Relics From an Earlier Era of Moscow Clubbing

There once was a time when "going out to a club" had a different resonance in Moscow. As elsewhere in Europe, the social club has a long history among the upper echelons of Russian society. But it was not until after the revolution that this building type developed into something truly expressive of Russian culture, albeit with a Soviet flavor.





Nobles Club, 10 Okhotny Ryad


Now dwarfed by its neighbors the State Duma and the Hotel Moskva, this pastel palace was originally designed by the prolific Moscow progenitor of Neoclassicism, Matvei Kazakov, for Prince Vasily Dolgoruky in 1780.


However, in 1784, the newly founded Assembly of Nobles purchased the house to serve as their headquarters. Kazakov expanded the mansion to accommodate the new club, enclosing the courtyard to create the elegant Hall of Columns ballroom. The newly redesigned club met the fate of many of the city's buildings in 1812 when Muscovites set fire to the city in an attempt to keep Napoleon at bay. The charred club was restored and once again underwent major renovations at the turn of this century when a third story was added.


Ironically, it was in the pristine white Hall of Columns, with its 28 Corinthian columns made of tied logs clad in faux marble, that the death knell of the indulgent decadence that this romping ground stood for was first heard. In 1856, Tsar Alexander II addressed an assembly at the club, declaring that it was "better to abolish serfdom from above than wait until it abolishes itself from below." Thus the tsar warned of the demise of the nobility, whose wealth was derived from the toil of the serfs.


In 1919, Lenin seized the property for the use of the House of Trade Unions. The importance and solemnity conferred on this transformed building was evident in 1924 when over a million people viewed the deceased Lenin there as his body lay in state. In 1953, Lenin's successor was likewise mourned -- by such crushing throngs that hundreds met their own demise as they pressed forward to glimpse the dictator. Stalin's infamous show trials of the "enemies of the people" were also conducted in the former ballroom, which is bedecked in rows of crystal chandeliers.





Merchant's Club, 6 Ulitsa Malaya Dmitrovka


While granted admission to the Nobles' Club in the late 19th century, the emerging merchant class nevertheless sought their own quarters. In 1909 architect Illarion Ivanov-Shits designed the club for these industrialists and bankers, who had been making do in cramped rooms nearby. The new club housed an auditorium, offices, lounges, restaurants, a library and a card room.


It seems fitting that the club belonging to this new class is designed in the Russian version of art nouveau, the style moderne, the unofficial style of Moscow's merchant elite. This newly moneyed group was consistently drawn to this striking style when erecting commercial buildings or new homes, as in that commissioned by carmaker Stepan Ryabushinsky with its curvaceous and sinuous lines designed by style moderne master Fyodor Shektel.


And in accordance with the inherent eclecticism of style moderne, Ivanov-Shits drew from both historical and contemporary models. In the interior, the architect used an abstraction of organic ornament and geometric patterning executed in rich metals with a visually sensuous texture. On the exterior, the architect chose to combine the motifs of a traditional classicism with the monumental forms of the contemporary Austrian Secessionist movement, as witnessed by the two squarish towers that top the club.


The merchants were able to enjoy their club for only a brief while. In 1918 anarchists occupied the building for half a year. Thereafter it served as a school, a cinema, and in 1933 for three years became the Theatre of Working Youth, or TRAM -- now the name of the restaurant in the basement of the building. And since the closure of TRAM, the Theater of the Lenin Komsomol, or Lenkom, has been resident.





Zuyev Club, 18 Lesnaya Ulitsa


If the innovative design of the Merchant's Club was a break with the past, the Soviet introduction of the worker's club, or what came to be known as both a "palace of labor" or a "palace of culture" represented a sea-change, a new building type expressly conceived by proponents of a new ideology.


These new workers' clubs were to serve as meeting and recreational spaces for industrial enterprises or trade unions, and still others for entire urban districts. They were multifunctional institutions that served both ideological and educational needs as well as providing a venue for leisure and entertainment.


In his Zuyev Club, constructed for the employees of the Department of Municipal Economy in 1929, architect Ilya Golosov designed a building emblematic of the avant-garde Constructivist movement, whose radical designs influenced modern architecture internationally.


Golosov fronts a rectangular building with a multi-storied transparent glass cylinder which in turn intersects with a horizontal, masonry plane that projects from the convex glass wall. This juxtaposition of pure geometries, the transparency and the spiralling form of the stairwell within, give the structure a sense of movement, a dynamism. The cylinder and the intersecting rectangle are at odds with each other, but the implied movement of the stairwell unites them.


To Golosov, this kinetic fusing was representative of the spirit of the revolution and the emerging machine age. For the Constructivists, the success of the Soviet experiment was synonymous with the modernization of society. Thus, the cylinder's placement was not merely aesthetic, but accommodated the stairwell behind. This radical design was merely the obvious formal expression of the building's function with the use of new materials and technology such as the reinforced concrete that allowed for the building's great expanses of glass.


Inside there is an auditorium that seats 850, a smaller one for 200, a library and eight clubrooms. Constructivist theorists spent considerable attention on the space planning of these clubs. In principle, the smaller club rooms represented the microcosmic level of socialization and ideological debate which would, in turn, spatially "flow" into the larger auditoriums, where such interaction would supposedly occur on a grander scale. The contemporary political structure of governing through soviets provided an analogous model for the way this flow from micro to macro would occur.


Currently the building serves as neighborhood social club, but, as is often the case with former municipal buildings with a meter to spare, space has been let out to commercial concerns which have altered the interior of this landmark, flying in the face of the idealistic architect's intentions as the rest of the seminal building sits in a state of disrepair common to the city's classic works of Constructivist architecture.





Kauchuk Factory Club, 64 Ulitsa Plyushchikha


Another example of the numerous workers' clubs that were built in the late 1920s and early 1930s, this 1927 club was designed by the famed architect, Konstantin Melnikov. Responsible for many of these clubs including the well-known Rusakov Club which, in its radical otherworldy form, appears as if it is going to take flight, the architect designed the Kauchuk in a more reserved style, but one that is more representative of the six clubs he did in Moscow.


Endowed with the challenging task of accommodating the oversized volume of a large auditorium -- in this case, 800 people -- Melnikov allowed the simple geometry of the large wedge-shaped space to dictate the building's bold external appearance. As had Golosov, Melnikov very simply appeals to the inherent beauty of this pure solid.Yet, while a number of his buildings may have an affinity to geometric constructivism, Melnikov was an individualist and denied allegiance to any particular school of thought. Ultimately, when Stalin made clear that any architect -- or anyone in the arts for that matter -- with any ambition must abandon this unknown and, therefore, suspect modernism, Melnikov's individualism rendered him without any architectural commissions.





Central House of Architects, 7 Granatny Pereulok


The quarters given to the Union of Architects of the Soviet Union in the 1930s attests to the import the state placed on their mission. As was the case with other framers of cultural ideology like journalists and writers, architects were given a former mansion for their club house.


This turn-of-the-century Neo-Gothic mansion with its macabre moldings and elaborately carved woodwork conferred on its new occupants their social status. Under Stalin, the sumptuous residences of the nobility and merchant class no longer had the problematic connotations of the recent past that the Constructivists were railing against. According to Stalin's artistic policy of Socialist Realism, the arsenal of the past could now be appropriated in the name of the Socialist state. For the Great Architect of Socialism, Comrade Stalin, this meant that Soviet designers should incorporate the architecture of classicism, the traditional architecture of power, in their buildings.


Thus, when the union sought to add an auditorium and restaurant in the late 1930s the architects Andrei Burov, Myron Merzhanov, and Alexander Vlasov -- darlings of their aesthetic leader Stalin -- looked to classical models for inspiration, as witnessed by the rounded-arched arcade and oversized cornice that front the unabashed, red-tiled addition.


And when new space was needed in the 1970s, the designers of this blighted period in Russian architectural history left their mark as well. They built an innocuous enough limestone-faced rectangular box, but capped the building with a relief sculpture depicting the signs of the zodiac. The result is something of an architectural time capsule, with the spirit of the '70s preserved for all to see.