Melnikov House

The Melnikov House is a one-apartment residential house, a landmark building of the Soviet avant-garde. It was built in 1927–1929 in Krivoarbatsky Lane in Moscow by the outstanding Soviet architect Konstantin Melnikov for himself and his family.
The Workshop House is considered the pinnacle of Melnikov's work due to its innovative design features, original artistic image, and well-thought-out functional layout. This one-apartment residential mansion, located near the centre of Moscow, is a unique example of this type of construction during the Soviet era. It was completed before Melnikov was 40 and would be his last building.
In 2011, the Shchusev Museum of Architecture took over the management of the building, which is now displayed as a part of its branch, the Melnikov Museum, established in 2014.
In 2022, the interiors of the house were closed to the public due to restoration. However, visitors can still access the garden and inspect the exterior.

History of creation

Searching for an architectural and planning solution

Konstantin Melnikov dreamed of having his own separate workshop house while studying at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Initially, he planned to purchase a pre-built house and renovate it. He searched for a suitable building in Moscow for a long time. The architect's plans for the reconstruction of one of Moscow's old stone houses in the neoclassical style, created in 1916–1917, have survived. The traditional layout and appearance of Melnikov's first sketches for his own house can be attributed to the influence of his former teacher, the architect Ivan Zholtovsky. Melnikov studied under Zholtovsky at the architectural department of the school and worked under his guidance from 1917 in the Architectural and Planning Workshop of the Construction Department of the Mossovet, which was the first state architectural workshop of the Soviet era.
However, in the early 1920s, Melnikov began working intensively on sketches for an innovative style house. The architect's personal archive contains various versions of his own house projects, all of which propose the construction of a workshop house that combines both domestic and working environments. Melnikov was so attached to his family that he could not imagine working in any other atmosphere but his home.
Unlike Melnikov's other buildings, the architect designed his own workshop house based solely on his personal taste and ideas about the housing and working environment. During the preparation of the house sketches, Melnikov acted in two roles simultaneously – as the client and the designer – and could afford maximum freedom of form-creation.
The initial known design for the new house is a two-storey square building with a large angled Russian stove in the centre of the first floor. Other sketches depict the house as a truncated pyramid, with small mezzanine rooms suspended in a single interior space. At the same time, in both the initial and subsequent versions of the house project, Melnikov focused more on the interior and layout of the premises than on the external appearance of the house. He aimed to create a space that would suit the needs of himself and his family.
Experiments with a circular plan first appeared in Melnikov's drawings in 1922. The architect sketched an oval and even an egg-shaped building, while continuing to develop the interior. The final version of the project, which combines two cylinders intersecting each other, is believed by researchers of Melnikov's work to have originated from an unrealised project for the Zuev Club. In 1927, Melnikov participated in a competition to design this club. He described his design as 'a pipe organ of five cylinders'. Later, when the building was being constructed according to Ilya Golosov's design, Melnikov decided to incorporate at least some of his ideas into his own house. The house featured a series of vertical cylinders inscribed in each other.
The curvilinear structure of the new house may have been influenced by the fact that the Melnikov family lived in a communal apartment for a long time before moving into their own house in Krivoarbatsky Lane. One of the rooms in the communal apartment had a plan in the shape of a quarter circle and overlooked five windows on the corner of Petrovka Street and Strastnoy Boulevard. The architect took into account the type of family life formed in the flat on Petrovka when designing the mansion. The main furniture purchased for the flat became the basis for the furnishings of the workshop house.

Construction: structural features of walls and shells

Melnikov's house is unique because, in the late 1920s, when the NEP was winding down in the USSR and the construction of communal houses began all over the country, one man was allowed to build a private house in the centre of the capital. Several explanations exist for this fact.
Firstly, Melnikov's house was an officially recognised experimental building. The architect tested the idea of a round house here, which could later be used in other projects due to its cost-effectiveness and simplicity of construction, including the construction of communal houses.
Second, by the mid-1920s, Konstantin Melnikov was one of the greatest and most respected architects not only in the USSR, but in the world, as a Soviet architect. He became world famous for building the USSR's pavilion for the World's Fair of Decorative Arts and Applied Arts in Paris.
Thirdly, the architect built his workshop house in 1927–1929, when he had a large number of real orders and could allocate funds for construction from the family budget. The total amount of fees he had received for the Bakhmetievsky and Novo-Ryazansky workshop projects by the time the actual construction of the house began in September 1927 was 10,900 roubles. It was this sum that the architect paid in 1927. At the same time, the initial construction estimate was 25,140 rubles, which rose to 37,846 rubles by October 1929. The construction of the house was carried out by the building organisation of the Moscow Municipal Services, exclusively at the architect's expense.. Due to the fact that the building under construction was considered a pilot construction, Melnikov was also exempted from the building tax and ground rent by the decision of the Presidium of the Moscow City Executive Committee of the Moscow City Council of 11 November 1933.
Finally, there is the version that the architect received the land as a reward from the Soviet authorities for his work on Lenin's first sarcophagus in 1924.
Konstantin Melnikov himself described in his memoirs the process of deciding to build his own house in Krivoarbatsky pereulok:


Schematic plan of the site with coordinating captions and notes by K. Melnikov		Approved construction project. Floor plans and building in section		Explanatory note by K. Melnikov with a drawing of the building wall structure

The version of the project approved for construction was dated 19 June 1927. The general volumetric and spatial composition of the workshop building was finally defined in this project. However, the details of the building's design were significantly refined by Melnikov during the construction process. Along with the project, the architect made a detachable model of the building, which made it possible to see the architectural composition and internal layout of the future workshop building. The model was needed to obtain a building plot and to explain the complex volumetric and spatial structure of the building to the builders.
The main differences between the original and the realised designs:

Both cylinders in the original project had a shared sloping roof, and their heights varied slightly from each other. This was due to the intended inclusion of a mezzanine floor with two rooms for children, instead of the balcony-terrace that was ultimately constructed.
The original plan did not include a basement floor with a calorifier in order to save money. The stove was intended to be placed in the centre of the second floor, which greatly limited Melnikov's room layout options. However, during construction, the wall foundations of the previous pre-revolutionary house were discovered. During the construction process, a small cellar was incorporated under the front cylinder, which could accommodate a 14 m² calorifier chamber. This allowed the architect to create a free plan for the first floor.
Due to the presence of the stove on the first floor, the staircase that is located in the area where two cylinders intersect, is shifted towards the inside of the front cylinder, closer to the entrance of the house in the original design.
The original project did not include the hexagonal windows, which have become the symbol of the house. Instead, Melnikov planned to have two narrow stained glass windows that would cut vertically through the entire rear cylinder and face west and east, respectively. To clarify, the hexagonal openings, referred to as "vents" by Melnikov, were originally included in the construction to reduce the use of expensive and scarce bricks while also ensuring even distribution of loads. It was only during the construction process that the architect decided to repurpose some of these vents as window openings.

The workshop house's walls and floors feature original and technically innovative structures, some of which Melnikov attempted to patent but was unsuccessful.
The house walls are made of red brick with a patterned masonry that creates an openwork frame. The masonry was carried out according to the design with a shift along the wall in a row and across the wall in two rows. As a result, 124 hexagonal openings were formed in the outer walls of the house, according to Melnikov himself. Other sources suggest that the walls originally contained "about 200" or 100 openings. During construction, almost half of the openings were filled, leaving 64 for windows and niches. The original wall framework allows for the relocation of window openings without compromising the load-bearing structures. New windows can be built almost anywhere in the wall and existing ones can be closed if necessary. During construction, loose sand, clay, and broken bricks were used to fill unnecessary openings. This reduced construction costs and saved materials. Additionally, the high air content between the particles in this mixture allows it to function as a 'heat accumulator', with lower heat dissipation compared to bricks. According to the architect's own calculations, his proposed design reduced brick consumption by almost half compared to conventional masonry with the same load-bearing capacity. Additionally, Melnikov's masonry system ensured even stress distribution throughout the wall and eliminated the need for load-bearing pillars and lintels.
The inter-storey shells were also uniquely constructed using wooden batten placed on a rib. When Melnikov built his own house, he had already successfully constructed innovative wooden structures. Examples of these structures include the 'Mahorka' pavilion at the first All-Russian Agricultural and Craft-Industrial Exhibition of 1923 in Moscow, the USSR Pavilion for the 1925 World Fair in Paris, and wooden trade pavilions and the office building of the Novo-Sukharevsky market.
The inter-storey shells are constructed using a grid of 0.5x0.5-metre square cells formed by crossing the floor planks at right angles. A wooden deck made of tongue-and-groove boards is then placed diagonally over the grid from above and below. This design eliminates the need for columns, rafters, and beams, allowing the shell to function structurally as a single membrane plate. The shell offers structural reliability even when sagging due to gravity. For instance, in the architect's studio, the ceiling had sagged over time. However, during renovation, Melnikov chose not to straighten it, explaining that the lenticular ceiling reflects light better by directing it downward.