Bakhmetevsky Garage and its Surroundings Борисова Александра
Task
Bakhmetevsky Garage and its Surroundings is an online map of Soviet Constructivist architectural heritage around Novoslobodskaya, Savelovskaya, Maryina Roshcha and Dostoyevskaya metro stations in Moscow.
Ideas and solutions
project website:around.jewish-museum.ru In the 1920s young architects passionately explored suburban areas of Moscow where one-storeyed wooden houses sat side by side with residential buildings and collective living blocks, community centers and departments stores, garages and printing houses. Constructivist architecture was the major artistic development of the period with its simple and yet innovative geometry becoming the symbol of the time. A century later, some of these buildings are an integral part of the architectural imagery of the city and are well-known not only by the architecture professionals but by the ordinary citizens as well. Others, however, got almost lost in today’s urban development, and it is hard to imagine that once they were perfect examples of the leading artistic movement. With the map, you can start your walking route from whatever location you choose, just pick the building. There are 16 buildings on the map by Konstantin Melnikov, brothers Golosov, Boris Blokhin, El Lissitzky and other architects. Before venturing into your journey, you can browse photos and read a brief historical reference about the building and its authors. The major destination of the map is the Bakhmetevsky Garage and the Jewish Museum located in the building. The history of the Bakhmetev bus garage shaped one of the main missions of the Museum — research on and promotion of the Russian Avant-Garde heritage. The map offers several unconventional destinations, less known by the citizens of Moscow. One of them is Pravda Printing Plant — the city inside the city where millions of copies of the major Soviet newspaper were printed. Another unorthodox destination is Ogonyok Printing Plant, the only project by El Lissitzky that has been actually realized. When Mikhail Kolstov, the editor-in-chief of the Pravda Journal, was purged, the building came into possession of the NKVD and is still public property, no photos are allowed on the territory
