An embarrassing admission: I’ve never been too keen on the Mel’nikov house.

This may seem odd coming from someone who just signed a petition calling for the preservation of Mel’nikov’s works and heritage. Not least among these is his famous house, which the experts say is presently “under threat.” A campaign to restore and maintain the aging structure — spearheaded by a talented young photographer currently residing in Moscow, Natalia Melikova — has already managed to muster a great deal of publicity. Coverage of this effort has not been limited to Russian press, either, though several articles have recently appeared in well-established news outlets like Известия (an old heavyweight, now in an online edition). Even before they began reporting in the vernacular, however, Sophia Kishkovsky ran a story on it for The New York Times‘ ArtBeat section back in April.

Unsurprisingly, the motion to preserve the Mel’nikov house has enjoyed an outpouring of support from a number of high-profile scholars and architects. Many readers of this blog are no doubt that my own stance on this issue has been one of deep ambivalence, despite my reluctant signature and endorsement of the letter. Basically, my reservations were as follows:

As a student of history and a great admirer of Mel’nikov’s architectural corpus (built and unbuilt), I am of course in favor of maintaining and restoring the many iconic examples of his work that remain. But knowing that pitiless, unsentimental attention to the demands of technical turnover and the imperative to overturn obsolescence formed part and parcel of the worldview animating Soviet modernism, it is impossible to deny the irony of the wish to preserve buildings that no longer serve any meaningful function — except, perhaps, as a physical reminder of the project that was once underway in Russia. Nothing would seem so preposterous to an avant-garde architect of the time than to cling to the past out of melancholy or nostalgia, let alone museumify it.

Whatever the reasons or principles I invoked, these are not the subject of today’s post. Just having stumbled upon a trove of rare images showing the building’s plan, a bisectable small-scale model of its proportions, and some rare photographs of its construction and eventual realization, I thought I’d post them along with some reflections on its strengths and weaknesses vis–à–vis housing projects by other architects of that time, as well as its place within Mel’nikov’s own corpus. Since I suspect my opinion belongs to that rather tiny, discordant minority of Soviet architecture geeks who don’t instantly kvell over the Mel’nikov house, we’ll first offer an expiation in advance of the outrage that might follow. And so, without any further ado, here are some of the plans and sketches for the house.

Plans, paintings, sketches

Konstantin Mel’nikov, preliminary sketch conceptualizing the house (1927)

Konstantin Mel’nikov, preliminary sketch conceptualizing the house (1927)

Konstantin Mel’nikov, early formulation of the hexagonal windows, accompanied by notes (1927)

Konstantin Mel’nikov, more developed sketch with notes and early plans (1927)

Konstantin Mel’nikov, more developed sketch with notes and early plans (1927)

Konstantin Mel’nikov, rendering of the facade with straightforwardly ascending staircases (1927)

Konstantin Mel’nikov, blueprint with floorplan for the hoose (1927)

Konstantin Mel’nikov, advanced rendering of the interior with spiral staircase (1927)

Konstantin Mel’nikov, advanced rendering of the exterior featuring interlocking uneven cylinders (1927)

Konstantin Mel’nikov, paintings of the bedroom in icon-like gold (1929)

Konstantin Mel’nikov, painting of the bedroom in icon-like gold (1929)

Konstantin Mel’nikov, preliminary proposal for a housing commune modeled on his individual dwelling unit (1929)

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Enough already: What’s not to like about the Mel’nikov house?

Well, a few things. For starters, the fundamental scheme of two interlocking, uneven cylinders strikes me as arbitrary. There seems to be very little in the way of a rationale underlying Mel’nikov’s design choices in this piece. At least, none are in evidence. Certainly no explanation is given, no broader set of principles invoked. Now of course, this roughly accords with the interpretation of Mel’nikov’s architectural persona offered by historians such as S. Frederick Starr or Anatole Kopp. Indeed, the latter appears to have taken his cues from the former in this respect. Consider this passage from Kopp’s Town and Revolution:

There can be no doubt that of all the members of ASNOVA it was Melnikov who played the greatest practical role during the twenties. With little taste for theory, Mel’nikov was more a man of action, preferring the reality of the construction site to manifestos and declarations of principle, and he expressed his conception of architecture in a series of buildings impressive in their range. This conception reflects the Asnova doctrine but strips it of the rigidity typical of abstract architectural theories that have never been applied. Mel’nikov’s work was a logical consequence of the new architectural romanticism which, through new and hopefully industrial forms, attempted to express the dynamism of the revolution…[in a manner akin to] Tatlin’s tower, but Mel’nikov was more of a realist than Tatlin and always took into account the material possibilities of the times. (Town and Revolution, pg. 77)

Such is the standard account of Konstantin Mel’nikov — the hardboiled realist who chanced to dream, the consummate practitioner who built while others argued. Eschewing the empty theoretical posturing of his peers, without any patience for the controversies raging between faculty members at VKhUTEMAS, Mel’nikov all the while made a name for himself by submitting actual proposals to competitions. Or so the story goes.

To be sure, there’s something to this characterization. But the conclusions that might be drawn from it are radically opposed. A critic like S. Frederick Starr finds this atheoretical attitude a tremendous virtue, and contends that one that it set Mel’nikov apart from his contemporaries. Relieved of the burden of doctrines or abstract formulae, Mel’nikov was free to express his creative genius through raw intuition. In Starr’s biographical treatment, this supported an individualist narrative: Mel’nikov as a “solo architect in mass society.” Catherine Cooke accepted this same premise, but her assessment of the results was precisely the inverse. For Cooke, Mel’nikov did not avoid theoretical debates out of disinterest or temperamental distaste. Rather, she suggested historians should take the architect at his word, and accept his self-professed incompetence in matters of theory. His built work, Cooke maintained, thus betrays a certain methodological caprice and enchantment with the mystical qualities of abstract forms.

The Mel’nikov house under construction

Workers laying the foundations for the Melnikov house (1927)

Rear cylinder of the Mel’nikov house under construction (1928)

Mel’nikov with his wife standing outside the house during construction (1928)

Hexagonal latticework for the windows, during construction (1928)

Floor piece for the Mel’nikov house (1928)

Worker peeking through one of the floor pieces for the Mel’nikov house (1928)

Working on one of the floorpieces for the Mel’nikov house (1928)

The main facade of Mel’nikov’s house completed while the rest is still under construction (1928)

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My estimation of Mel’nikov’s work falls somewhere between these two extremes, though not as some kind of “happy medium.” While I cannot agree with the importance he assigns to the “astounding” Mel’nikov house itself, Tafuri’s fondness for the Soviet pavilion for the 1925 Paris Expo and the breathtaking Rusakov workers club in Moscow is well justified. Cooke was still right, however, to question the grounds on which he and Dal Co proclaimed Mel’nikov “the most coherent analyst of the architectural syntax of the 1920s and 1930s in Russia,” despite their correct discernment of the formalist semiological undertones of his work (Modern Architecture, pg. 183). In fact, I generally tend to agree with Cooke’s appraisal of his theoretical naïveté. Aside from a few shapes that recur throughout Mel’nikov’s corpus, there seems to be nothing that unites individual buildings except their unsystematic character.

Nevertheless, Mel’nikov often got by well enough just by relying on his immediate spatial sensibilities, which were formidable. The thing is, his faculties of improvisation worked best when confronted with formal or functional difficulties. For example, the elongated spaces for row seating inside the theater section of the Rusakov club addressed the very pressing matter of its audience capacity. At the same time, it produced an extraordinary formal effect viewed from outside, as the extra rows jutted out into space and hovered several stories over the ground beneath it. Likewise, the open staircase for his 1925 Soviet pavilion ingeniously solved the problem of traffic flow within the cramped space of the fairgrounds that year. No equivalent aesthetic or expeditious consideration explains the form of the Mel’nikov house, however. While the hexagonal windows create an interesting honeycomb pattern in the latticework, allowing ample sunlight to creep in, the building on a whole resembles a giant water tank. The main facade of the building remains impressive, however, if only for its stark flatness. The winding indoor staircases are pleasant enough, but nothing to write home about. One gets the impression that the reason the building is so well known has to do with its sheer oddness, as a kind of distant cousin of the expressionist current from Germany (though deriving from distinct origins).

Finally, the Mel’nikov house may perhaps be evaluated by comparing it to another modernist dwelling complex in Moscow from around the same period: Narkomfin, built a few years later by the constructivist architects Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis. The comparison is not flattering to Mel’nikov’s work. Narkomfin is more radical in almost every respect. It was the embodiment of the principles Ginzburg and his colleagues in OSA had been elaborating for years. So perfect were its proportions, so thoughtful its internal arrangement, that it can even be seen as an anticipation of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation decades later. Ginzburg and Milinis’ Narkomfin is to be preferred not simply because it was a collective housing complex, as opposed to Mel’nikov’s private dwelling for himself and his family, in some sort of facile antinomy between social and individual dwelling spaces (Ginzburg himself would soon shift his attention to individual, standalone living quarters, in his disurbanist schemes with Okhitovich). Rather, Narkomfin is more significant as the materialization of the Soviet modernist Zeitgeist, while Mel’nikov’s house, though interesting, must be considered a relative outlier.

The Mel’nikov house completed

Mel’nikov shortly after being built, 1929

Staircase inside the Mel’nikov house (1929)

Staircase inside the Mel’nikov house (1929)

Bedroom inside the Mel’nikov house (1929)

Bedroom inside the Mel’nikov house (1929)

Konstantin Mel’nikov standing in the entrance to the outdoor patio on the rooftop terrace (1929)

Konstantin Mel’nikov walking along the rooftop terrace (1929)

Mel’nikov house upon completion, photographed here in 1930

Mel’nikov house photographed by M.A. Ilyin in 1931

An older Mel’nikov inside his house (1960s)

An older Mel’nikov inside his house (1960s)