Avant-garde in details: how the Na Shabolovke Gallery works

Na Shabolovke Gallery in Danilovsky district is one of the favorite spots for everyone interested in constructivist architecture. There, they study and keep the history of the Shabolovka neighborhood, in particular, of the Khavsko-Shabolovsky residential development, an architectural landmark from the 1920s. The gallery occupies one of the buildings there.

Founded over 20 years ago, it was fully renovated in 2014. Now it’s focused on avant-garde art projects, as well as on conceptualizing and promoting the Danilovsky district cultural heritage. The gallery runs awareness events (such as presentations or guided tours) regularly. For children, they offer Kids’ VKHUTEMAS: a series of workshops teaching kids how to make household items with their own hands.

The main exposition: from the Shukhov tower to samovar sockets

These days, the Gallery’s pride and joy is the Avant-Garde Museum in Shabolovka, their main exposition. It displays the Danilovsky district history and architecture, commemorates its residents and constructivist landmarks. To a great extent, it was created by the locals, and thus remains particularly dear to them.

“It all started in 2014. I got to know a lot of passionate people who, like myself, believed that our district is unique, but underappreciated and tragically underrepresented on the tourist map of Moscow. We decided to set up a space where the locals could bring their families or friends to, to talk about our neighborhood’s history or to learn something new. We started talking to old-timers, record our talks, collect exhibits,” Ms. Selivanova reminisces.

One wall is dedicated fully to the Shabolovka constructivist mementos. For example, to the most radical commune in the USSR, where the resident students lives were planned out literally minute to minute: the Textile Institute students’ hostel in the 2nd Donskoy Proyezd, and to other, less radical but no less interesting communal houses known by architects all over the world. On top of that, there’s the constructivist experimental school No. 600 that opened on Khavskaya Street in the 1920s, the Danilovsky department store that revolutionized Muscovites’ ideas of retail facilities back in the day, and of course, the symbol and the centerpiece of the neighborhood: the Shukhov tower. Engineer Vladimir Shukhov used an unusual telescopic method to build it: each new section was assembled inside the previous one, then lifted out on winches. Shukhov patented that method in the late 19th century. Initially, it was mainly used to build water towers. For a long time, despite having fewer sections than initially designed, the tower remained the tallest building in the city.

“The Shukhov radio tower is the axis of our district. In our gallery, you can learn how it was built, what challenges they faced when building it, and what processes were used. We have copies of photographs Vladimir Shukhov made himself,” Ms. Selivanova says. “Every year, we celebrate two local history dates: the Tower Day in March and the Radio Day in May. We had a lot of visitors on those days in 2015-2016: they were coming here to socialize, make tower-shaped cakes. The pandemic changed everything, but now we’re trying to restore those good traditions.”

The Na Shabolovke Gallery occupies the facilities of the former Khavsko-Shabolovsky residential public center: an array of constructivist buildings built in 1927-1930 and located between Shabolovka, Lesteva, Khavskaya and Serpukhovsky Val streets. Fifteen L-shaped houses are an architectural landmark. They were designed by young architect Nikolai Travin, a graduate of VKHUTEMAS (Higher Art and Technical Studios). All the buildings were under one street number and end-to-end apartment numbers, like they were all the same apartment block. The buildings had huge numbers (1 to 15) painted on them and façades of different colors. All that was done so that residents and visitors don’t get lost. In time, each building got its own name, apartment numeration was broken by house, and all of them got painted the same color, forgetting all about the architect’s concept. Recently, some of the houses in the Khavsko-Shabolovsky residential development were re-painted into their original colors. Ms. Selivanova hopes the rest of the façades will be restored to the colors envisioned by Travin.

The Gallery not only tells the story of those constructivist apartment blocks, but also gives visitors a chance to visit their first residents. In particular, there you can observe the life of a medic commune that used to occupy a house on Lesteva Street in the 1920s. The Gallery has lots of genuine items from that time. One of the key innovations of the time, built-in furniture, is on display there. It was invented so that people didn’t have to drag their old furniture: wardrobes or chests of drawers, to their new homes when moving.

“Here we have all the characteristic interior accessories of the time: shelves, handles, kitchen hoods, electrical appliances, wallpapers, clothes irons, kerosene lamps, samovars and samovar sockets. Thing is, many people were taking their samovars with them when moving from the country to the city. To accommodate that, they provided the so-called ‘samovar sockets’: holes in walls where samovar stacks went,” the curator says.

The only part of the exposition that changes all the time is the People’s Museum. There, all the items donated by the neighborhood residents are displayed. There are already so many fascinating pieces that it’s impossible to display them all at once. That’s why they update the exposition regularly. Multiple exhibits are connected to local factories that used to stand there in the 20th century. There were quite a few of them.

On top of that, the exhibition also has items connected to the architect craft, as it was practiced in the 1920s-1930s. A mysterious black circle and some no less mysterious rulers are tools they used to train eye measurement ability. VKHUTEMAS architects in Ladovsky’s psychotechnic laboratory studied using them.

Swaps, presentations and Kids’ VKHUTEMAS

Another important part of the Gallery is the library. It has a decent collection of books on avant-garde in pictorial arts, photography, theater and cinema. The library is not only a place where you can sit down with a good book; it hosts presentations and music shows, markets and swaps (events where people can exchange pieces of clothing or other items).

The youngest visitors can attend Kids’ VKHUTEMAS, a studio offering various courses updated approximately once a month.

“We use that space to tell kids about various materials and teach them manual crafts. Our carpentry and textile workshops are especially popular. Kids just love drilling, sawing, cutting and getting some useful thing as a result. They are so happy to wear some piece of clothing they’ve made themselves! After one session, they decided they didn’t want to take off the shirts they’d made, and all went home wearing them. We have both on-staff and invited instructors. Right now we’re running an architecture workshop where kids design buildings and make paper models. We have an intensive design course planned for the summer,” shares her plans Ms. Selivanova.

Kids’ VKHUTEMAS, a part of the Gallery’s education program for children, will relaunch on June 27. Children of different age groups (8 to 13 and 7 to 11 years old) will learn basics of urban planning, design, as well as the structure and principles of object and puppet theater. 

Temporary exhibitions: from workers’ clubs to synthetic art

At the moment, the gallery is hosting the Development Industry exhibition focused on workers’ clubs of the 1920-1930s as a sociocultural and architectural experiment. The history of those clubs that were supposed to lure industrial workers out of their apartments is linked to the names of great architects such as Konstantin Melnikov, Ilya Golosov and Vesnin brothers. The exposition puts a spotlight on the competition for the right to design the Proletarsky district Palace of Culture, known now as the ZIL Culture Center, is one of the leading specimens of constructivist architecture in Moscow.

Another temporary exhibition, And His Name Was El, is dedicated to El Lisitsky, one of the pillars of the Russian avant-garde art. It displays art projects created by students of A.N.Kosygin Russian State University, Graphic Design Department, and inspired by the works of that great avant-garde artist. In addition to student’s works, the exhibition also has some items from the RSU museum collection, such as posters or propagandist textile works.

A new temporary exhibition opens as soon as June 3. It will reveal the principles of synthetic art, a 1920s experiment combining sound and light. The exhibition is focused mainly on Alexander Scriabin, the creator of the art synthesis concept and a genius music composer, Grigory Gidoni, an inventor and artist from Leningrad, and on another well-known artist, Vladimir Baranov-Rossine.