Architecture of a residential building
The architecture of the residential building was unusual and impressive for the late 1920s, especially considering the old Moscow environment. Residents of the nearest districts called it a "boat-house" ("steam-house" according to E. Miliútina); However, this epithet is applied to many modernist buildings. The authors of the project, Guínzburg and Milinis, managed to organize the living cells in a single building in such an unusual way that it even interested Le Corbusier himself, who visited the Narkomfin building and visited
personally Nikolai Miliutin's apartment.[24].
In an explanatory note on the project, Guínzburg explains the appearance of the open first floor as follows: "Due to the unevenness of the site, which in such cases causes a large surface area of the basement, in this case, the house is mostly raised to a height of 2.5 meters on separate pillars, which is more economical and, in addition, keeps the park area intact."[16].
The book "Housing" says more succinctly: "The whole house is located in the park."[25] This refers to the remains of the "Shalyapinskiy" park, the surviving parts of the mansion's gardens. Additionally, in 1937, trees were transplanted to the park around the Narkomfin building from the reconstructed Garden Ring, which was covered with asphalt and the entire garden line was demolished. As a result, one of Guínzburg's arguments in favor of an open first floor and a "house with legs" was "not to cut off the territory of the park with a house."[25]
Other arguments by Guínzburg in favor of an open first floor on supports:
-
- The first floor is the least suitable for living, and the tenants of the only apartment on the ground floor of the house are forced to close the windows with curtains all the time.
-
- Due to the size of the pre-revolutionary rent, it is known that the first floor apartments were valued lower.
-
- «The opportunity to tear the building from the ground, ... to bring the perception of a person, spatially clean and clear, seemed tempting for compositional considerations».[25].
-
- In 1927, Le Corbusier published his Five Points of Modern Architecture in L'Esprit Nouveau. The first of them are the free supports of the first floor (pilotis).
The residential building is a six-story building block 85 m long and 17 m high, stretched from south to north, the bedrooms and corridors are grouped along the eastern facade, the living rooms along the western one, respectively, the rooms receive the morning sun, the living rooms in the evening. Closer to the ends there are two staircases connected to each other and to the apartments by two wide corridors – 4 m wide and 2.3 m high – on the second and fifth floors. Guínzburg calls the hallways horizontal arteries and contrasts them with vertical stairs: the hallways were supposed to make it easier for apartment residents to communicate with public service facilities. On the other hand, the architect interpreted the hallways as public spaces "a place of public stay."[26].
The typing section of the Stroykom of the USSR developed five main types of residential units: A, B, C, D and F. The largest of them, cell A, meant three- and two-room apartments, B - only two-room apartments. The minimum was cell F, designed for a living area of 25-30 m².
Three types of apartments were used in the Narkomfin building – according to Guínzburg, “Housing” (1934) – there are actually about a dozen types of apartment cells. The second and third floors were occupied by eight type K apartments, according to Guínzburg, in reality, nine type K apartments, intended for large families. On the top three floors, from the fourth to the sixth, there are 32 small type F apartments, according to Guínzburg, actually 24 small type F apartments, designed for one person or for a married couple without children. At the ends of the house, separated from the central part by stairs, cells 2F—double F cells—were used. At the level of the flat roof, there were dormitory-type rooms, where the single-person living cells published by Nikolai Miliutin in Sotsgorod were made. Some are for one person, others are for two, with a surface area of 9 and 15 m², respectively, with a height of 2.6 m, linked by a common bathroom and shower between each two rooms.
In K cells the area of the living room, or "living room" is 25 m², its height is 5 m. In the part, divided into two levels, 2.3 m high, below are: a terrace connected to the hallway, a hall and a kitchen with an area of 4.3 m², on the upper floor, two bedrooms of 19.88 and 12.1 m² with a combined bathroom and toilet. Living area of cells K, 57-60 m², total area 82-83 m², —(100 m² apartment No. 11—. From the moment the house was installed, this type of apartment was intended for the most elite families due to its spaciousness, comfort and greater “living space”.[27].
Cells F. All apartments are two stories with entrances from a fifth-floor hallway. The apartments had two layouts: either with a staircase from the entrance upstairs - to a two-story living room with a glass window along the entire wall - and up again - to a sleeping niche - or with a long staircase to the same living room and sleeping niche, located on the same level. Therefore, each apartment consists of two parts. One part is 3.6 m high (living room), the other 2.3 m (sleeping niche). With the chosen layout, the living and sleeping areas were opened to each other, visually and spatially, providing lighting and ventilation on two sides. The only closed spaces in the apartment were a shower cubicle with a sink and toilet. If necessary, the visual and physical separation of the sleeping niche and the living room was achieved by a curtain cornice. The front and bathroom are located directly at the entrance to the apartment. The F small apartments do not have a kitchen. The absence of kitchens, according to Victor Buchli, is the maximum expression of socialized life and a new way of life. The living room is equipped with a small "kitchen unit" for heating food. The total area of cells F is 35 to 36 m².
The appearance of 2F cells at the ends of the building is due to the need for a rational distribution of the volumes of the apartments within the house; allowed, in the first place, to be limited to two corridors. Cells 2F as a whole duplicate the structure of cells F. They have two living rooms with a height of 3.6 m, as well as a dining room, an anteroom, a bathroom, a toilet and a kitchen with a height of 2.3 m. Guínzburg calls the 2F cells “in social terms <…> Ordinary apartments with a more rational distribution of heights and, therefore, with a more interesting spatial solution”, but does not say anything about the number of 2F cells in the house, their area and the number of rooms in them. Victor Buchli provides the following data...[28] Along each staircase there are 2F cells of two types: two levels - three apartments on the sixth floor -, the rest are single level - three apartments on the fourth floor -. All cells, by analogy with pre-revolutionary apartments, are visually and physically separated from each other by walls and doors. Along the south staircase there are two "articulated K-units" (Buchli's definition). This type of apartment was never mentioned either in the recommendations of the Stroykom of the USSR or in the works of Guinzburg, his students and commentators. It differs from the K cells in a significantly larger area, the presence of an additional bathroom and dining room on the lower level, as well as large semicircular balconies. Elena Ovsyannikova (2015) describes this type of apartment as follows: «At the ends of the building, from the north and south, there are more spacious apartments, individually designed with balconies. Guínzburg's workshop was located in one of these apartments.
An examination of the Narkomfin building, carried out in 1994 by Elena Ovsyannikova, a professor at the Moscow Institute of Architecture, and Swiss students from Geneva, led by Jean-Claude People, showed that its internal structure turned out to be even more complex than stated in the project. It turned out that there were non-standard apartments on all floors, although most of them are typical. The total number of variants of residential units could reach eleven—including a concierge room, an upper-floor “study,” a bedroom on the roof, and Miliutin’s own attic. It is characteristic that at the end of the fifth floor corridor there was a common kitchen, organized already in the 1940s, and from the corridor itself there is access to the closets to store things that did not always fit in the "F" cells.
The book Johannes Cramer and Anke Zalivako (2013), which contains the most complete results of the internal structure of the Narkomfin research and design decisions: «Repeatedly referred to the inconsistency of the project which lies in the fact that Guínsburg and Milinis obviously could not or did not want to choose a single coherent concept for the organization of space. On the contrary, different types of apartments are not only arranged and equipped in completely different ways, but are also designed for completely different user groups, so that, together, a kind of encyclopedia of new housing has emerged with four fundamentally different types of apartments, each of which, in turn, has its own design options.
The low ceiling height, according to Guínzburg, is compensated by the "adjacent storage" of the living room. Meanwhile, realizing that the premises are not sufficiently insulated, Guínzburg stipulates that the solution "is suitable for a small family, otherwise sliding walls or curtains will be needed, which would allow, if necessary, to create the necessary acoustic insulation of the individual rooms."
The terraces at the lower corridor level were intended to be shared by the tenants of eight type K apartments – actually nine type K apartments – for which a covered terrace is provided parallel to the corridor. The solarium was designed for the recreation of residents of type F apartments.[31][32].
The principle of layout of residential cells, similar to that used in the Narkomfin house project, was implemented in several projects in the West, in particular, in the bachelor dormitory built in Wrocław, according to the project of Hans Scharoun (1929). The presence of a corridor that serves several levels is characteristic of Le Corbusier's residential units.[33].
The façade solution of the house is laconic constructivism: ribbon windows, a characteristic technique of the 1920s, emphasize the horizontal, smooth walls are decorated only with elements conditioned by function: strips of planters and a built-in terrace on the second floor. The structure of the facades reflects the interior layout of the apartments, following the principle of modern architecture from the inside out, so ribbons predominate on the east wall, and in the lower part of the west wall the living room windows merge into large glazing points, alternating with small kitchen windows. The northern end façade is devoid of windows and is enlivened only by the balcony ledge, the well-lit southern one is more plastic: it is enlivened by three semicircular balcony ledges, which form one of the textbook views of the house. Semicircular balconies are located one above the other on the third, fifth and sixth floors.
Structures and materials
The house was erected with the use of new products from the then construction industry; The engineer Sergei Lvovich Prokhorov and the Technobetón company directed by him were responsible for the construction experiments. The supporting structure is a reinforced concrete frame.
The frame structure made it possible to free the first floor for passage and relieve the load on the external walls, which serve as a thermal insulation fence thanks to cement blocks with thermal insulation filling. As can be seen from the illustrations given in the book by E. Ovsyannikova and the residential complex E. Miliútina House of Narkomfin, made in our time, when the plaster on the walls collapsed everywhere, the material of the walls of the main facade was cinder blocks and the end surfaces of the house were made of fired bricks.
An important innovation of S. L. Prokhorov was the use of “cold” concrete stone blocks with two large holes: for floors between floors and interior vertical walls between apartments and in the fencing of stairs. The voids in the blocks were used to lay sewage, drainage and ventilation ducts located inside the building, often in a rather complex configuration, since all communications were required to be made between the volumes of apartments of different typologies. As part of the floors, rows of blocks with reinforced concrete were interspersed, saving concrete and even wooden formwork, since it was not necessary to drive nails into the boards:.
Guinzburg calls the “cold” blocks with two holes “common for German concrete construction” – in fact, they are known, in particular, in Bauhaus practice. S. L. Prokhorov organized the production of similar blocks in large holes right at the construction site of the Narkomfin building using machines for the production of "Krestyanin blocks", where wooden inserts were placed to make holes.[34] Later, they were called "Prokhorov blocks".
The floors of the apartments were made of "Sorel" cement with two layers of 2 cm - wooden stone, wood shavings on the base, typologically the material is similar to chipboard. Xylolite (artificial stone made from sawdust) was placed on a concrete base plate. Fiber blocks and Krestyanin blocks in 1/2 block were used in the partition walls; the thickness of the partitions was 5 cm — there was a lack of sound insulation in the modern sense that was absent in the Narkomfin house; it was planned to be added during the renovation of the house in 2017-2019 —.[35] To insulate the reinforced concrete beams in places where they reached the facade, that is, on very rare occasions, reed, an insulating material made of compressed dry grass, was used.
The flat cement roof of the house is insulated with slag and fitted with gutters that run into the body of the house. The technological solutions for the roof with thermal insulation with pressed “peat plates” and waterproofing with bitumen followed the scheme developed by the leading German flat roof specialist Ernst May.