Alexey Kozyr
architectural studio

Apartment in Barrikadnaya ulitsa

Architects: Alexei Kozyr, Ilya Babak

 

 

Alexei Kozyr likes working on small as well as large projects. A good example is this apartment in the Stalinist highrise on Barrikadnaya ulitsa in Moscow. What can be done, you might think, with a ground-floor, 45-square-metre space with two windows? How can this space be expanded? After all, you’re not going to butt down the walls with your head. No, not the walls; but it has proved possible to excavate the floor a little. By removing the 14-centimetrethick layer of cement, Kozyrev gained a measure of vertical freedom – helped by the fact that this apartment has a 4.2-metre-high ceiling. Thus it was that the apartment gained a double-height central space, while mezzanines appeared above the kitchen and corridor. But instead of the usual 15-centimetre-deep floor structures, it was necessary to make super-thin 8-centimetre ones. And in the living room the floor is even made of glass.

 

 

As for the interior style, here Kozyrev was in constant dialogue with Mikhail Posokhin (senior), the architect of the building. “In this house everything is unique,” says Kozyr. “Including the cabinetry, the metal fittings, and the ceramics. At a certain point there were no more state commissions and the industry died out. It’s now impossible to revive it. I’ve preserved the old fittings, but given them new meaning. This is a kind of insert that has been introduced into the interior of the building. And this insert complies with the same laws that were established in the original space. But it is emphatically different, and this contrast works to the benefit of both the old (without destroying it) and the new. This is a principle which is for some reason never employed anywhere else in our country. In Russia people think they have to knock everything down and then erect something completely different…

 

 

In this interior we stripped all the surfaces down to the building’s monolithic structure, preserving everything that it was possible to preserve. You can’t make grooves in concrete, so we have installed exposed electric wiring. When you even out the walls, the wall and ceiling mouldings lose their definition, so we have tried not to even the walls too much. We have deliberately avoided introducing colour. Brick has colour; concrete has colour; and that’s enough for an apartment of this size.”

 

Natalia Pochechueva
Photo Kirill Ovchinnikov
Project Russia №68