What Am I Doing Here? (13 page)

The Arbat was once the aristocratic quarter of Moscow. It was largely rebuilt after the Napoleonic fire in 1812, and even today, in palaces of green or cream-coloured stucco, one or two of the old families linger on with their possessions. Melnikov's house — or rather pavilion in the French sense — is set well back from the street, a building both Futurist and Classical consisting of two interlocking cylinders, the rear one taller than the front and pierced with some sixty windows: identical elongated hexagons with Constructivist glazing bars. The cylinders are built of brick covered with stucco in the manner of Russian churches. In 1973 the stucco was a dull and flaking ochre, although recent photos show the building spruced up with a coat of whitewash. On the front façade above the architrave are the words KONSTANTIN MELNIKOV ARKHITEKTOR — his proud and lonely boast that true art can only be the creation of the individual, never that of the committee or group.

After I had entered the door on that dark January morning, I climbed the spiral staircase painted emerald green and came into the circular white salon where the architect himself, lying on a kind of Biedermeier chaise-longue, was having a grated apple for his elevenses. His son, Viktor Stepanovich, was grating the apple. The old man, he explained, could not take much solid food. He was very frail and disillusioned, and when he blinked his hooded eyes one had the sense of hopes abandoned and lost ambitions.

Viktor Stepanovich took me upstairs to the studio that on a summer's day must have been one of the lightest and airiest rooms imaginable, but on this day of muddy clouds and snow flurries the atmosphere was one of liturgical solemnity. He was a painter. His canvases lay this way and that against the walls. He was also something of a mystic and mountain climber, and while we sat drinking vodka and cracking pine nuts, he showed me several pink Monet-like impressions of dawn in the Caucasus, which struck me as extraordinarily beautiful. When I asked if I could take some photographs of the house, he said, ‘You must be quick!' For what I hadn't realised was that Anna Gavrilovna, the architect's wife, was hiding in the bedroom and thoroughly disapproved of having a Western visitor.

The house, as I said was somewhat dilapidated. There were water stains on the walls; it was not particularly warm. Yet because Melnikov, for reasons of economy as well as aesthetics, had eschewed a slick, mechanical finish, and because he had stuck to the materials of his peasant boyhood – rough-cut planks and plain plaster – the effect was never shoddy but had an air of timeless vitality.

By the time we got downstairs, the old man was sorting through papers on his desk. By the window there was a plaster cast of a Venus: the yearning of a Russian for all things Mediterranean. He showed me photographs and drawings of projects – realised and unrealised – from his entire career.

Among them were the Makhorka Pavilion from the 1925 Moscow fair; the brilliant free-form arrangement of street stalls at the Sukharevka Market; the Paris pavilion of 1925; the Paris car park; the Leyland bus garage in Moscow; his various workers' clubs, which proved that he, like Le Corbusier, was a ‘poet' of reinforced concrete; the plan for a monument to Christopher Columbus (to be erected in Santo Domingo); and, finally, a project for the Palace of the Soviets – halfpyramid, half-lotus – so wild in conception as to make the loonier architectural ramblings of Frank Lloyd Wright seem like so many little sandcastles.

Among the photographs from Paris, he showed me one of himself, a dandified figure standing on the staircase of the Soviet pavilion. Then, having pointed meticulously to the hatband of his Homburg, his cravat, and his spats, he asked me: ‘What colour do you think they were?' ‘Red,' I suggested. ‘Red,' he nodded.

How a private family house – and not any old house but a symbolic coupled duet – came to be built in 1927 in the heart of Moscow, can only be explained within the framework of Melnikov's strange career. Fortunately there is now a firstrate guide in S. Frederick Starr's
Melnikov, Solo Architect in a Mass Society,
from which one can extract the bones of the story. Kostia Melnikov was a bright peasant lad whose father was a milkman. The family home, known as the Hay Lodge, was a cabin sixteen-foot-square in an outlying suburb of Moscow. ‘Today,' he wrote in old age, ‘looking back on my works, the source of my individuality is clearly visible . . . in the architecture of that building. Built of clay and straw, it looked like a foreigner in its own homeland . . . but all the magnificent carving of the surrounding houses yielded before it.'

The milkman Melnikov supplied a nearby academy where his young son was soon to be found rooting in the wastebaskets for scraps of paper to draw on. The family apprenticed him to an icon painter. His next job was in a firm of heating engineers whose proprietor, a second-generation Englishman, Vladimir Chaplin, recognised the boy's artistic talents and sent him to the prestigious Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.

This institution, Mayakovsky once said, was the ‘only place where they took you without proof of your reliability'. It seems that Chaplin hoped his protégé would blossom into a painter of country scenes and was a bit chagrined when Melnikov changed tack from painting to architecture. The young man, however, was a wonderful architectural draughtsman. He designed schemes for grandiose neoclassical buildings. He married a plump, pretty sixteen-year-old girl from the middle classes, Anna Gavrilovna, and by the time the revolution came he had already built a car factory.

The savage winter of 1917-18 found the young Melnikovs half-starving, back with his family at the Hay Lodge. But gradually, as the nightmare of the Civil War receded, Melnikov – like Ladovsky or the Vesnin brothers – began to emerge as one of the most forceful architectural theorists of the renamed Vkhutemas School. His asymmetrical Makhorka Pavilion was a success among intellectuals and workers. At almost no notice, he designed the sarcophagus and glass cover for the embalmed corpse of Lenin and later would recall that one of the party hacks threatened to have him shot if he didn't get the work done on time. Then, in 1925, partly for his proven skill at operating within a minimal budget, he was awarded the commission to build the Soviet pavilion at the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs.

With such outstanding exceptions as Le Corbusier's Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau, the exhibition was an exercise in opulent kitsch – the essence of Art Deco. Competing in vulgarity were a pavilion of Old Granada, a Ruhlmann and Patout pavilion, the Italian Fascist-Renaissance pavilion and the English pavilion – perhaps the silliest of all – in the Hollywood-Anglican style.

The Russians, in contrast, with their budget of only 15,000 roubles (at the time an equivalent of $7,650 U.S.) had no alternative but to build light. In fact, the whole structure, which sat on a site between the Grand Palais and the Seine, was made of the cheapest Russian timber, roughly shaped by peasant craftsmen, sent by train from Moscow, erected in next to no time, and painted red, grey, and white. Its plan, sliced with two staircases at the diagonal, was incredibly ingenious. Among the exhibits was a small version of Tatlin's tower – when the show was over this was left to the French Communist Party who promptly forgot about it. They failed to pay the storage charges of the warehouse and the tower sat unrecognised until it was chucked out and probably burned sometime in the early Sixties.

An English publication, put out by His Majesty's Stationery Office, had this to comment: ‘The pavilion of Russia was of matchboard construction and was painted red . . . The exterior was largely of glass, and the whole looked like a dilapidated conservatory.' Others compared its aesthetic to that of the guillotine or said it was a ‘stab in the back by the warriors of the Bolshevik Revolution'. But this did not prevent Melnikov from being the toast of the town, nor the great names of Modernism – Hoffmann, Le Corbusier, Perret, Mallet-Stevens – from admitting with great generosity that the Soviets had stolen the show. Le Corbusier took the young Russian under his wing and showed him all the Modern buildings worth seeing – among them his studio for Amédée Ozenfant – which may have put ideas into Melnikov's head about building a place of his own.

Melnikov was even the toast of White Russian émigrés who held a costume ball in his honour: guests came dressed as the ‘new Constructivist architecture'. He went on holiday to Saint-Jean-de-Luz where, in answer to a commission from the Paris city fathers, he devised a scheme for a multi-storey car park for a thousand cars to be flung across the Seine like a bridge and supported by colossal Atlas-like caryatids on either side. The commission, needless to say, fell through.

Meanwhile, Melnikov's friend Rodchenko, who had come with his project for a workers' reading room, far from revelling in the high jinks, detested Paris and all it stood for. ‘The cult of women,' he wrote home, ‘like the cult of worminfested cheese or oysters, has reached a point where to be fashionable is to be ugly.'

Melnikov, in later years, said he was terribly tempted to stay in France, yet his peasant instincts seem to have called him back. He boarded the train for Moscow, where he soon found he had stirred up a hornet's nest of jealousy in the Vkhutemas School. The denunciations followed but, buoyed up by an apparently limitless faith in his own genius, he decided to press on regardless. He built an extraordinary depot for the Leyland buses which the Soviets had bought from England. Then, in 1927, he set about building his house.

He seems to have hoodwinked Nikolai Bukharin, the party official who put the site at his disposal, into thinking that the design would have immediate relevance to the problem of mass public housing. But, as he himself confessed, the time had come he felt to be both architect and archi-millionaire.

Given the fertility of his imagination and his keen ability to grasp some feature and use it for his own ends, it is hard, if not impossible, to pinpoint Melnikov's sources. He is known, as a student, to have studied the utopian projects of Boullée and Ledoux, both of whom designed cylindrical buildings. He is thought to have admired the interlocking cylinders of grain elevators in the American Midwest, which were published by Le Corbusier in his
L'Esprit Nouveau.
He examined the structure of certain Muscovite churches. And as for the honeycomb construction, whereby windows can be added or subtracted without affecting the weight load, it reminds me of the cylindrical brick tomb-towers of Islamic Central Asia. There was, it is well known, a strong Islamic influence on early Soviet architecture.

I would also like to think that on one of his summer drives around Paris someone drove him to the parish of Chambourcy to see the Desert de Retz, a building that was being ‘discovered' around that time by Colette, among others.

The Desert, a colossal truncated Doric column with a stack of oval and round rooms piled up around a spiral staircase, was designed and built by an eccentric Anglomane and friend of Boullée, the Chevalier de Monville. It is surely the most imaginative building of the eighteenth century still standing. yet, although classed as a national monument since 1941, the French government in its wisdom allowed it to fall into ruin. The windows of the drum are oval and rectangular, but there is something about their arrangement which seems very close to the spirit of Melnikov's house. At the time I didn't have the wit to ask him.

Melnikov himself, in answer to the self-imposed question ‘What is it that prevents genius from manifesting itself in architecture?' wrote that his lack of money was converted into an ‘immense richness of the imagination'. His sense of autonomy had swept away all sense of caution, and the practical economies forced him to risk as much, relatively speaking, as was risked by Brunelleschi when building the dome of the Florence cathedral.

I never got a chance to go into the bedroom because Anna Gavrilovna was hiding there. I suspect, however, that the altar-like beds had been done away with as well as the uniform yellow-green colour of the walls, which Melnikov – who had certain theories about colour and sleeping patterns – associated with restful sleep.

Scattered all over the house were bits of bourgeois furniture, neoclassical chairs, or an Art Nouveau carpet – in fact, throughout there was an atmosphere of antimacassar and samovar at odds with the original spirit. Viktor Stepanovich told me that during the years of the Stalinist ‘night' his mother had salvaged whatever she could from her old family home.

Melnikov, mercifully, did not have to share the fate – of cattle trucks to Siberia – which befell a Mandelstam, a Babel, or a Meyerhold. Yet gradually the vultures closed in. First his colleagues denounced him as a Formalist. Then, at a meeting of the Soviet architectural establishment, about eight hundred hands shot up in support of a motion that would prevent him from practising his profession.

The death knell of visionary architecture in Russia had already been sounded when Lenin's commissioner for enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, announced, ‘The people also have a right to colonnades.' It did, admittedly, take time for the spread of that deadly megalomaniac style known as Sovnovrok (New Soviet Rococo), which was bound to be anathema to Melnikov. For forty years he simply sat at home doing nothing. Occasionally there was talk of his rehabilitation, but nothing really came of it, so that by the time of my visit the house, for all its vestiges of vitality, had become a sombre and gloomy private palace - as sombre as Prokofiev's 1942 Sonata.

When I bade the old man goodbye, he smiled a smile of wistful melancholy and, raising one hand, drew in the air a graph of his blighted career. If one could have recorded it accurately on paper, it might have looked something like this: