Irony in architecture, especially subtle irony, and especially irony directed at oneself, is a rare phenomenon. Architects are, after all, mostly serious people, perhaps even mortally serious. They are also rather intolerant, particularly those who advocate purity of form, functionality, the notorious honesty, and all that sort of thing: make a joke that is awkward, inappropriate, or too daring, and you may find yourself branded a postmodernist (or even end up on someone’s blacklist – for bad taste or failing to conform to the spirit of the times… whatever that may mean).

In 2005, a residential building designed by the Ostozhenka was constructed on Klimashkina Street, deep inside the block. Its architecture seems to fully embody the philosophy of the contextual approach, while at the same time being ironic about that very approach. This is the Panorama residential complex designed by Alexander Skokan and Valery Knyashin.



As was their custom, the architects tried to “speak” in the city’s space in a whisper, to be as unobtrusive as possible, while at the same time categorically refusing to block the view from Presnensky Val Street toward the Church of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street. The latter, incidentally, is understandable. Five years earlier, a brick apartment building designed by the same Skokan and Knyashin had been constructed on the neighboring site (19 Klimashkina Street). In the mass of the building, the architects had forcibly cut a 13-story-high arch – once again, in order to preserve the visual axis between Presnensky Val and the church. Surely they had not gone to all that trouble for nothing?





The same logic dictated the glass “camouflage” on the facades of Panorama, decorated with a geometric pattern in the spirit of Mondrian’s Neoplasticism, through which the building was supposed to dissolve, as it were, into its context. And it also dictated the huge curving “crack” in the body of the building, which preserves that same visual axis.



A conceptual and aesthetic contradiction is immediately apparent: in practice, the “crack” nullifies the effect of the “camouflage”, which was already barely managing to fulfill its masking function. This trick turns the all-but-invisible building into an attraction, making it downright indecently expressive. And there is a sense that the architects deliberately allowed this contradiction to emerge, as is indirectly suggested by the ostentatious, almost Rocaille-like mannerism of the “crack’s” curves, leaving no doubt about its artificial origin. It is precisely this deliberate quality that contains the irony.



To be both tactful and audacious, to “explode” the context in order to preserve it, simultaneously aestheticizing the absurdity of the situation, and to create something new without challenging the city and its residents – these are things that perhaps only Ostozhenka knows how to do. Presumably, the path from classical modernism, with its dogmatism, to the sculptural, impassioned neo-modernism – what the former Moscow Committee for Architecture, with its light hand, dubbed “emo-tech”, and what Ostozhenka ultimately arrived at years later – should pass through humor and self-reflection.