At the Patriarch's Ponds - Navody. In passing. At the Patriarch's Ponds - Navody From the history of an elite house on the Patriarch's Ponds

Address: Ermolaevsky lane, 15/44
Design organization: SPAR LLC
Architects: Sergey Tkachenko, Oleg Dubrovsky; with the participation of: Ilya Voznesensky, Alexey Kononenko, Mikhail Leikin
Architects (at the “detailed design” stage): Ecoproject + LLC, with the participation of:
Elena Gritskevich, Olga Skums, Elena Shmeleva
With the participation of the studio "Parties" (computer modeling)
Chief engineer: Elena Skachkova
Designers: Anna Litvinova, Nadezhda Kosmina
Customer: “Stroyproekt-komplektatsiya”
Design and construction: 1997 - 2002

Egor Larichev:

This week, the most odious of recent Moscow buildings is solemnly recognized as a museum value.
At the intersection of Ermolaevsky Lane and Malaya Bronnaya, on the corner of the Patriarchs, a year ago a house appeared, called by its creators “Patriarch” (the author of the project is Oleg Dubrovsky from the architectural studio of Sergei Tkachenko). The ten-story egg-colored building is crowned with a round colonnade under a playful dome and a metal openwork spire stuck nearby, which are perfectly visible from the Garden Ring. The pathetic “Patriarch” is impossible not to notice. It was noticed: not a single architectural structure in recent times has caused greater indignation in the professional community. The building has already been contemptuously nicknamed “the cake”, and the debate now is only about what kind of cake it is - sponge-cream or meringue? It’s time for “Patriarch” to be awarded the prize of audience dislikes. And yet the house is recognized as worthy of the collection of the Museum of Architecture.
On June 27, the house will be solemnly “handed over” to the museum by Elena Gonzalez, Bart Goldhoorn and Nikolai Malinin, curators of the museum program “Muar project. Building No...." The goal of the program is to replenish the MuAra collection with projects of the best modern buildings. At exhibitions that change each other every month (the next one, dedicated to “The Patriarch,” will open this Thursday), design documentation and photographs of buildings chosen by the curators are shown, then all the materials on a CD are transferred to the museum’s archives.
The idea of ​​three curators initially seemed strange. Firstly, it is difficult to find an interesting house every month with the current quantity and quality of construction. Secondly, newly built, “fledgling” buildings are transferred to MuAr, although usually they wait for decades for a ticket to museum eternity. And here from construction dirt to museum princes. Riches, because a house that ends up in a museum is automatically considered an event in architecture. So “Patriarch”, who will become the hero of the exhibition. “Building No. 12” now deserves serious, rather than folk-culinary, analysis.
Let's start with the history of the house. As the ancients said, ab ovo - “from the egg.” And in fact, at first, on the site of the “Patriarch”, the same workshop of Sergei Tkachenko intended to build a twelve-story egg-shaped house with rounded “French” balconies and decor parodying the Baroque style. The house would have caused a real sensation: the residents of the Patriarch's could have witnessed a real Koroviev trick, and Moscow - a dashing architectural gesture. The project was even close to approval, but it happened after the financial crisis of 1998. The investor was not satisfied with the loss of space dictated by the complex shape of the building. The “egg” gradually transformed into a mortar, then into a cylinder occupying the entire area of ​​the allocated area. Well, then the rounded walls straightened out - and the “Patriarch” appeared. In its structure, all that remains of the “egg” is a slight narrowing towards the top - it provides “insolation”, that is, it gives the required amount of light to those residents of the “Patriarch” whose windows face a narrow alley.
The egg house was planned as ultra-elite housing for those enlightened wealthy people who gravitate towards living in a modern art object. But the main building of the Patriarch is a completely utilitarian form, the traditional and tacky decor of which causes sharp disapproval from the architectural community. What remains of the “art” is the colonnade-rotunda and spire-tower hovering above the city. They are very strange.
Hovering over the roofs of the low gray houses of Sadovaya, this senseless couple looks like a perfect phantom. The Corinthian capitals of the columns glitter with otherworldly gilding, and the metal structures are astonishing with their ligature. Sculptures depicting the customer of the Patriarch, its architects and even residents should soon appear under the dome of the rotunda. Just a castle in the sky, soaring in the Moscow sky!
But when approaching the “Patriarch”, the beauty dissipates like a fleeting dream. The intersection of Ermolaevsky and Bronnaya is completely crushed by the cyclopean body of the building itself, clearly squeezed into the wrong place. This is the most banal luxury house with garages, baths and a swimming pool, entirely at the mercy of the investor. That is, built on a tiny plot according to the laws of the market. The building threatens to burst from the abundance of filling; protruding balconies make it literally burst at the seams. In the best traditions of Luzhkov’s architecture, “Patriarch” follows the principle of “contextuality,” that is, it tries to make concessions and nods to the houses surrounding it. As a result, it looks even more ridiculous and spreading. A shapeless living amoeba with a classicizing rotunda cap and a spire in its paw. A building with a “bifurcated” character is a classic case of architectural schizophrenia. A case worthy of an architectural physician or even a pathologist rather than an archcritic.
So why did “The Patriarch” end up not in the anatomical theater, but in the Museum of Architecture? Because, says one of the curators of the MuAr Project program, Elena Gonzalez, this house is “an event that goes beyond the scope of architecture.” But if you look at the list of the latest buildings accepted into the MuAra collection, it becomes clear that the curator is being somewhat disingenuous.
It’s just that within the Moscow Ring Road the program’s resources have been exhausted. At first, the buildings “donated” to the museum were full-fledged Moscow arch-objects: residential buildings, shops, banks and schools. But gradually the obvious “shallowing” of buildings and curatorial “outings into nature” began. The MuAr included Alexander Brodsky’s restaurant-pier “95 degrees” on the Pirogovskoye Reservoir - beautiful, but intimate and very fragile in appearance. Then a private residential building in Gorki-2 from Yuri Grigoryan and the Meganom bureau. The last object is generally an out-of-town recruit: “Building No. 11” was the Nizhny Novgorod building of the “Planet IKS” shopping and office center, designed by the workshop of Viktor Bykov.
The transition of curators to “younger” architectural genres and departure from Moscow is clearly related to the lack of new large objects in the capital that would be worthy of the Museum of Architecture. And if there are no worthy and high-quality ones, let there be at least challenging ones. Welcome to MuAr, Mr. “Patriarch”!

Egor Larichev. THE CAPTURE OF THE "PATRIARCH". "Weekly Magazine", June 21, 2002
http://www.guelman.ru/culture/reviews/2002-07-01/Larichev210602/

Marina Khrustaleva:

Patriarchal is a place known for its ability to provoke unpredictable events. Once upon a time, it was planned to build a Bulgakov memorial zone on the empty corner of Malaya Bronnaya and Ermolaevsky Lane. Genius loci was very enterprising and filled the free “cube” with a building almost twice its apparent volume. Up to the middle of the height, this is a completely respectable building with regular French balconies, paired semi-columns and semicircular bay windows in the corners. After the cornice crowning the sixth floor from the side of Malaya Bronnaya, something strange begins: the plane of the wall goes inward, the corner bounces with a loosened frieze, and from somewhere inside a tower begins to grow in ledges. Two almost symmetrical towers, which appeared already in the early sketches, mutated in completely different ways under the influence of the location. The closest one, crowning the rotunda, resembles a layered lid from a box. The distant one, which completes the Babylonian-Borromini chord, gradually, by the will of circumstances, turned from a baroque octagon with lucarnes into a kind of paraphrase on the theme of Tatlin’s tower.

Vladimir Pirogov, head of the sector of the Moscow Monument Protection Department, member of the Expert Consulting Public Council (ECOS) under the Chief Architect of Moscow:

In the 70s, Soviet architects, designing panel houses, were “hungry” and now attacked all possible styles, allowing for wild eclecticism.
- Postmodernism?
- Well, you can say this: An example of modern architectural omnivorousness is a high-rise building near the Patriarch's Ponds, on the corner of Bolshaya Bronnaya and Ermolaevsky Lane. The venerable architect Sergei Tkachenko seemed to sense freedom and tried to “shove” everything he knows into this house - from classical pediments and “crackers” (beams under the eaves) to the Tatlin tower on the roof and the sharp combination of a circle and a square in terms of plan. At the same time, he seemed not to pay attention to the fact that the house was set in a historical environment.
- How did this turn out to be possible? Wasn’t the project approved by all authorities?
- Yes, the project of the house on Patriarch's with the Tatlin tower on the roof, like all large buildings in the center, was passed by the Council under the Chief Architect, which includes the heads of the Workshop for Planning the Central Zone of Moscow, and passed. After all, the council does not check projects from the point of view of taste. He only checks whether the house will not disrupt visual connections, or whether it will overweight it. And the Garden Ring is already built up with tall buildings to such an extent that it is difficult to seriously disturb anything there. A three-point dominant has formed on this segment: a high-rise building on Vosstaniya Square, the Beijing Hotel, and now this tower has appeared in the middle, enclosing this space in a triangle. Maybe this is not bad from an urban planning point of view.

Sergey Dudin:

[…] Patriarch's Ponds have been one of the most beloved and revered places in Moscow since ancient times. True, a completely logical question arises - why ponds, because everyone knows that there is only one pond there? The fact is that this place was once called the Goat Swamp. In the 17th century, the estate of the Patriarch of All Rus' appeared there, and three ponds were built on the site of a drained swamp. By the way, the memory of the three ponds was preserved in the name of Trekhprudny Lane, sung by the romantic and tragic Marina Tsvetaeva: “Hurry to Trekhprudny Lane, this soul of my soul...” She was once born in one of the houses along this lane. Unfortunately, nothing remains of the house.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, two ponds were filled up, God knows why. From 1932 to 1922 the ponds were called Pioneer ponds. For native Muscovites, the ponds remained Patriarchal. The immortal genius of Mikhail Bulgakov covered these alleys with fairy-tale romance and anyone who sits on a bench in the famous alley hopes to see the figure of the mysterious Woland... Although in Bulgakov’s time these places looked somewhat different, and there is no longer a tram that took the life of Berlioz, who did not believe in the fate , and many houses...
[…] Imagine the joy of Mr. Preobrazhensky if he had a chance to see the new house on the Patriarch’s Ponds, which is called “Patriarch”. Yes, the history of the famous ponds does not end with the adventures of Bulgakov’s heroes, miracles continue! For what else, if not a miracle, can this unique house-palace be called. Even Bulgakov’s professor never dreamed of this!
Everything in this building indicates that the main task of its creators is the desire to decorate the historical place so beloved by Muscovites. Despite its impressive size and original architecture, the house fits surprisingly well into the web of nearby alleys, with their, frankly speaking, not large buildings. I would like to emphasize that the corner location of the house always requires a special approach specifically to the problem of architectural design of the corner. Take a look at the so-called “Nirnzee apartment building” in Trekhprudny. There, the architect highlighted a corner of the house with a unique and charming “birdhouse.” "Lanterns" decorate the corners of many other houses in the area. And our hero stands proudly on the corner of Ermolaevsky Lane and Malaya Bronnaya Street, right next to the place where the oil spilled by Annushka played an extremely bad joke on the head of MASSOLIT. The majestic house seems to reign over its small brothers, like a true patriarch.
No matter how modern and fashionable the Art Nouveau or high-tech styles are, they do not fit either with the name of the house or with the houses surrounding the “Patriarch”. Therefore, the architects Oleg Dubrovsky and Sergei Tkachenko chose the lush so-called Russian imperial style, which at one time was designed to link the European architecture of the famous Rastrelli and Rossi with the Byzantine luxury inherent in the royal and boyar chambers. The main lobby was designed by the famous designer Jacques Garcia, creator of the interiors for the Parisian residence of the Sultan of Brunei. Mosaic marble floors, columns, ceilings with exquisite stucco, amazing chandeliers, carpets - all this evokes a somewhat nostalgic sadness for the long-gone times of Russia's wealth. But it can’t help but inspire sweet hope about her future, since you see such beauty before your eyes! I could say a lot about the amenities of living in this house, but I will only dwell on a few. On the ground floor there will be a bar, a conference room, a swimming pool with a heated marble floor, saunas - there is a place to receive guests and entertain them. We can’t stay stuck in the kitchen forever!
Specially trained staff will provide a wide variety of services: from massages and apartment cleaning, to home delivery of dinners, air tickets and fireplace maintenance. Yes, yes, every apartment has a real fireplace. The latest amenities include a garage - you just press a button and the car is sent to its designated place. You can get from the apartment to the pool by a special elevator from the hall on your floor. In general, automation in the house, as they say, is “at the proper academic level” - at the request of apartment owners, it is planned to install an “intelligent home” system everywhere, when everything in the apartment can be turned on and off using a remote control with touch control (on the remote control screen there is a plan of the apartment with all the details, just touch it). It is assumed that the owner of the property can refuse types of services that he does not need - as we know, one does not drag one to heaven by the ears. But it would probably be very disappointing to live in such a house and not enjoy the fruits of civilization... Moreover, the expected payment for comfort is planned to be from 2.5 to 3.5 USD. e. per day. The rest of the utility bills are the same as in any other house.
The house will be commissioned in December of this year, and one cannot help but envy its future inhabitants. If Woland had visited Moscow these days, he would not have missed the opportunity to admire our amazingly prettier city from the charming turret crowning a new solution to the “housing problem”, which, in his opinion, once spoiled us...

Olga Kabanova:

[...] It seems that there is no strength to be surprised at any number of houses that have been built in Moscow in recent years, but the “Patriarch” - multi-storey, magnificent, lavishly decorated, adorned with an outlandish tower, flown onto the roof clearly from another text - is a clear example of the New Russian and Novomoskovsky For some reason, style stood up like a piece of cake in my throat, which there was no way to swallow. Well, it can’t be digested, although there are cooler, more massive, richer, more representative houses in the city. It seems that such important houses should be built for the rich and arrogant by bald, cynical guys, without imagination, culture and the habit of looking back at world architectural fashion. If such people look forward, they only look at the backs of their superiors and organizations.
But “Patriarch” was born in one of the best Moscow architectural workshops - the studio of S. Tkachenko - and was invented by a young, cheerful, completely “advanced” (self-determination) and fashionably haircut team, which already had several stylish and modern Moscow buildings to its credit. This team is headed by Oleg Dubrovsky, who is not only giving, but also living up to expectations, with a positive outlook on life, calm cheerfulness and charm, reminiscent of the actor and director Sergei Bodrov (junior).
The story of the appearance of "Patriarch" as presented by Dubrovsky is as follows. After the default, before which the team worked at Mosproekt-2, it became difficult to get orders, so all possible building projects in the center were required to be made “passable” - that is, with turrets, decorations and other historical pomp. The authorities wanted to do it this way and only this way - at least cry, at least laugh. It was at this sad time, either out of despair, or out of anger, that the house was outlined in general terms. It was decided to look at the problem cheerfully - in an era of high technology that does not reign in ours, to use slave labor and make something ridiculously man-made, with a Babel tower on its head, with colonnades and domes. Such a fundamental madhouse. The limit of absurdity. Because putting up a building is boring. Yes, it towers over the Patriarchs and presses. But if the customer wanted so many floors, then there will certainly be so many. In general, they decided to respond to the social (or boss) order in full. This is how the hero of Sergei Bodrov (junior) directly formulated the text, which was just taking shape in people’s minds. Some reacted to his speeches with laughter, others very seriously - with indignation and fear.
They laugh little at the yellow “Patriarch” they have built, but are increasingly indignant. There are several reasons for this. Not the least of which is that not all architectural ideas were brought to life. Both daring and not so daring. Not very well - due to lack of funds: the façade was not laid out with white stone, the joinery was sloppy, the large two-volume tower, like a bell tower, was not built, which is why the house looks somewhat fake. Well, daring ideas - to concrete, for example, a pond for an elite parking lot, and build a covered market on the remaining areas - were easy to ignore. Because on the pond they still had to build a powerful monument to Bulgakov, which would include a multi-meter primus stove walking into the water and a bench placed on a pedestal on which the bronze writer sits. Much cooler.
Another reason why “The Patriarch” has not been read by the average architectural consumer is that it is difficult to joke and cause provocations in our city. And not because the history of modern architecture does not know them (it knows them, and so does Moscow), but because in all seriousness and with great pathos, many absolutely hilarious buildings were built here, much more like a cruel joke and inappropriate provocation. Here the situation is similar with National Bolshevism, which, despite all Limonov’s steepness, will never surpass the madness of Ampilov’s supporters who are pure in heart and mind. Thus, “Patriarch” is quite comparable, for example, to the new building of Galina Vishnevskaya’s school. And it was built without any ridicule by very young and serious people. But not far from the school, on Ostozhenka, a Moscow version of one of Gaudi’s most famous Barcelona houses was built - well, absolutely hilarious, a real parody, pure kitsch. And “Patriarch” is apparently too big, expensive and majestic to be easily laughed at. And a square meter in his spacious apartments is not a joke.
Another consideration cited by those dissatisfied with the “Patriarch”: they say, this is a special place, Moscow, with a cultural tradition. But what good can you expect from a place about which it was once written that either the devil himself or his henchman sat there on a bench and joked in the most unpleasant way, and many people believed it as a reality. In general, this place is not clean.
Responding to attacks from his colleagues, architect Oleg Dubrovsky has repeatedly said that it is impossible to make a nature reserve out of the Patriarch’s Ponds. It has changed, and its inhabitants have changed. The architecture simply reflects these changes honestly. After all, no one seriously encroaches on rating TV shows that go beyond the bounds of decency, since the viewer loves them. True, Dubrovsky also notes with satisfaction that the customer today wants to build in a modern way, and there will be no more houses like “Patriarch” in his life. They laughed it off. So, maybe there is no point in blaming the architect if he did not order the frozen hit.

What do you think about this?

Daniil Dondurey, editor-in-chief of the magazine "Art of Cinema" (lives on Patriarch's):

It seems to me that this is a fake building made of papier-mâché - a fake. Old Moscow, a patriarchal place that preserves many collective myths, a place of national memory, received a house that could only be appropriate in the United Arab Emirates. It is like a cake with sour cream, which cannot be eaten without harming your health. It's a real shame. A vulgar mixture of different styles. This is worse than television series that distort the consciousness of the population of a huge country. TV series are quickly forgotten, but the house is in front of you for decades.

Natalia Sipovskaya, editor-in-chief of the Pinakothek magazine (works for the Patriarchs):

Moscow, I think, will devour everything, it is such a plasma-shaped city. She ate Tsereteli. But this house shocks me. He is terribly unpleasant: rich, pretentious, awkward, with a skirt on the roof. It’s as if people, not knowing how to sew seams, decided to build a coat with lace.

Anatoly Smelyansky, Doctor of Art History (lives on Patriarch's):

Yes, this is a noticeable house, with such a funny Tatlin tower on the roof. Flight of new Russian fantasy. He doesn't annoy me, although I know that many people simply hate him. It is huge, solemn, looks like such a miracle and organizes the space around. But this place is terribly architecturally filthy - there are houses from the beginning of the century, and such gray, meaningless TsEK boxes. So it does not spoil or destroy the landscape.

Olga Kabanova. ON THE CORNER OF THE PATRIARCHES. Izvestia, March 13, 2002
http://izvestia.ru/culture/article15613

Kirill Ass:

[…] But here we see the residential building “Patriarch” of S. Tkachenko’s workshop on the corner of M. Bronnaya and the former Zholtovsky street. And what does this building reveal to us? An endless list of inaccuracies, mismatches, and absurdities. Let's take a closer look at this curiosity.
Let's start with the main thing, with the body of the building, its mass and shape. What made the architects build a thirteen-story house in this place? Neither the fairly spacious area, nor the surrounding houses, nor the logic of the development of the fronts of the intersecting streets encouraged this. Peace has always been a valuable feature of this corner of Moscow; it is not without reason that it is one of the most expensive areas. An irregular quadrangle of five to seven-story buildings limited the space, smoothly converging through the dense greenery of the square to the culmination of the entire area - the surface of the Patriarch's Pond. Above it in the south rises a yellow residential building from the 1940s, nobly asymmetrical, crowning with its colonnade the entire composition of the quarter, and obviously built not without intention and sense.
Now, in the far corner of this quadrangle, the “Patriarch” house sticks out defiantly, whose completion, as if in fear that it might be accidentally overlooked, the architects decorated with two “spatial compositions” at once. The house, in essence, is completely devoid of a clear shape - sluggish curvatures, vague hints of some figures, fragmented decor - everything contradicts the mass of the building, as if it were both embarrassed by its size and proud of it, like the tallest student in the class. The building stretches out towards the intersection of streets, trying in vain to appropriate the entire space of the pond. There is no respect for the neighbors in the block: the house of the former Moscow Architectural Society, architect. Markov is disdainfully brushed aside, to say nothing of other “ordinary buildings”. So the even and balanced perimeter of the Patriarch's Ponds was suddenly tactlessly destroyed. For what? Only at the whim of the client? With current housing prices in this area, such a height is completely unnecessary - after all, apartments will still be snapped up at any price!
Perhaps this form is caused by the internal need of the building? Let's take a closer look at it. Alas! We are forced to note that, in principle, a building of this type cannot have internal motives for external expression - after all, it is shell & core, an empty box. So we have to come to terms with the fact that the complex composition of the facades is only a figment of the architects’ imagination: after all, they did not pay attention to external influences, and the building has no internal ones.
But since there are no motives, there are at least the necessary elements. There was once a sad joke that windows are the main enemy of the façade. In our case it is hardly possible to say more precisely. It would seem, what would be easier than, without any obstacles (since there are no layouts), to cut windows of the correct size? But the architect's hand trembled - and the openings are more unpleasant than the other. And it's not just the proportions - the fillings are terrible. What prevented at least the frames and transoms from being made proportionate to themselves? Why are vertical divisions almost five times thicker than horizontal ones? Either this is some kind of ridiculous plan, or simply unacceptable indifference to one’s work. The windows are designed as a kind of French balconies. Or they pretend to be them, you can’t tell them from below. The gratings are carefully drawn, but it seems as if a pencil was lost and only coal was at hand. What a contrast with the neighboring house, where the ligature of the balcony railings is so touching. Under the windows on the rounded corner of the house, the bars suddenly bent away from the facade, having lost all meaning. Decorativeness in itself. It’s the same everywhere, as if the architects are only concerned with some isolated fragments of the building, and it never comes together into a complete idea, perfected in all respects.
Project manager S. Tkachenko, in a conversation with G. Revzin in the magazine “Project Classics”, talks about “an element, perhaps of a joke, ... irony” manifested in the use of details, about the “distance” created by irony. It’s a pity that the distance is so small that it’s not visible. The skillful use of refined decoration can help to hide deficiencies in spatial composition caused by insurmountable building conditions or the awkwardness of the architect, of which we find many examples in the past. Avoiding decor, in turn, reveals all the inherent features of the structure or interior. But here the decor is either used inappropriately or terribly drawn, and it not only does not mask the hopeless disproportion, but, on the contrary, accentuates it, making the vulgarity of the building blatant.
Art critic G. Revzin is delighted with the quality of the parts. But where are they? What the unfortunate passerby gets is a pitiful semblance of details. The giant undivided columns on the first floor step in front of us in a ragged rhythm, threatening to crush us. The deep throat of the entrance turns out its lip above the heads of the spectators, trimmed from the inside with a miserable slatted ceiling. This is what we see before us. Let's look up. Several more details are falling on us - some kind of huge modules are hanging from the facade. Here and there, scattered schematic rustications weakly indicate aggressiveness.
Get away from this dangerous neighborhood! Let's take a look, standing to the side. All the increasing rows of pilasters rush upward. But what hurts the eye? The pilasters are dark - and all are terribly low, and the capitals are only carelessly sketched out. The pitch of the pilasters is somehow inconsistent. There are hints of cornices between them. The hints, unfortunately, are crude. On the tenth floor, it seems, I got tired of drawing the cornices, and the pilasters, while maintaining their thickness, suddenly became three times higher. Above them, at a height inaccessible to vision, there seems to be a well-drawn entablature. For some reason it is littered with modules, and besides, it suddenly opens up to give room at the turn for the clock, which is already completely indistinguishable from the ground.
Above all of this hovers a rotunda, whose order was unvarnishedly copied from Vignola (who, by the way, almost never followed his “rules” in practice), and whose columns are devoid of narrowing. However, the rotunda turns out to be not a rotunda at all, but some kind of curved figure, impossible in plan, along which the entablature stretches without any bracing, as the Baroque masters never dreamed of. This figure is also covered with those same two “compositions” made of supposedly stainless steel. One of them has a mollusk shell as its ancestor, and the second is a parody of Tatlin’s tower. The whole house is painted in flashy yellow and white, in imitation of the pseudo-tectonic “Moscow” coloring, which destroys the form even more, because everything that decorates the facade has nothing to do with the structure of the building or its meaning, and is essentially completely abstract a pattern of motley, as it were, “architectural” elements, composed in the most impossible way.
Now, having taken a break from the influx of impressions, let’s try to understand what it’s all about? We read about the excellent quality of the parts. But besides the quality of the craft work, there is the work of the artist, which is omitted here. And when the details are finally ready, it would not hurt to place them on the body at home with dignity and taste. And this also seemed unnecessary, as you can see. And when it comes to “molding”, dozens of pilasters and kilometers of cornices, the delicate work is canceled. But here there is an arrogant (in every sense) contempt for the “common” person - all the beauty “from Vignola” is for the dear client in the sky, or on the back, “his”, courtyard facade, while let passers-by be content with the plastered load-bearing pillars at the entrance - The only truly honest details of this building are to avoid leaving the underground parking lot.
S. Tkachenko spoke about “collage”, “irony” in relation to the so-called Moscow style. But as a mockery of the “Moscow style,” the house failed, because it repeats all the compromises inherent in the object of ridicule. Here, all the innate features of Moscow architecture of the 90s are presented as if for selection. It turns out something like “ate the little siskin.” S. Tkachenko, like almost all of our masters, seems to not see something important - form and proportions, the most important relationship between material, detail and the whole. The house is completely devoid of them. More precisely, these relationships, of course, exist, but simply no one paid attention to them. And this cannot be the fundamental position of the architect, because such an approach generally takes him outside the field of architecture. And then there is no need to discuss the details, the subtlety of irony, etc. This is about something else. But this topic was not mentioned in the quoted conversation. But besides a few neat casts, there is everything else, everything in between. And in essence, this “between” is the main thing in architecture. It is not only the profile that is important, but also the line along which it goes. Not only the capitals are important, but also the entasis and intercolumnium. The flesh of the building is important, not just the makeup. Precision is important. Tact is important. Taste is important.
After all, if an architect is subtle enough to clearly see the shortcomings of Moscow's construction in recent years, then is it worth wasting his time and the client's money on monumental giggles?

Evgenia Mikulina:

[…] Stalin's buildings are characterized by a certain grotesqueness - a conventional exaggeration of masses, details, image. This grotesque is a natural reaction between incredible architecture and the standard environment it was intended to transform.
The “Patriarch” house of Sergei Tkachenko’s workshop seems to be an interpretation of this motif. Its authors assert an ironic attitude towards the tasks of the profession, refer to Vignola and declare that they hoped to make the great theorist of proportions laugh with their subtly thought out pranks. They are well acquainted with the literature on which Soviet classics of the 1950s relied.
But if the classics are built on the “structure-tectonics-decor” hierarchy, then “Patriarch” is an anti-classics, here the decor is fundamentally more important than everything else. Behind the incredible amount of details, you literally cannot see the house: behind the cornices, columns, balconies, it is as if there is no wall; it seems that all possible rules for constructing an architectural form have been violated.
Meanwhile, much has been taken into account in the appearance of this house. For example, it is pyramidal - for functional (insolation) and aesthetic reasons: its silhouette slightly resembles both “high-rise buildings” and their prototype - ancient Russian tents (here the “literary” name of the house partly materializes). Its vertical facade is three-part: there is a “heavy” base, a neutral middle and a lightweight upper part. That is, quite Zholtovsky. And even the constructivists “inherited” it a little: the design is crowned with a paraphrase of Tatlin’s “Tower of the Third International.”
The Patriarch looks like a feast of architectural excesses, the taste of which is spoiled by numerous violations of the recipe: for example, all the details are not to scale, and all the rows of the order along the vertical of the central volume are the same. It’s clear that these are just architectural jokes, but by the time you figure it out, it’s no longer funny. However, the very fact of grotesque exaggeration connects “Patriarch” with Stalinist prototypes, and the awareness and irony of this gesture takes architecture to a new level. This is not a poorly realized imitation of the classical tradition, but precisely its interpretation, to which every free creative person has every right.
“Patriarch” is an example of what would have happened if the decor had been a true sign of the “Stalinist style” - a position most often held by both critics of retro fashion and its adherents from commercial construction. But the essence of this style is in the interpretation of volume, in the nature of the division of masses, in proportional principles. All three objects in this issue show that in the existing negative practice of “neo-Stalinist” architecture, it is not the style itself or the idea of ​​​​turning to it that is flawed, but an incorrect understanding of its characteristics and the methodology of working with its techniques. And that the creation of a “new Stalinist classic” today is just another professional architectural task. Which nothing prevents you from doing well.

Georgy Kokhtagora:

[…] And now, from general considerations, let’s move on to specifics and get closer to the city’s most bleeding wound—the Patriarch’s Ponds. Here, at the bottom of a dehydrated ancient pond, everything has been turned upside down and dug up. Someone wanted to drill into the bone marrow of Moscow. Looking at all this sadistic surgery, mocking and drooling, from the corner of Malaya Bronnaya and Ermolaevsky Lane looks at an amazing building - a new elite residential building, blasphemously nicknamed “Patriarch”. And it is the Patriarch house that can be called the culmination and apotheosis of the “Moscow style”. This bright yellow architectural hysteria is a corner multi-story building with a manic repetition of absolutely identical double pilasters along the entire height of its facades and the same stubborn repetition of glazed semicircular balconies posing as bay windows. The colossus ends with an anniversary cake of several rotundas molded on top of each other, in turn crowned - oh, gods! - a kind of paraphrase of the “Monument to the Third International” by avant-garde sculptor Vladimir Tatlin!... From now on, this extreme architectural manifesto can be seen from everywhere, confusing the gaze and shaking the imagination of even seasoned aksakals from architecture and art history. To this it must be added that the Patriarch house is the creation of the architect Sergei Tkachenko. And such creations, of course, are not always so exalted; in the “new Moscow” you can find dozens, or even hundreds, and they all have their own authors, some extremely famous

Georgy Kokhtagora. MOSCOW CHIMERA. ARCHITECTURE OF LAST TIMES. "Tomorrow", January 7, 2004

"Patriarch" on Patriarch's

The history of the famous ponds does not end with the adventures of Bulgakov's heroes, miracles continue! For what else, if not a miracle, can one call this unique house-palace? Even Bulgakov’s professor never dreamed of this!

If Woland had visited Moscow these days, he would not have missed the opportunity to admire our amazingly prettier city from the charming turret crowning a new solution to the “housing problem”, which, in his opinion, once spoiled us...

Everything in this building indicates that the main task of its creators is the desire to decorate the historical place so beloved by Muscovites. Despite its impressive size and original architecture, the house fits surprisingly well into the web of nearby alleys with their small buildings.

To view the “Patriarch”, we will enter from the Garden Ring onto M. Bronnaya Street.

Built in 2002, the house caused a storm of public criticism and shook up the professional community.

Some admired the new building, others caustically called the house a “cake” for the round colonnade and metal spire with a ladder crowning it.

It seems that there is no strength to be surprised at all the houses that have been built in Moscow in recent years, but the “Patriarch” - multi-story, magnificent, lavishly decorated, adorned with an outlandish tower, flown onto the roof clearly from another text - is a clear example of the New Russian and Novomoskovsky style, why - a piece of cake in the throat that there is no way to swallow.

The house has its own coat of arms,symbolizing spirituality and luxury.

The architects O. Dubrovsky and S. Tkachenko chose the magnificent so-called Russian imperial style, which at one time was designed to link the European architecture of the famous Rastrelli and Rossi with the Byzantine luxury inherent in the royal and boyar chambers.

The main lobby was designed by the famous designer Jacques Garcia, creator of the interiors for the Parisian residence of the Sultan of Brunei.

Mosaic marble floors, columns, ceilings with exquisite stucco, amazing chandeliers, carpets - all this evokes a somewhat nostalgic sadness for the long-gone times of Russia's wealth. But it also cannot help but inspire sweet hope about her future, since you see such beauty before your eyes.

Despite its impressive size, the building has only 28 apartments.There are many amenities. On the ground floor there is a bar, a conference room, a swimming pool with a heated marble floor, saunas - there is a place to receive guests and entertain them.

Specially trained staff provides a wide variety of services: from massages and apartment cleaning, to home delivery of dinners, air tickets and fireplace maintenance. Each apartment has a real fireplace. The latest amenities include a garage - you just press a button and the car is sent to its designated place. You can get from the apartment to the pool by a special elevator from the hall on your floor. (The photos below will be from the Internet).

At the request of apartment owners, you can install an “intelligent home” system, when everything in the apartment can be turned on and off using a remote control with touch control (on the screen of the remote control there is a plan of the apartment with all the details, you just need to touch it).

According to old-timers, Alla Pugacheva wanted to buy one of the apartments, but she was refused. This is understandable. The singer's fans, replacing each other, would definitely spend days and nights under her windows. The remaining neighbors, who paid 53 thousand dollars per sq. m. meter, prefer to live in peace and quiet - they have the right to this.

The building is crowned by two structures.One of them in its appearance resembles a twisted tower-monument, which was never built according to the design of V. E. Tatlin in honor of the Third International.

According to the original plan, the height of the tower was supposed to reach 400 meters. Inside the tower there should have been rotating rooms, the windows of which would follow the sun all the time.

The roof itself is studded with air conditioners, hoods and antennas.

Another design looks more like a meringue or a whipped cream top.

Let's go up to the roof of the house.

What struck me most was that this meringue is made of wood and plays a purely decorative role.

There's nothing inside, just a structure on the roof.

The circumference of the house is decorated with 12 fiberglass sculptures coated with stone.

Their second is sculptures by V. Kurochkin.

The sculptures are made with pretensions to antiquity: a city planner, a chronicler, a builder with a brick, a builder with a trowel, a figure of debate, a muse, a sculptor, a stonemason and two more allegories - a whip (city guardian) and a gingerbread (good citizen).

The Patriarch residential complex is located in a unique historical area of ​​Moscow next to the Patriarch's Ponds. This place gained worldwide fame thanks to the famous novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. Today the Patriarch's Ponds area is called the “silver mile” of Moscow. Elite apartments in houses on Patriarch's are highly valued in the capital's real estate market for their rare combination of rich infrastructure, quiet side streets and convenient transport accessibility.

Apartments in the residential complex "Patriarch"

In the residential complex "Patriarch" 28 apartments deluxe class area from 148 to 380 sq.m. All apartments can be equipped with a fireplace. The windows have wooden double-glazed windows, the ceiling height is 3.2 meters. Located on the top floor luxurious two-level penthouse with an outdoor terrace.

Description and infrastructure

The Patriarch residential complex was created according to the design of the architectural bureau of Sergei Tkachenko and is a monolithic 12-story building that noticeably dominates the surrounding buildings.

The facades are richly decorated with balconies, columns, and sculptures. The roof of the “Patriarch” is topped with an unusual turret - a kind of tribute to the ambitious, but never realized project of the “Tatlin Tower”. However, many famous architects and urban planners have repeatedly stated that the Patriarch residential complex is one of the ugliest buildings in the capital.

As for the engineering and technical equipment of the complex, it is performed at the highest level. The control system allows you to control the operation of equipment remotely from a single remote control, the screen of which displays the functioning of all systems in the apartment - lighting, microclimate, audio-video complexes. The building is equipped with an autonomous transformer substation, electrical transformer substation, automated fire extinguishing and smoke removal systems. The permanent presence of engineering personnel has been organized.

The residents of the house are especially proud of the exclusive design of the luxurious lobby by the famous French designer Jacques Garcia.

Infrastructure facilities include a luxurious swimming pool, decorated with marble and a lighting system, a gym, a bath complex, including a sauna, hammam, and a snow room. Residents have access to a cigar room, a café-bar, and a fur storage facility.

The residential complex has underground two-level garage and 24-hour security.

The wealth of Patriarch Kirill: how the head of the Russian Orthodox Church earned capital. Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus' did not waste time in vain in the nineties: his professional portfolio includes the organization of tobacco, oil, automobile and food businesses. According to various estimates, all this hectic activity brought the head of the Russian Orthodox Church capital of 1.5-4 billion dollars. Now the patriarch has at his disposal an apartment in the famous “House on the Embankment”, a Breguet watch worth about 30 thousand euros, palaces in Peredelkino and Gelendzhik, as well as a personal fleet. Novaya Gazeta published on its pages incriminating evidence against the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus' Kirill, in to the world - Gundyaev Vladimir Mikhailovich. According to the newspaper, in the 90s, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, being a modest head of the Department for External Church Relations (DECR MP), was actively involved in business, thanks to which he made a fortune of several billion. Yes, not rubles, but dollars.

The patriarch's business career began in 1993. Then, with the participation of the Moscow Patriarchate, the financial and trading group “Nika” arose, the vice-president of which was Archpriest Vladimir Veriga, commercial director of the DECR MP. A year later, under the government of the Russian Federation and at the same time in the OSCC, two commissions on humanitarian aid appeared: the first decided what assistance could be exempt from taxes and excise taxes, and the second imported this assistance through the church and sold it to commercial structures. Thus, most tax-exempt aid was distributed through the regular trade network, at regular market prices.

Through this channel, in 1996 alone, the DECR imported about 8 billion cigarettes into the country (data from the government commission on humanitarian aid). This caused serious damage to the “tobacco kings” of that time, who were forced to pay duties and excise taxes and therefore lost in the competition of the DECR MP.

According to Doctor of Historical Sciences Sergei Bychkov, who published several articles about the patriarch’s tobacco business, when Kirill decided to leave this business, more than $50 million worth of “church” cigarettes remained in customs warehouses. During the criminal war, in particular, an assistant to deputy Zhirinovsky, a certain Zen, was killed for these cigarettes.

And here is a letter from the State Customs Committee of the Russian Federation to the Moscow Customs Administration dated February 8, 1997, regarding “church” cigarettes: “In connection with the appeal of the Commission on International Humanitarian and Technical Assistance under the Government of the Russian Federation and the decision of the Chairman of the Government dated January 29, 1997 No. VC-P22/38 authorizes customs clearance of tobacco products in the prescribed manner with payment only of excise duty entered into the customs territory before 01/01/97, in accordance with the decision of the above-mentioned Commission.”

So, in fact, since then Metropolitan Kirill has been given a new title - “Tabacchi”, writes Novaya Gazeta, clarifying that now he is no longer given that title. Now the patriarch is usually called “Skiner” - thanks to the light hand of Orthodox bloggers, who drew attention to the enormous importance in the life and work of Kirill of his passion for alpine skiing (this hobby is served by a villa in Switzerland and a private jet, and in Krasnaya Polyana it helps to consolidate informal relationships with powerful of this world).

By the way, Kirill himself once tried to justify his participation in the tobacco business: “The people who were involved in this did not know what to do: burn these cigarettes or send them back? We turned to the government, and it made a decision: recognize this as a humanitarian cargo and provide the opportunity to implement it.” Government representatives categorically denied this information, after which Patriarch Alexy II liquidated the DECR MP commission and created a new ROC MP Commission on humanitarian assistance, headed by Bishop Alexy (Frolov).

In addition to the aforementioned Nika Fund, DECR MP was the founder of the commercial bank Peresvet, JSC International Economic Cooperation (IEC), JSC Free People's Television (SNT) and a number of other structures. Kirill’s most profitable business after 1996 was the export of oil through the MES, which was exempt from customs duties at the request of Alexy II. Kirill was represented at the MES by Bishop Victor (Pyankov), who now lives as a private citizen in the USA. The company's annual turnover in 1997 was about $2 billion.

Due to the confidentiality of this information, it is now difficult to understand whether Kirill continues to participate in the oil business, but there is one very eloquent fact. A few days before the start of the US military operation against Saddam Hussein, Kirill’s deputy, Bishop Feofan (Ashurkov), flew to Iraq.

In 2000, information was made public about Metropolitan Kirill’s attempts to penetrate the market of marine biological resources (caviar, crabs, seafood) - the relevant government structures allocated quotas for catching Kamchatka crab and shrimp to the company established by the hierarch (JSC Region) (total volume - more than 4 thousand tons).

According to Kaliningrad journalists, Metropolitan Kirill, as the ruling bishop of the ROC MP diocese in the Kaliningrad region, participated in an automobile joint venture in Kaliningrad. It is characteristic that Kirill, even after becoming patriarch, did not appoint a diocesan bishop to the Kaliningrad see, leaving it under his direct control.

In 2004, Nikolai Mitrokhin, a researcher at the Center for Shadow Economy Research at the Russian State University for the Humanities, published a monograph on the shadow economic activities of the Russian Orthodox Church MP. The value of the assets controlled by Metropolitan Kirill was estimated in this work at $1.5 billion. Two years later, journalists from Moscow News tried to count the assets of the head of the church Ministry of Foreign Affairs and came to the conclusion that they already totaled $4 billion.

And according to The New Times, in 2002, Metropolitan Kirill bought a penthouse in the “House on the Embankment” overlooking the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. This, by the way, is “the only apartment in Moscow registered specifically in the name of the metropolitan by his secular surname Gundyaev, about which there is a corresponding entry in the cadastral register.”

Another attribute of this life that has become the subject of widespread discussion is a Breguet watch worth about 30 thousand euros, which Ukrainian journalists photographed on the patriarch’s left hand next to the monastic rosary. This happened the day after Kirill pompously broadcast live on the main Ukrainian TV channels: “It is very important to learn Christian asceticism... Asceticism is the ability to regulate one’s consumption... This is a person’s victory over lust, over passions, over instinct. And it is important that both rich and poor possess this quality.”

The luxurious motorcades of Patriarch Kirill and the security services from the Federal Protective Service that he uses have become the talk of the town. In Moscow, when the patriarch is driving, all the streets along his route are blocked, which, naturally, causes mass indignation among car owners. In Ukraine, Kirill’s half-kilometer motorcades completely shocked local residents: in the neighboring country, even the president travels much more modestly.

We must, however, give Kirill his due: for official visits he charters planes from Transaero, and uses his personal fleet only for personal purposes.

A separate and almost inexhaustible topic is the palaces and residences of the patriarch. Kirill strives to keep up with the top officials of the state in this matter. The newly built palace in Peredelkino was considered his permanent residential residence, for which several houses of local residents were demolished. From the windows of trains in the Kyiv direction, it looks like a large Russian tower - like the Terem Palace in the Kremlin. Kirill doesn’t like living there: the railway passing next door worries him.

Therefore, the current patriarch ordered to redecorate the palace in the Danilov Monastery, which did not look poor before. The construction of the patriarchal palace in Gelendzhik was not without scandals, which primarily aroused the indignation of local environmentalists.

The scandal surrounding the patriarch’s Gelendzhik dacha first broke out a year ago, when activists from the “Ecological Watch” in the North Caucasus entered the territory of the facility under construction. During the inspection, they found out that at least 10 hectares of a unique forest are enclosed by a three-meter fence, and in the center there is a strange “pretentious” building, topped with domes - something between a temple and a mansion.

At the same time, according to Novaya Gazeta, in 2004 the Russian Orthodox Church received at its disposal a plot of land with an area of ​​only 2 hectares. Moreover, this land belonged to the Forest Fund; accordingly, it was prohibited by law to erect permanent buildings on this land. However, large-scale construction began here. Environmentalists claim that during construction, 5 to 10 hectares of valuable forest were cut down, which is confirmed by images from space.

The Russian Orthodox Church hastened to refute the arguments of the “greens”. The Moscow Patriarchate referred to the act of Rospotrebnadzor, according to which no facts of illegal logging were recorded on the territory of the Spiritual and Cultural Center. Environmentalists, in turn, point to the fact that the document was drawn up in December 2010 - that is, several years after the destruction of the forest.

Another scandal surrounding the patriarch’s dacha, again initiated by environmentalists, broke out in October of last year. Then activists said that the fire that broke out at the end of September of the same year on the territory of the Spiritual and Cultural Center of the Moscow Patriarchate could have been the result of arson. As Novaya noted then, according to the law, builders are required to pay monetary compensation in the hundreds of thousands of rubles for destroyed trees. And if the trees burned down in a fire, then payment of compensation can be avoided.

At the beginning of 2011, information appeared in the press that the Russian Orthodox Church facility under construction near Gelendzhik was nothing more than a dacha for the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus' Kirill. However, the information department of the Moscow Patriarchate refuted these arguments, saying that the spiritual center of the Russian Orthodox Church in southern Russia is being built on this site, along with the existing centers in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The location of the residential complex determined the further appearance, as well as the finishing of the entire complex. The area of ​​old Moscow, as well as the Patriarch's Ponds, attracts many connoisseurs of real pictorial art and endurance in this style. The lobby is decorated in marble. The mosaic floor, and in general the whole atmosphere, immerses you in a different time and era. Luxurious spacious apartments, with a full range of equipment and services. Water filtration, ventilation system, satellite TV, internet, telephone lines. All these services are available to you during your stay.

Renting apartments in the Patriarch residential complex has a whole list of advantages. An accurate security system guarantees you peace of mind and healthy sleep, we are always on guard while you relax. An underground garage for your car, a swimming pool, a solarium - you can find all this in this residential complex. A special pass regime allows the security service to instantly identify fraudsters and not allow them into the territory of the residential complex. In some apartments, you can find spacious winter gardens, as well as greenhouses. There you can grow flowers or fruits all year round.

You can rent an apartment in the Patriarch residential complex with the help of official representatives or special real estate bureaus. The airy rounded balconies of the residential complex are made in the old Moscow design. Huge loggias, glazed with high-quality double-glazed windows, make sitting on the balcony more pleasant and cozy. The opportunity to build a fireplace, or additionally install an air conditioner, is present here.

Rich infrastructure, as well as the latest home equipment technologies, allow you not to move too far from home. This is very convenient, especially when you have children who need attention.

You can either rent an apartment in the Patriarch residential complex or buy an apartment at competitive prices.