A Factory’s Path

The center for constructivist studies “Zotov”, hosted in the renovated and readjusted building of Bread Factory 25 at Presnya, opened its first exhibition entitled “1922. Constructivism. The Inception”. It shows hundreds of authentic works connected both with the constructivist movement and with its predecessors from the abstract art of the 1910’s. The bread factory is also regarded as a work of constructivism because its shape was fully dependent upon the “hard assembly line” proposed by the engineer George Marsakov. Thus, the building becomes both a shell and the largest exhibit at this show. Its interiors, restored by the project developed by the SPEECH architects Sergey Tchoban, Igor Chlenov, and Alina Garnovskaya in 2018-2022, were shown to reporters at the end of October. In addition, a book has recently been released about the history of the building and its renovation, authored by Nikolai Vasilyev, Anna Martovitskaya, and Elena Ovyannikova.

A joke suggests itself that after such a grand inauguration the topic of the bread factory can be considered exhausted. However, there is no such thing as an exhausted topic – even though the building itself, as well as the history of “bread provision” appears to be much clearer. And, in addition, the meaning of the “constructivism” term, more known and more spread in the west, hopefully, will be methodically and consistently explained to the audience of the new public center.

Sergei Tchoban, SPEECH, Tchoban Voss Architekten, Chart Studio

We made a fundamental decision to preserve the interiors of the bakery building in the state that we received them at the beginning of our work, in 2018, with all the losses and all the layers added later on. Trying to recreate an interior the way it was at some point in its life is an attempt that is by definition doomed to failure because there is no way of knowing what the spaces exactly looked like in the 1930’s – any additional arrangement would be more or less a fantasy.

I consider the full conservation approach to be the most relevant and promising. It has been tested many times in recent decades; specifically, according to my project in the 1990’s, the Java Tower in Hamburg was restored in this way. In the case of conservation, the interior seems to freeze at the moment of its transformation into a museum or cultural space and – in this case – also becomes part of the exposition, since the constructivism research center is now located in it, in the architectural monument of constructivism.

Alina Granovskaya, SPEECH, chief architect of the restoration and adaptation project of the bakery building No. 5

Our first thought was: we will not touch anything here – we will preserve all of this unique beauty. We considered the peeling ceiling as some kind of beautiful pictorial abstraction. It was important for us to preserve the surface of the brick in its entirety, and to create a living museum of that time – and not only of the 1930’s, when the building was actually constructed, but also of subsequent periods: the 1950’s, 1960’s, 1970’s... Each generation brought something of its own here, we wanted to preserve all this and show the audience a true picture of the life history of the building.
A lot was done in the process of author’s supervision, in manual mode. In this case, we could not just provide drafts of nodes or a painting pattern and consider our work to be finished. For two years, my colleague Yulia Verbitskaya and I were present at the construction site, discussing every fragment, every square meter.