Dreams about something longer – Newspaper Kommersant No. 188 (7389) of 10/11/2022

The Museum of Architecture has opened the exhibition “Melnikov / Melnikoff” – the first detailed display of the work of one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century, Konstantin Melnikov (1890-1974). More than two hundred exhibits – from student works to sketches and drawings of famous buildings and unrealized projects, their layouts, paintings, personal items and documents – look at one go, as I was convinced Igor Grebelnikov.

World fame of Konstantin Melnikov began in 1925 in Paris, at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts. There he presented his pavilion of the USSR, a defiantly bold building – in essence, a parallelepiped of wood and glass. The construction was cut diagonally by a staircase, climbing which, the viewer could feel a surge of freedom – being outside, thanks to the glazed openings, he seemed to be inside, and also above the exhibits and the whole space. After that, going down and entering the room, he could already consider everything in detail. “This house of glass, the cost of which is certainly lower than all other pavilions, is a valuable lesson for all architects, for Melnikov asserts himself not only as a constructor, but also as an artist,” L’Amour de l’art magazine wrote at the time.— It frees the concept of volume from the concept of continuous mass. It expresses the third dimension.”

In the West, his fame only grew stronger over the decades: neither the isolation of the Soviet country, nor the fact that in his homeland since 1937, when the persecution of Melnikov “for formalism” began with might and main, and the “solid masses” already set the tone not only in architecture, he did not build a single building, although he regularly participated in all significant competitions. There he is a great avant-garde artist who influenced modern architecture: without having studied Melnikov’s pavilions, garages, workers’ clubs, a house-workshop in Krivoarbatsky Lane, you won’t get a diploma, you won’t build something worthwhile.

We have a different matter. Melnikov is also studied in architectural universities, but judging by what and how they build today, not so enthusiastically.

For the general public, his name has not become synonymous with something unprecedented, despite the fact that the buildings can be seen with your own eyes – 11 buildings designed by him have survived in Moscow. None of them is used for its intended purpose and has not become a museum of itself, as it happened and is happening all over the world with many buildings of Melnikov’s contemporaries, the great modernists – Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Malle-Stevens, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Aalto. The trouble is not that Melnikov’s buildings – garages and workers’ clubs – have outlived their original purpose: energy seemed to have disappeared from the buildings, that liberating spirit that revolutionized architecture changed life itself.

Now it is quite convincingly recreated by an exhibition at the Museum of Architecture, and its bilingual name – “Melnikov / Melnikoff” (the architect signed his foreign projects in French) – looks like a brand that has high hopes. It must be said that the safety of Melnikov’s huge archive was taken care of first of all by himself, and after his death, by his heirs. Together with the famous house-workshop in Krivoarbatsky Lane, the Museum of Architecture received a total of about 20,000 objects and documents – sketches, drawings, handwritten materials, competition projects, works of art, household items, personal items. (The way it happened – feuds and trials between the heirs, and then between them and the museum – is a separate, extremely unattractive story.)

A significant part of the materials included in the exposition, nevertheless, has already been published more than once (for example, in the extensive monograph by Selim Khan-Magomedov, published in the Masters of Architecture series back in 1990), and some of them were shown at other exhibitions. Nevertheless, now the ten halls of the enfilade of the main building of the museum form an exemplary intelligible story of Melnikov’s life and work in an unusual but successful way.

The design of the exhibition (its architecture was handled by the Planet9 bureau) uses elements of Melnikov’s buildings, the walls are painted either dark red or yellow-gold, but this is nothing more than a background: original works reign in it. Sketches, drawings, sketches, photographs are grouped around one or another layout (including layouts of unrealized projects – they were created specifically for the exhibition). And if the prototypes and sketches of the buildings made by Melnikov cause emotion and delight, then you sometimes think about the unrealized ones that there is some truth in their “paperwork”.

The exhibition opens with the motif of the professional drama of a brilliant architect who fell into the millstones of state orders of the Stalinist period. Model building of the People’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry (1934) – a monstrous colossus with 41 floors above ground and 16 underground, as if drawing the viewer into its womb with giant staircases, was thought to open onto Red Square. On a huge sketch (it was placed on the poster of the exhibition), the building looks much more attractive, but for decades architects at artistic councils and party committees were frightened by it as “utopian and formalistic”. The projects of the first hall are completely lost competitions: from the Palace of Nations (1932) to the Monument in honor of the reunification of Ukraine with Russia (1954) and the Pantheon in Moscow (1955); their numerous sketches are interspersed with quotations from the most prominent Soviet architects who castigate Melnikov in every way. Amazing resilience: as Khan-Magomedov, who had been in close contact with him since the mid-60s, recalled, Melnikov had exceptionally high self-esteem, the researcher himself explained it as “a psychological defensive reaction of a genius seeking to maintain … psychological comfort for productive work.”

However, as the exhibition shows, during the entire career Melnikov easily broke with the past. Moreover, starting from the first projects – whether it was a residential three-story complex for workers “Pila” (1922), where each family’s apartment had a separate entrance and front garden, or the pavilion “Makhorka” for the All-Russian Agricultural and Handicraft and Industrial Exhibition of 1923, offering the visitor a literally dizzying route for tobacco production. Just five years ago, his graduation project, a sanatorium for wounded officers in the Crimea, was an exemplary building in the spirit of neoclassicism, which was taught to him by Ivan Zholtovsky, who later became a prominent Stalinist architect and critic of the “formalist” Melnikov. And each new project became like a competition with the previous one, and sometimes the present one, as it was in the case of a closed competition for the creation of a sarcophagus for the Lenin Mausoleum. Melnikov proposed several options, but the one that won could not be technically implemented. Now this sarcophagus has been reproduced according to drawings and descriptions and occupies a separate room.

But even in this project, the exhibition assures, Melnikov solved tasks that were much more exciting for him than visual propaganda. The curators put the tomb for the leader among such Melnikov projects as the Sleepy Sonata building (where, according to the architect, the main attention should have been paid to sleep) from the Green City competition project, a proposed recreation area near Moscow. Or like an amazing bedroom in the architect’s own house on the Arbat, where there was nothing but beds, and they seemed to sprout from the floor. Melnikov, as well as representatives of the Bolshevik elite in the 1920s, was seriously worried – in the form of the development of the ideas of the philosopher Ivan Fedorov – the topic of life extension and immortality. His full-fledged creative life, unfortunately, turned out to be short-lived. But he nevertheless achieved immortality – although not in the way that Russian cosmism tried to invent.