In what cases is it appropriate to consider architecture as a sculptural form? By what means does it acquire this quality of “sculpturality”? Why, for instance, is the chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp, designed by Le Corbusier, unquestionably a sculpture, while the so-called Marseille Block by the same architect is much harder to describe as such? (If anything, it is closer to painting.) In his articles “The Revolt of the Guilds” and “The Uniqueness of Space”, published in the 13th issue of “Project Klassika” on the theme “Architecture as Sculpture”, Grigory Revzin interprets the phenomenon of the house-as-sculpture as an antithesis to replication and industrialization, defining sculptural form-making as a characteristic feature of the whole neomodernist architecture. It is worth quoting from the second article:

“…What makes modernist architecture different is the fact that all the expressive characteristics of even a unique building speak of its reproducible nature. It is as if assembled from a construction kit (which, to a large extent, it is), and a composition made from such a kit is less a unique work than a demonstration of the kit’s overall possibilities. Neomodernist architecture, on the other hand, destroys precisely this image of reproducibility – even a constructed model, once bent, crumpled, and stretched, becomes a unique body, whose qualities cannot be predicted with the qualities of the kit itself”.

However, while neomodernism resists modernist “predictability”, it also resists ornament, rejecting it as something non-functional: just as there is no uniqueness in a construction kit, so too, supposedly, there is no purity or sincerity in classical orders or decorative moldings. This leads to the conclusion that the neomodernist drive toward sculpturality is both natural and, in a sense, forced – they strive for distinctiveness, yet categorically refuse to speak in what they perceive as the dead language of classicism. In this sense, the concept of the house-as-sculpture appears as a kind of compromise. The escape from uniformity is achieved by turning the building itself into an element of decoration, where the object being “adorned” is the city itself, which becomes a kind of meta-façade.

The multi-story office building by the Ostozhenka Architects on 1st Brestskaya Street, designed by Alexander Skokan and Valery Kanyashin, is a striking example of this house-as-sculpture phenomenon.





Its curved glass façade, overhanging the street space, draws attention from afar. Reflecting the city, the façade simultaneously distorts and transforms it – and along with it, the observer. To borrow Revzin’s words, in this case “the object of sculptural impact is precisely your body; it is through your body that this architecture becomes flesh, and its shell becomes the form you are invited to assume”.









This building, together with the Gvozd shopping center completed three years earlier, undoubtedly marks the beginning of Ostozhenka’s break – cautious yet consistent – with the modernist canon and the contextual approach. The architects had not previously allowed themselves such a degree of freedom in engaging with context. The building on 1st Brestskaya is a bold artistic statement, at first glance not entirely in tune with the authors’ usual reflections on professional tact and appropriateness. One might say that Russian neomodernism was born precisely at that moment – in the first half of the 2000s.