The last Soviet architect – Kultura – Kommersant

At the age of 95, the architect Felix Novikov, the author of the landmark buildings of the late 1950s-1980s, died in the United States of America, one of the key characters of what is now called “Soviet modernism” – and they call it precisely from his suggestion: he minted in his time this term. He was a whole era in the architecture of Russia of the twentieth century, and his life was, in turn, a reflection of all the features of the time, states Evgeny Mikulin.

Felix Novikov was born in 1927 in Baku. His father was a builder, his mother was a writer. In 1935, the family moved to Moscow, Novikov’s father took a serious post in the construction department of the Moscow City Council. He had a happy childhood, but happiness ended in 1938, when his father was repressed under the “economic” article, and his mother was sent for compulsory psychiatric treatment. Both survived, but life was never the same.

Family dramas, however, did not put an end to Novikov’s life. In 1950 he graduated with honors from the Moscow Architectural Institute. The design school at the Moscow Architectural Institute at that time was classical, and Novikov enthusiastically worked with historical styles. Among his teachers at the Moscow Architectural Institute, however, was the great Soviet avant-garde artist Leonid Pavlov. And it was Novikov who called him the main teacher.

Thanks to the influence of Pavlov, a world-class master of modernism, Novikov gained an understanding of the strength and expressiveness of a “naked” volume in architecture. How important in architecture is a good “skeleton” on which any “meat” can grow.

This ability to work with volumes and proportions came in handy for Novikov very soon: in 1954, the famous decree on “architectural excesses” appeared. The luxury and decorativeness of the Stalinist Empire was done away with – the new architecture was supposed to be strict, industrial, mass and cheap. For many masters of Soviet architecture, this change in course was a tragedy. For Felix Novikov, the time of opportunity has come. For the sake of developing new architecture, the government initiated many competitions in which Novikov actively participated. He recalled this time with enthusiasm – young architects were ordered at the government level to be bold, to study and adopt foreign experience.

Crowded halls of the House of Architects, in which slides were shown with the latest foreign buildings. A trip to Italy, during which the seconded architects were able to see the neighborhood of classics and modernism. Novikov’s memoirs of this time are similar to the Soviet prose of the thaw – either “Colleagues”, or “I’m going into a thunderstorm.” And it was on the wave of this thaw enthusiasm that the creative “four” of Novikov and his co-authors won in 1958 a competition for Palace of Pioneers on Sparrow Hills.

The Palace of Pioneers became the hallmark of the new Soviet architecture – it was proudly shown to all foreign guests.

Similar public buildings were being built all over the country and became some romantic justification for the sad ordinary housing estate. Numerous Soviet palaces, inspired by the Moscow Palace of Pioneers, towered above the ordinary “Khrushchev”.

Novikov’s career developed brilliantly. He built a lot, well, throughout the USSR and even abroad – it was he who designed Soviet embassy in Mauritania. This was the pinnacle of Soviet success – and the dramatic turn in Novikov’s fate and career that followed was directly related to the end of the Soviet era.

For many, the name of Novikov is associated not with his successes, but with the drama: a project that has dragged on for decades “Red House” on Turgenevskaya Square. In 1967, Novikov’s workshop received an order for a building project for the USSR Ministry of Electronic Industry. Novikov came up with two towers on the stylobate – radio tubes on the panel. Construction began, but suddenly the direction of thought of the Moscow authorities changed: the towers in the city center were not held in high esteem. Novikov was forced to redo the project. The architect, who had not previously encountered resistance to his ideas, was furious, but he redid the project: he painted four low buildings. True, in the center of the composition he still planned a tower. And again the tower was forbidden to be built. It was built by Novikov only after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and fired the Moscow party leadership.

Numerous alterations and delays, scandals and dramas: the “Red House” became the most famous long-term construction at that time and, in a sense, a visible symbol of the breaking Soviet system, its inability to overcome internal contradictions and “build” something harmonious and significant out of itself.

I remember this process very well – as a child, I lived literally a hundred meters from this construction site, sometimes my father and I made our way over the fence and wandered along the cyclopean concrete slabs and beams of the mutilated building. One can only imagine at what cost this story was given to Novikov, how painful these decades of struggle were after decades of success.

In 1993, not wanting to see how the post-Soviet architectural landscape was changing under the influence of postmodernism that had penetrated the country, Felix Novikov emigrated to the United States.

The red granite of his building on Turgenevskaya in 1997, at the direction of Luzhkov … was plastered. Novikov publicly renounced authorship. Now the building is the headquarters of the LUKOIL company, a light projection of the red logo is spinning in the glazed tower, and the surrounding residents routinely call it the “eye of Mordor”. And the whole story also reads like a novel.

Living abroad, Felix Novikov stopped working as an architect. He wrote a lot – books and articles. Articles are often bilious, angry – exhausted by his struggle, he did not consider it necessary to stand on ceremony with anyone. His views on architecture were integral, uncompromising, very personal and hard-won. And he put a lot of effort into ensuring that the Soviet architecture of “his” era was appreciated. It was he who initiated the exhibition “Soviet Modernism. 1955-1985″, after which, in fact, the term “sovmod”, “Soviet modernism” appeared in the current architectural lexicon.

Felix Novikov was the last Soviet architect. In every sense – from the period of creativity, which ended exactly at the time of the collapse of the country, to the details of the biography. In a sense, he left even then, in 1993. But like the construction of his last building, his physical departure dragged on for decades. He was the last holder of the title of “People’s Architect of the USSR” in the world. And with his death, indeed, in the literal sense of the word, an era has gone.