What would mass Soviet housing be like if it were made by a good architect? So: four high-rise buildings on the banks of the Khimki reservoir, united by a stylobate. Closer to the water - three wide plates, near the street - a square tower. In 2014, in these buildings in the north of Moscow, it is difficult to notice the traits of genius or fragments of an unfulfilled future; it's just dark panel houses on the outskirts, fenced off from the surrounding space with needles of collapsing balconies. And once in decline, "Swan" was perhaps the first elite residential complex in the USSR.

Andrey Meyerson became a star of Soviet architecture, having assembled an experimental residential complex on Leningradskoye Shosse from standard parts of panel high-rise buildings at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. “Swan” is not a house, but it is also not a microdistrict familiar to the inhabitants of the outskirts. As conceived by the architect, the 16-story buildings stand compactly on a single stylobate, which should accommodate everything that residents may need: shops, a pharmacy, repairs and even a garage - Moscow was entering the era of mass motorization. Meyerson created a vertical block similar to . Group the panels a little differently, arrange the balconies a little more expressively, place the towers a little more effectively in a natural environment - and as a result, a piece of European level comes out. The quarter became the dominant feature of the district.

Inside, the Swan was also superior to ordinary Soviet housing. High ceilings - 2 meters 80 centimeters, the best layouts, spacious rooms and kitchens, large balconies. In the quarter near the Khimki reservoir, only the elite of the Brezhnev stagnation - scientists, artists and the nomenklatura - could get housing. The vast majority of apartments had one or two rooms (although there were also four-room apartments), but this was hardly a serious drawback: the smaller the differences between mass and piece in an authoritarian society, the more they were valued. True, in just a couple of years in Moscow they will begin to appear and much more convenient residential buildings for the elite, and Meyerson himself will build a "centipede" of the House of Aviators on Begovaya. The pilot project will be simplified, launched into a series, and a couple more high-rise buildings will be erected in neighboring blocks between Festivalnaya and Flotskaya streets.

The microdistrict will remain a symbol of socialist housing with a human face, but the scale of the idea, faced with the weakness of implementation, will eventually shatter into pieces. The quality of construction in the USSR, even in best projects was unimportant, and Soviet life was meager. Socialism died from constant poverty, and the Swan grew old along with it, almost disappearing behind the arrays of new buildings. In 2014, this is a young man in the body of a decrepit old man: no longer a dominant, only panel high-rise buildings on the outskirts, fenced off from the surrounding space with needles of massive balconies. But how can they be denied the grim showiness of brutalism?

House "Swan"

Experimental microdistrict on the bank of the Khimki reservoir

Architects: A. Meerson, E. Podolskaya, I. Fedorov, A. Repetiy

Years of creation: 1967–1973

structure: 4 houses with a height of 16 floors

The text uses materials from Anna Bronovitskaya (Institute of Modernism).

Photos: Ekaterina Fefilova

House-complex with service / experimental residential complex "Lebed"

Architects: A. Meyerson (head of the team of authors), E. Podolskaya, A. Repety, I. Fedorov (workshop No. 2, Mosproekt-1)
Engineers: B. Lyakhovsky, A. Gordon, D. Morozov, V. Samodov
Address: Moscow, Leningradskoe shosse, 29-35
Years of construction: 1967-1973

Mikhail Knyazev, architect of the Hora bureau and co-founder of the Sovmod project:

“In 1973, the construction of a “house-complex with service” was completed on Leningradskoye Highway in Moscow. Its other name, under which it entered the history of domestic architecture, is the Lebed residential complex.

This house became the dominant feature of the experimental microdistrict of the same name, which was created in those years in the north-west of the capital. Here is how one of the authors of the project, architect Elena Podolskaya, described it: “The detailed planning project of the microdistrict provides for the construction of 9-, 16- and residential buildings, as well as a large shopping center, schools and kindergartens. The ensemble of the microdistrict, the silhouettes of buildings of which will loom over the pines of the Pokrovskoye-Glebovo park, will serve as the compositional beginning of the huge new urban district of Khimki-Khovrino. characteristic feature"Swan" is its well-known isolation, isolation. We are talking about the lack of direct communication with other microdistricts. After all, the rest, more precisely, the main district of the Khimki-Khovrino massif is located on the opposite side of the Leningradskoye Highway and a little further from the center of Moscow.” (E. Podolskaya. House-complex with service // Construction and architecture of Moscow, No. 1/1968).

Representatives of various fields were involved in the design - economists, statisticians, sociologists. The result of the joint work of architects under the guidance of Andrey Meyerson and invited experts was the division of the population of the future microdistrict into groups, or, as the participants in the study called them, “collectives”. The authors of the project believed that such a differentiation of residents into groups that were planned to be settled in different conditions would help to form optimal scheme public services and establish the characteristics of a new format of housing. The architects considered the Lebed complex, reserved for the residence of "team No. 3", as the most important part of a large experiment.

The volume-spatial composition of the "Swan" consists of four 16-storey buildings, three of which (buildings No. 4, 5 and 7) have two sections and are closer to the Khimki reservoir, and a one-section tower (building No. 6) is advanced to the red development line highway. An important role in determining the final location of the buildings was played by individually calculated insolation for each house, fire and sanitary requirements.

All volumes stand on the stylobate of the service block, where a spacious lobby with a wardrobe and vending machines, an order office, dry cleaning and laundry, a rental office for household appliances, a medical room, a kindergarten-nursery for 140 children, a conference hall, clubs, workshops, library and much more. This set of functions was supposed to provide the inhabitants of Lebed, if not with an autonomous existence within the complex, then at least create a high level of service for those times and the most comfortable living conditions.

The exploited roof of the stylobate had a recreational function: on it, residents could spend time outdoors and even play sports. In the underground part of the complex, the architects provided for a cooperative parking garage for 300 parking spaces, storage rooms for each apartment and a group of technical rooms.

A person who settled in Lebed received an apartment with an improved layout, a number of technical characteristics of which distinguished it from any other Soviet apartment. High ceilings (2.7 m clean), large kitchens, spacious rooms and utility rooms, a system of built-in wardrobes, loggias of impressive size - all this corresponded to the ideas of a new type of dwelling.

The facades of the complex, despite its high-quality filling, did not differ much from the solutions used for mass residential development: the usual hinged expanded clay concrete panels with roughly sealed seams were chosen for the exterior decoration of residential volumes. The simplicity of the exterior decoration of residential buildings is compensated by the successful rhythm of the loggias, giving the facades the necessary plasticity. The walls of the service block are made of red brick, effectively combined with rough reinforced concrete surfaces. The sharp contrast of the "Swan" with the surrounding landscape enhances the perception of its architecture and adds even more expressiveness to the sharp forms of the ensemble.

For the Swan project, the architect Meyerson, who built the famous one on Begovaya a few years later, received the Grand Prix in Paris. Regardless of whether the ambitious experiment ended in absolute success, it can be said that the architects competently solved a number of difficult tasks, and Lebed, the pearl of the experimental microdistrict of the same name, deserves respect and deserves a special conservation status.”

They look like four retired officers. Covered with scars, covered with wounds, battered and weathered, in patched-patched tunics - but they have not lost their bearings. They are still one for all and all for one - they hold all-round defense, standing on a common stylobate, squeezed from all sides by newly-minted guardsmen, carrying unnecessary patrols, rising above the surface of the water ...

The painful sensation of their appearance has two sources. First, the surprise that they fell into decay so quickly. Yes, we know that modernist architecture “gets old badly” - because it is in a hurry in youth: to be sharp, modern, made from the most relevant (not tested by time) materials ... But this one somehow got old very quickly. Although there were no supernova materials here... And the second reason is just this line, with which they once stood over the avenue, forming one of the most memorable ensembles of Brezhnev's Moscow. And it is precisely this painful discrepancy between a proud posture and miserable clothes that torments.

Photo: mosproject.ru

Photo: pastvu.com

He opposed the microdistrict - with its then not quite obvious costs: inhumane scale, social irresponsibility, aesthetic monotony. Here, an attempt was made to create a new type of living environment - isolated from the city and immersed in nature. Both theses were not empty declarations. The problem of remoteness was solved by a car - it was the first residential complex in Moscow with an underground garage. And not only the fact that the complex was located in a green zone, on the edge of the park and on the shore of the bay, but also the fact that each tower was turned to the water with a wide side, was responsible for nature.

This kind of cluster was very relevant for Moscow within its new borders. Yes, and promising - which the future confirmed. Inheriting, on the one hand, from communal houses (fundamentally differing from them in the level of comfort), "Swan", on the other hand, was the prototype of future elite complexes (differing from them in the same way). However, at that moment there was neither social drive behind this idea (as in the 20s and 90s), nor anyone's interest. Therefore, only thanks to the perseverance of the architects, it was continued in the Swan-2 quarter - on the opposite side of the highway.

Photo: City

The issue of social homogeneity was solved in Lebed in the Soviet way: it was possible to get an apartment here only for certain merits or through great connections. Architect Gleb Sobolev recalls how, in preparation for entering the Moscow Institute of Architecture, he went to this house to tutors. “Physicist and mathematician lived on the same site. Earnings from the unofficial training of students made it possible to purchase a cooperative apartment. Thus, seemingly existing in parallel, two worlds - official and unofficial - were peacefully built into each other. It's funny, of course, that, unlike the West, where panel construction was designed for the poor, even small deviations from the standard gave the complex an aura of elitism. However, the layouts here were an order of magnitude more interesting than in typical housing.

And the most curious thing is exactly how a non-standard architecture is born from a standard set. Prefabricated elements were no different from those used in typical panel 9-storey buildings. But how picturesque is the plasticity of the walls - due to the well-thought-out rhythm of balconies, loggias and stair lattices. The balconies are sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, they effectively protrude beyond the edges of the towers, and with all the small set of options, they work great, because the towers are turned to each other in different ways. The ratios in the composition change as you move around it. This method of organizing space is typical for Russian monasteries - and the acuteness of sensation arises due to this paradoxical transfer to a new reality. It is updated by the fact that the Leningradskoye Highway flows nearby (on which the Swan remained the only dominant for a long time), that is, it is most often perceived precisely in motion. And, of course, the soaring effect gives the complex a special poignancy - due to the columns-legs, a large space behind them, as well as the fact that the columns themselves are torn off the ground with a stylobate. By the way, this method has not yet been found anywhere.

Photo: flickr.com/photos/stevecadman

Yes, the quality of performance was not up to par. But with simple and strong gestures, the authors managed to create a vivid, memorable image. It is noteworthy that architects of the 90s will adopt this methodology: realizing that the quality of construction has not changed much since Soviet times, it is important to compose a gesture that will withstand any execution. This is exactly how Alexander Skokan designed his brick towers - on the Sokol and on the Dmitrovsky highway, on the streets of Vrubel and Klimashkin - the obvious and worthy heirs of the Lebed. But this is the fate of Russian constructivism as well: a spectacular project, a stylish picture, novelty of forms - and a monstrous execution, leading to rapid aging. By and large, this is generally the fate of the form in Russia - to be beautiful in design and wretched in implementation. And the authors of The Swan were the first to come close, if not to the resolution of this paradox, then to its clarification.

However, the aesthetics of simple forms, rough concrete, open seams brings The Swan closer not only to distant predecessors and close followers, but also to contemporaries - to the works of "new brutalism" and further - to Le Corbusier, whose "living units" are his obvious ancestors. True, the fact that the late Corbusier had a meaningful program - "to start a game between rudeness and grace" - came out by itself with us. However, Corbusier would have appreciated this too: it was not for nothing that he compared building defects with wrinkles and moles, saying that defects are ourselves, our everyday life.

Photo: wikimedia.org

But that was the wisdom of the old man, and brutalism is associated with the arrival of a generation of "angry young people" who were unhappy with the existing order of things. In architecture, in particular, they were not satisfied with the coldness and sterility of functionalism. The founders of the movement, the Englishmen Alison and Peter Smithson, called for greater "veracity" of the material. Hence the sculptural nature of exposed concrete, from which in 1972 they built the spectacular Robin Hood Gardens neighborhood in London. And a composition close to "Swan" was created a couple of years earlier by another brutalist, Jose Luis Sert - a hostel in Cambridge. The paradox is that if the British discontent made it possible to move towards new frontiers, then the end of the “thaw” in Russia was, alas, precisely the end, and not the beginning of something. And what in England sounded ironic or even black humor (harsh concrete and a rigid grid of facades), in Russia looked like a breakthrough.

And today, for the uninitiated, the words of admiration for the “Swan” in the mouths of modern Russian architects sound like a sort of English humor. But these are not only words: Nikolai Lyzlov deliberately did not put, but put his elite skyscraper ("City of Yachts") - so as not to interrupt the "Swan", but only to play in contrast. True, conceived like a pike sliding into the water, the "City of Yachts" resounded in all directions, like a greedy cancer (already without the participation of the architect), and the "Swan" was crushed. But on the other hand, his aristocracy set off: to be near the water, but not to fall out on it with all his mass - it was subtle.

The Smithsonian's Robin Hood Gardens is also struggling to fight off attacks: it's not fashionable to get angry in a glamorous age, the new owner wants to demolish it. But the most bitter fate befell the author of The Swan, architect Andrei Meyerson. In modern times, he joyfully discarded the ideals of youth and began to build ridiculous fat houses - such as the Ararat Park Hyatt hotels on Neglinka or the Ritz Carlton on Tverskaya. But neither expensive materials nor modern technologies they are not able to give these objects that strange aroma of genuine inspiration, which, despite all the shrinkage and loss, continues to exude the "Swan".

• Book from the series “Architecture of Moscow. 1955–1985 Guide"
• Year of release 2014
• Uley publishing house, Moscow