Transformation of approaches to the composition of residential house facades in Moscow in the 1930s

Abstract

Introduction. The example of not implemented projects reveals the features of the stages of the formation of the architecture of residential building facades during the 1930s. Despite the considerable attention paid by researchers to various aspects of Soviet residential housing construction, studies on the formation of the architecture of the facades of residential buildings are not presented. Materials and methods. The study applied comparative analysis to the projects, which were not carried out but published in professional journals of the considered period. Results. It is possible to distinguish three stages in the principles of the construction of facade compositions of the houses belonging to the considered period. In the first projects of houses for specialists published in 1932 and 1933, one can identify two main directions of solving the problems of “development of cultural heritage and advanced construction technologies”. For both directions, tiered construction of the composition was typical. The first direction was “quoting” of classical prototypes in relation to the type of apartment building. The second principle of constructing the facade composition for residential buildings was the plastic enrichment and an increase in the number of functional elements inherent in residential architecture. The distinctive feature of the projects of the mid-1930s for both directions was the creation of multitier compositions with an increase in the share of direct use of elements carrying no functional load. Late in the 1930s, houses were transformed from point-to-point construction sites into complexes or parts of mainline ensembles. Both directions gradually mixed into each other due to the replacement of plastic functional elements with decorative ones. Conclusions. Parallelly developing, the approaches to the construction of facade compositions of Moscow residential buildings undergone many transformations during the 1930s. The transformations led from a clear separation of approaches to their almost complete mixing. Stage-by-stage transformation is stipulated by the change in the allocation of new construction sites and by principles of design and construction process organization. Nevertheless, with detailed compositional analysis, one can reveal different approaches to facade architecture formation what suggests that several creative directions are maintained, even under the condition of the directive formation of the unified creative line of Soviet architecture.