On Chistoprudny Boulevard in Moscow, there is a building decorated with outlandish animals, birds, flowers and ornaments. Where are they from here?
At the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries, large-scale construction began on Chistoprudny Boulevard: old one- and two-story buildings were demolished, and new apartment buildings were erected in their place, in which the latest engineering structures with load-bearing reinforced concrete floors were used, which made it possible to create spacious rooms with high ceilings without internal partitions.
One of these houses was number 14, built in 1908-1909 for the nearby Trinity Church on Gryazeh. The funds for the construction were donated by the family of the merchants Olovyanishnikovs. The church community provided some apartments to needy parishioners, the rest were rented out. With the money raised, the community maintained a parish school and supported low-income families. The authors of the building project are the architect Lev Kravetsky and the engineer Pyotr Mikini.
Structurally, the house was distinguished by its simplicity: rectangular in plan, five storeys high, with two entrances and a hipped roof. Its main feature was the expressive decor of the facades, which was created by the artist Sergei Vashkov. This candidacy was proposed by the teachers of the Olovyanishnikovs, even before graduating from the Stroganov School, Vashkov began to work at their factory of church utensils, and by 1901 he took over as its artistic director.
According to Vashkov's sketches, a “carpet” of terracotta bas-reliefs depicting fairy-tale animals, birds and plants was laid on the third and fourth floors of the house. The artist was a student of Viktor Vasnetsov, a great connoisseur of the traditions of Russian painting, especially the church trend. He called the decor of the Dmitrievsky Cathedral in Vladimir as the main inspiration for the design of the apartment building of the Trinity Church on Gryazekh. Vashkov's bas-reliefs were not a direct borrowing, but rather an author's rethinking, a transfer of ancient images to the realities of the early 20th century: his figures of animals and plants received an emphatically grotesque, large-scale appearance.
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The basement of the building was decorated with rustic wood, and the central part of the roof was framed by an openwork lattice. Above the three upper arched windows in the left half of the façade, there was a medallion with the year of construction in the Cyrillic counting system: "ATI". The second floor windows had a symmetrical pair of balconies with protruding columns and a curly fence.
After the completion of construction, Vashkov received an apartment in the building and lived there until the end of his life. In 1945, it was decided to enlarge the house, and the architect Boris Lvovich Topaz was assigned to manage the project. He developed a project for the superstructure of the house for two additional floors. During the work, they lost a number of bas-reliefs, the roof lattice, dismantled the balconies and the hipped roof. At the same time, according to art critics, the reconstruction of the building was carried out relatively delicately, and a significant part of the original concept was preserved.
From the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 1920s, one of the many Moscow confectionery cafes of Bartels operated on the first floor of the building. After the revolution and nationalization, the upper floors remained residential, the lower ones were occupied by shops.
In Soviet times, the house appeared in films: for example, in the comedy "Foundling" and "Pokrovskie Vorota" 14. Since 1989, the building's basement has been rented by the Marine Aquarium on Chistye Prudy pet shop. According to the residents, salt water and high humidity provoke the growth of fungus on the walls and ceilings, which causes significant damage to the building. In the early 2000s, another commercial tenant made changes to the historical appearance of the house: one of the central windows of the second floor was converted into a door, a cast-iron staircase stylized as Art Nouveau with an openwork lattice decorated with figures of animals and birds was brought to it. In the interiors of the interior, the original decor has been partially preserved: lattice of stairs, doors, relief stucco moldings on the ceilings.
In 2016, the facade was restored with funds from the Moscow government, but no full restoration of the stucco decoration was carried out, so the bas-reliefs continue to collapse.