Next to the sprawling U.S. Embassy and just off the ill-named Garden Ring, the clogged 12-lane highway that encircles Moscow 's city center, stands a little slice of utopia. Paradise, however, has never looked so lost.
Art historians regard this 1930 building as an avant-garde masterpiece, a seminal piece of architecture from the period after the Russian Revolution and before Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin demanded giant, neoclassical buildings that still define much of the cityscape. It embodies the constructivist style, the controversial marriage of social engineering and design.
Now, after a headlong rush to put up steel and glass malls, office buildings and luxury apartments, with historic buildings often torn down in the process, Moscow is slowly developing an interest in preservation.
But the hardest sell, both to city officials and residents, are the constructivist buildings - the Narkomfin building, workers clubs and houses of culture - that still dot the city, orphans of both the Soviet Union and the country's new capitalism.
Architects count about 30 significant constructivist sites in the city, including the famous Konstantin Melnikov House-Studio , which appears likely to become a museum after a long struggle over its future. The Kauchuk factory's workers club has been partly converted into a Chinese restaurant.
The Narkomfin was designed by architect Moisei Ginzburg as a model for communal living and had a major influence on the direction of modernist and constructivist architecture. The Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who thought that a house was a "machine for living in," incorporated elements of Ginzburg's vision into his work.
Sitting on rows of columns, the Narkomfin's 52 apartments had built-in furniture and were created for workers from the Finance Ministry. A skywalk connected the main block to an adjacent community house with a large glass frontage. Inside were a communal library, kindergarten, fitness center, kitchen and dining room.
Besides the annex, the shared facilities included a second-floor open terrace and a roof garden with a solarium. The corridors were built especially wide to encourage social discourse as if on a city street. And outside, Ginzburg imagined meandering paths among the trees and greenery.
"The combines of habitation, dense and compact, permit the inhabitants to enjoy gardens, expanses of greenery and the collective spaces of sport and relaxation," Ginzburg said of his intent. Workers were to live and recreate as one, members of an idealized socialist village set down in the city.
But the building's style - described by some as revolutionary rationalism - fell out of favor with the rise of Stalin, and the Narkomfin has had little maintenance since its construction. A housing shortage led Soviet officials to crudely fill in the open space created by the building's stilts. Ginzburg's idyllic green space never materialized. And the walls of the U.S. Embassy now encroach on the building's rear.
For some years the architect's grandson, Alexei Ginzburg, himself a Moscow architect, has called for the building's restoration as an apartment hotel. "We insist on a strict restoration," he said, "and we think an apartment hotel will attract people interested in the culture and art of that period as well as people looking for a different experience when they come to the city."
City officials say that they want to save the building but that preservation is complicated.
(Taken from “Buildings Orphaned By Changes In Moscow ” by Peter Finn, Washington Post Foreign Service)
