4/ KONSTANTIN MELNIKOV’S HOUSE
1927–1929
© Igor Palmin
4/ Konstantin Melnikov’s House, 1927–1929
© Wikipedia
The home is made up of two cylinders with honeycombed walls and a single bedroom for the entire family. The house is an architectural masterpiece, is celebrated worldwide and is one of the top attractions for foreign tourists to Moscow.
All 20th-century architects built homes for themselves, all except Soviet architects, in whose country stand-alone residences ran against the powerful Socialist tide. How Melnikov managed to evade these constraints is a mystery and our good fortune that providence happened to smile on this wildest of all the dreamers of the Soviet avant-garde.
4/ Konstantin Melnikov’s House, 1927–1929
Living room © All photos by Igor Palmin
But, for Russians, it is important not so much as an architectural wonder but as a cultural anomaly: a single-family home built during the era of the accursed “apartment question” with the inscription, “Konstantin Melnikov architect”, proudly displayed over the entrance and with an enormous, bright, cathedral-like studio on the third floor, all of it bespeaking Melnikov’s pride in a profession little recognized in the USSR, whose members were treated as anonymous functionaries of design institutes and slaves of the building industry.
4/ Konstantin Melnikov’s House, 1927–1929
Living room
Studio
Hallway © All photos by Igor Palmin
5/ WALTER GROPIUS’s HOUSE
1938
© Library of Congress
5/ Walter Gropius’s House, 1938
© Getty Images
Thereafter, the United States, not Europe, would lead the way in innovative architecture. In the US, Gropius taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He used his home as instructional material.
Walter Gropius was one of the principal modernist architects. His move to the United States in the 1930s was an event of historic significance.