How round houses appeared in Moscow, and is it easy for Muscovites to live in "bagels"

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Someone calls them Olympic rings, someone - bagels. Strange looped high-rise buildings appeared in Moscow in the late seventies. Alas, the idea of building round houses did not justify itself, but those buildings that were erected in the Soviet years still stand in the west of the capital as a memory of the strange, contradictory Soviet era. And the residents of these houses are already accustomed to living in this strange, rounded coordinate system.

The idea didn't catch on

The authors of the unusual idea to build ring-shaped houses in Moscow are the architect Yevgeny Stamo and the engineer Alexander Markelov. The project was timed to coincide with the upcoming 1980 Olympics and assumed that a complex of five such buildings would appear in this part of the capital - by analogy with the five Olympic rings. And in the future, who knows, maybe more of them would have been built …

The first house was erected in 1972 in the Moscow region of Ochakovo-Matveevskoye on Nezhinskaya street. However, the second house was built in neighboring Ramenki, on Dovzhenko Street, only seven years later, after which the project was completely abandoned. As a result, only two “rings” remained in Moscow instead of five.

Both artists and workers lived here

Immediately after construction, each house was inhabited by tenants - not by some privileged persons (although there were also foreigners among them), but by ordinary Muscovites. Of the famous people among the tenants, one can recall only the actor Savely Kramarov, actress Galina Belyaeva and her first husband, director Emil Lotianu, who received apartments in a house on Nezhinskaya, but in general the audience turned out to be motley. Indeed, in fact, these buildings did not differ in any way from the typical nine-story buildings of the 1970s, which are still abundant in the sleeping areas of Moscow. The only difference is the unusual shape of the houses and, accordingly, the layout of the apartments.

To make the building ring-shaped, the architects had to design it with a maximum error of six degrees, according to Soviet standards of those years, and make monolithic inserts in the resulting voids. As a result, it turned out the same Soviet "panels" - only of an unusual shape.

Wasteful "bagels"

Although round buildings diversified the landscape of districts with boring Soviet houses of the same type, in reality the “rings” turned out to be not profitable. Firstly, it was more expensive to maintain such a house, because it was not standard. Secondly, the sunlight did not enter all the windows evenly, and great attention was paid to the insolation of citizens' apartments during the Soviet years. Thirdly, the government considered that the construction of the "donut" wastes urban land, since more apartments on the same square would fit in a rectangular house than in a "ring".

Repair is like a bad dream

Residents of round houses did not really worry when they moved in, and even rejoiced. First, you have your own separate apartment anyway. Secondly, you live in an unusual, "Olympic" house, and the very realization of this causes pride. The difficulties were revealed later. For example, if at first glance the apartments seemed ordinary, rectangular, then when gluing wallpaper or buying new furniture, the non-parallelism of the walls became a whole problem, because they diverged by 60-80 centimeters and they had to be leveled or ordered special furniture. Some tenants subsequently began to make a special, rounded design in their apartments, but not everyone could afford it.

Cons and pros of living in a ring

Another problem with bagel houses is the view from the window. The balconies and windows that go inside this ring need to be constantly curtained, because since they are located as if at an angle to the neighbors, from other apartments you can clearly see everything that is happening in your room.

The third problem was immediately faced by guests who began to come to the tenants. There are too many entrances in the houses. In each of these "bagels" there are 26 of them, and this is more than 900 apartments. Since the building is a closed ring, finding the right entrance, or at least the first one, is not easy and not quick.

Another not very pleasant feature of living in such a house is that the acoustics are too good. Even despite the fact that the round building has several arches for the passage to the courtyard, a certain vacuum still forms in the inner part, and if someone in the courtyard or on the balcony speaks in an undertone, all the neighbors hear the conversation. And, of course, the air circulation inside the house, as well as in the apartments, according to the tenants, is not as good as in ordinary houses. Air currents go in a circle. Therefore, on the one hand, the wind periodically howls here, and on the other, there is dampness in some apartments and mold forms.

But the fact that there are shops, pharmacies on the first floors of the houses, and one of these buildings even has its own library and a kindergarten in the yard, pleases residents. Everything you need is close at hand, and most importantly, you constantly see the same faces. Home is like one small town.

However, there are not so many old residents left, more and more apartments in these "rings" are now being rented out, but this is no longer a problem of specifically bagel houses, but a general trend.

Moscow was not built in a day…

By the way, the house on Dovzhenko Street has appeared in several films - for example, in the motion picture Stop on Demand. He is also clearly visible in the credits of the film "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears." And this is correct, because the round building is actually a symbol of the irrevocably bygone era of the 1970s and 80s.

But Moscow buildings of the talented architect Fyodor Shekhtel - this is a completely different era.