If Russia of the 1930s had not chosen the socialist path and had become a bourgeois democracy, possibly, private residences would have looked like houses designed by Stepan Liphart. The portrait of the customer for these three villas is far from simple because it requires an exposed life, as if you were constantly being filmed in a movie. Another thing that comes to mind is the architect Mallet-Stevens – not his Art Deco Paris mansions and villas (which are closer to modernism), but his “dandy” image and his work as a Haut Couture artist. The Stepan Liphart villas, on the other hand, demonstrate some “pan-aesthetic” course to the future, this course lying through the impending dark ages, which even yields a heroic note in the pan-aesthetic concept laid out before us.

A “hydroelectric power station” house

Coauthored by Boris Kondakov, the project of a “hydroelectric power station” villa was created in 2007 for the architectural contest called “Dom-Avtonom” (“Autonomous House”), the task of which was to design housing independent of any utility lines. The organizers tried to deliver an environmental message, but the two young architects, inspired by the revolutionary romanticism of the 1930s and works by Erich Mendelssohn, Noah Trotsky, and Evgeny Levinson, rather treated it as a union of art and technology. According to Liphart, the two main themes here were the movement of water and the classical order. It is the latter, which many architects today consider to be boring “architectural Latin” that hinders their creative fantasy, that Stepan Liphart draws his inspiration from.

Stepan Liphart, , Liphart Architects

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been greatly impressed by the buildings of the Moscow Canal, the spirituality of their essentially functional architecture, which looked particularly impressive when the gateway locks were in operation: how the water rose in them, how the giant ships gradually rose to the level of the openwork turrets and belvederes. Rukhlyadev and Krinsky, functionalists, who in the 1920s boldly experimented with form and space, combined here their avant-garde experience with classical material, and the fruitfulness of such synthesis and synergy is quite obvious. On the other hand, the scale of these hydraulic structures is close to the typology of a large country house. So the image of the “hydraulic power station” is in the return from the gateway to the villa.