow Grigory Mustafin and the chief architect of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk Maxim Efanov – about how the master plan of the city is formed. The key to success: gathering data, digital simulation, working with the city people, thinking infrastructure, and presentation.

Object

Cité for Naro-Fominsk

The new neighborhood on an island in the center of Naro-Fominsk continues the ideas of developing the territory of the silk-weaving factory, around which the city actually formed. The authors skillfully mix different formats of mid-rise development and make the most of the island location, offering a variety of formats of interaction with water, available to all citizens. No wonder that the project is considered exemplary and worthy of duplication in the region. It is also an example of rare synergy between the client and the architects.

Object

A Tower and a Manor House

The concept of a high-density residential district replacing a set of outdated privately owned houses in Yekaterinburg preserves the street grid and, in some cases, even the scale of construction. OSA Architects combine towers with townhouses and other types of housing, orienting the silhouette composition towards a pedestrian boulevard. Through non-linear routes and spatial diversity, the residents will see their neighborhood in a new way every day.

send.project

The Warm Stone

The housing complex in Zelenogorsk is interpreted by Mayak architects as a scatter of stones. The unconventional outline of houses with a pentagon plan not only helped to form the image part of the project, but also facilitated the architects’ work with the density of construction and insolation of the apartments.

send.project

For All Times

The modular technology combined with the building material of glued wood allows the architectural company Rhizome to create quick-mount hotels (no less!) that are highly rated by the architectural community: last week, the new hotel “Vremena Goda. Igora” scored three awards. Below, we are examining the project in detail.

Review

The Other Way Around

Few awards instead of many, the award ceremony conducted on the first day instead of last, projections instead of sketch boards, trees inside and art objects outside – the renewal of the Architecton festival seemingly took the sure-fire path of turning all the professional traditions upside down – or at least those that happened to be within the scope of the organizers’ attention. There’s certainly a lot to pick on, but the exhibition does feel fresh and improvisational. It looks that pretty soon these guys will set trends for Moscow as well. We shared with you about some elements of the festival in our Telegram channel, and now we are examining the whole thing.

ArchiWOOD-14: Building Bridges

This season, the festival’s jury decided not to award a grand prize: judging by the fact that the shortlist included several projects that had not reached the award in previous years, and the “best house” was pronounced to be an undoubtedly beautiful but mass-produced model, the “harvest” of wooden buildings in 2023 was not too abundant. However, there were many unusual typologies among the finalists, and restoration and revitalization projects received their share of recognition. Let’s take a look at all the finalists.

Object

The Chinese Symphony

The construction of the Chinese center “Huaming Park” has been a long story that came to fruition relatively recently. The building is adjacent to a traditional Chinese garden, but it is very modern, laconic and technological, and the simple-in-form, yet spectacular, white lamellae promise to someday be incorporated as a media facade. This complex is also truly multifunctional: it contains different types of living spaces, offices, a large fitness center, conference halls and restaurants – all wrapped in one volume. You can comfortably hold international forums in it, having everything you may possibly need at your fingertips, and going outside only to take a walk. In this article, we are examining this complex in detail.

Object

Ensemble of Individualities

Construction of the first phase of the INDY Towers multifunctional complex on Kuusinen Street, designed by Ostozhenka, has started. The project opens new angles of similarity between the column and the skyscraper, and we examine the nuances and parallels.

Object

Black and Red

Kazakov Grand Loft received its name for a reason: responding to the client’s brief and proceeding from the historical industrial architecture of its immediate surroundings, Valery Kanyashin and Ostozhenka architects proposed a new version of a modern house designed in the fashionable “loft” style. What makes this building different is the fact that the bricks here are dark gray, and the facades of the romantic “fortress” towers blossom with magnificent glazing of the windows in the upper part. The main highlight of the complex, however, is the multiple open air terraces situated on different levels.

Object

Icy Hospitality

Mezonproject has won the national architectural and town planning competition for designing a hotel and a water recreation center in the city of Irkutsk. The architects chose hummocks of Baikal ice as a visual image.

Object

The Mastery of Counterpoint

In the sculpture of Classical Greece, counterpoint was first invented: the ability to position the human body as if it were about to take a step, imbuing it with a hint of the energy of future movement, and with hidden dynamics. For architecture, especially in the 20th century and now, this is also one of the main techniques, and the ATRIUM architects implement it diligently, consistently – and always slightly differently. The new residential complex “Richard” is a good example of such exploration, based on the understanding of contrasts in the urban environment, which was fused into the semblance of a living being.

send.project

Countryside Avant-Garde

The project of the museum of Aleksey Gastev, the ideologist of scientific organization of work, located in his hometown of Suzdal, is inscribed in multiple contexts: the contest of a small town, the context of avant-garde design, the context of “lean production”, and the context of the creative quest of Nikolai Lyzlov’s minimalist architecture – and it seems to us that this project even reveals a distant memory of the fact that Aleksey Gastev learned his craft in France.

in memoriam

In memory of Jean-Louis Cohen

Marina Khrustaleva – about Jean-Louis Cohen (20.07.1949-7.08.2023), French architect and architectural historian that specialized in modern architecture and city planning.

Object

On the Hills

In the project by Studio 44, the “distributed” IT campus of Nizhny Novgorod is based on well-balanced contracts. Sometimes it is hovering, sometimes undulating, sometimes towering over a rock. For every task, the architects found appropriate form and logic: the hotels are based on a square module, the academic buildings are based on a “flying” one, and so on. Modernist prototypes, specifically, Convent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette, stand next to references to the antique Forum and the tower of a medieval university – as well as next to contextual allusions that help inscribe the buildings of the future campus into the landscape of the city hills with their dominants, high slopes, breathtaking river views, the historical city center, and the Nizhny Novgorod University.

Report

The Magic Carpet

The anniversary exhibition of Totan Kuzembaev’s drawings named “Event Horizons” shows both very old drawings made by the architect in the formative 1980’s, and now extracted from the Museum of Architecture, as well as quite a few pictures from the “Weightlessness” series that Totan Kuzembaev drew specifically for this exhibition in 2023. It seemed to us that the architect represented reality from the point of view of someone levitating in space, and sometimes even upside down, like a magic carpet with multiple layers.

Object

A Copper Step

Block 5, designed by ASADOV architects as part of the “Ostrov” (“Island”) housing complex, is at the same time grand-scale, conspicuous thanks to its central location – and contextual. It does not “outshout” the solutions used in the neighboring buildings, but rather gives a very balanced implementation of the design code: combining brick and metal in light and dark shades and large copper surfaces, orthogonal geometry on the outside and flexible lines in the courtyard.

Object

The Light for the Island

For the first time around, we are examining a lighting project designed for a housing complex; but then again, the authors of the nighttime lighting of the Ostrov housing complex, UNK lighting, proudly admit that this project is not just the largest in their portfolio, but also the largest in this country. They describe their approach as a European one, its chief principles being smoothness of transitions, comfort to the eye, and the concentration of most of the light at the “bottom” level – meaning, it “works” first of all for pedestrians.

send.project

Spots of Light

A new housing complex in Tyumen designed by Aukett Swanke is a very eye-pleasing example of mid-rise construction: using simple means of architectural expression, such as stucco, pitched roofs, and height changes, the architects achieve a “human-friendly” environment, which becomes a significant addition to the nearby park and forest.

Object

Ledges and Swirls

The housing complex “Novaya Zarya” (“New Dawn”) designed by ASADOV Architects will become one of the examples of integrated land development in Vladivostok. The residential area will be characterized by various typologies of its housing sections, and a multitude of functions – in addition to the social infrastructure, the complex will include pedestrian promenades, shopping malls, office buildings, and recreational facilities. The complex is “inscribed” in a relief with a whopping 40-meter height difference, and overlooks the Amur Bay.

Object

Agglomeration on an Island

Recently, an approval came for the master plan of the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk agglomeration, which was developed by a consortium headed by the Genplan Institute of Moscow. The document provides for the creation of 12 clusters, the totality of which will give the region a qualitative leap in development and make the island more self-sufficient, more accessible, and less dependent on the mainland. We are inviting you to examine the details.

Interview

Ivan Grekov: “A client that wants to make a building that is “about architecture” is...

In this article, we are talking to Ivan Grekov, the leader of the architectural company KAMEN (translates as “stone”), the author of many high-profile projects that have been built in Moscow in the recent years, about the history of his company, about different approaches to form making, about different meanings of volume and facade, and about “layers” in working with the environment – at the example of two projects by Osnova Group. These are the MIRAPOLIS complex on the Mira Avenue in Rostokino, whose construction began at the end of last year, and the multifunctional complex in the 2nd Silikatny Proezd on the Zvenigorodsky Highway; recently, it received all the required approvals.

Report

Grasping and Formulating

The special project “Tezisy” (“Abstracts”), showcased at Arch Moscow exhibition in Moscow’s Gostiny Dvor, brought together eight young “rock stars of architecture”, the headliner being Vladislav Kirpichev, founder of the EDAS school. In this article, we share our impressions of the installations and the perspectives of the new generation of architects.

Object

The White Tulip

Currently, there are two relevant projects for the Great Cathedral Mosque in Kazan, which was transferred to a land site in Admiralteiskaya Sloboda in February. One of them, designed by TsLP, was recently showcased at Arch Moscow. In this article, we are covering another project, which was proposed during the same period for the same land site. Its author is Aleksey Ginzburg, the winner of the 2022 competition, but now the project is completely different. Today, it is a sculptural “flower” dome symbolizing a white tulip.

News

ATRIUM’s Metaverse

The architectural company ATRIUM opened a gallery of its own in a metaverse. Inside, one can examine the company’s approach and main achievements, as well as get some emotional experience. The gallery is already hosting cyberspace business meetings and corporate events.