New Arbat, Moscow

2024 Author: Harold Hamphrey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 10:06

Novy Arbat is a street located on the territory of the district of the same name in the Central Administrative District of the capital of Russia. It stretches from Arbat Gate Square (from there the numbering of buildings begins) to Svobodnaya Rossiya Square.

Origin of the name

St. Novy Arbat was conceived by designers before the Great Patriotic War. Thus, the general plan for the reconstruction of the capital, which appeared in 1935, provided for the laying of a new city highway from Arbatskaya Square to Dorogomilovskaya Zastava, connecting the center of Moscow with residential buildings in its western part. The indicated highway at its very beginning was supposed to run parallel to the already existing Arbat Street, which is why Novy Arbat became the working version of the name. In addition, this section was called Constitution Avenue. Unfortunately, the war prevented the realization of all these plans. They returned only in the sixties.

In 1963 there was a merger into a single highway of the section from the Garden Ring to Arbatskaya Square, part of Kutuzovsky Prospekt and st. Kalinin. The specified zone became known as Kalinin Avenue, named after Mikhail IvanovichKalinin. Muscovites themselves used the unofficial name for the section between the Garden Ring and Arbatskaya Square - Novy Arbat. This variant was documented in 1994.

Significant events

Three people were killed in the tunnel under Novy Arbat during the August coup (the events of 1991). A memorial sign was later erected in memory of the tragedy.

On March 10, 2010, Novy Arbat became the venue for the nationwide rally "For Fair Elections". Its participants, according to various estimates, were from ten to twenty-five thousand people. Crowds of people moved along the odd side of the street without blocking traffic.

Architectural features

Architects Thor, Posokhin, Makarevich, Mdoyants, Airapetov, Popova, Pokrovsky and Zaitseva worked on the ensemble of the site in question in 1962-1968. Thanks to their efforts, a new volumetric fragment of the metropolitan environment appeared, in which everything was subject to a single plan - from the basic orientation of the space structure to advertising and landscaping elements.

On the northern (even) side there is a dotted line of five residential buildings. Each of them has twenty-four floors, the building material is frame panels, the number of apartments is 176. These buildings are similar to each other like twins. It was assumed that representatives of the creative intelligentsia and high-ranking Soviet officials would live in grandiose buildings. Cafes and shops are located on the first two floors of the houses. Between the high towerstwo-story buildings were erected, which include, among other things, the Book House and the Oktyabr cinema. Thanks to this decision, Novy Arbat has become even more contrasting. However, not everyone sees this as a plus.

And what is located on the southern (odd) side of Novy Arbat Street (Moscow)? This site is occupied by twenty-six administrative buildings. They are connected by a continuous plane of an eight-hundred-meter stylobate. It has two underground and ground floors. They serve to accommodate the lobbies of administrative buildings and a large shopping center.

The development on the odd side is characterized by the most modern level of organization and maintenance of its time. Mutual interference in the implementation of commercial and administrative functions of buildings does not occur, the separation is made with the necessary clarity. The architects proposed an effective solution to the issue of unloading goods to stores located in the buildings. To do this, a tunnel 1 km long and 9 m wide was built along the entire length of this building. Entrances are located from the side of two lanes and from the ends. This does not disturb the habitual course of life of the local population and creates comfortable conditions for the employees of the shopping center.

The current state of affairs

At present, Novy Arbat (Moscow) cannot yet be called a completed project. So, on both sides of this street there are structures left from the old buildings, sometimes even their back sides, which in no way fits into the appearance of the modern highway. Houses on Novy Arbat, erected in the late XIX - early XXcentury, rise above the shopping center on the south side and protrude between the 2nd, 3rd and 4th towers on the north. Their forms in the general ensemble have a random character, but at the same time they provide a sense of habitation, which is so lacking in modern buildings. At the end of the twentieth - beginning of the twenty-first century, houses No. 14, 18, 21, 21a, 23 were reconstructed. They currently have a representative look.

The area from the Garden Ring to the Novoarbatsky bridge

The work on laying this part of the street was carried out in 1957, but its unique appearance is still being formed. The specified territory of Novy Arbat has been in the process of development since the 1920s (that is, even before the construction of the highway was planned), which cannot be said about the main section, formed over a decade on a single project.

Step one

The initial stage of formation of this part of the street took place in 1920-1960. Two residential buildings were erected in Bolshoy Novinsky Lane. Their current address is Moscow, st. New Arbat, 23 and 25.

In the 1930s, the building of the Institute of Balneology and Physiotherapy appeared. After the laying of a new highway, this structure turned out to be on its red line.

In 1940, a residential building was erected at the corner of the future Novy Arbat and Smolenskaya embankment. The author of this project is the architect A. Shchusev. Two houses at the intersection with the Garden Ring, which served as the beginning of this section of the planned highway, appeared in the 1950s. From 1963 to 1970, the construction of the CMEA building continued, and then for almost thirty years the appearance of the famous street did notchanged.

Step two

The end of the 1990s is considered to be the new stage in the formation of the section from the Garden Ring to the Novoarbatsky bridge. On the odd side are the residential complexes Novy Arbat 27 and Arbat Tower (house 29). In 2006, the building of the Institute of Balneology was occupied by a multifunctional complex called Novy Arbat, 32.

Project evaluation

The creation of Novy Arbat is the largest reconstruction process within the inner regions of Moscow, carried out in the 60s of the twentieth century. As a result, an extensive spatial system was created along the highway, a new monolithic element of the urban environment appeared, which entered the structure of the capital and set the main tone for its further transformations.

According to the well-known historian of architecture Andrey Ikonnikov, the large-scale ensemble of Novy Arbat is distinguished by its characteristic and special strength. These properties are most clearly manifested when viewing the panoramas of the street from the embankment to them. Taras Shevchenko. But in the landscapes that open up from a high plateau in the southwestern part of the capital and along a branch of the bend of the Moskva River, Krymskaya and Bersenevskaya embankments, Novy Arbat crashes like a huge wall of skyscrapers. Because of this even ridge, the importance of high-rise buildings of the 50s of the XX century, thanks to which the architectural silhouette of the city had a special picturesqueness, is reduced. The new street, making its way through the historical canvas of the capital, in no way linked to nearby buildings, aroused only hostility among Muscovites. Writer Y. Nagibin even compared Novy Arbat with false teeth in Moscow. The humiliating nickname was to the liking of the townspeople and became popular. The Architectural Guide to the Capital, published in 1997, notes that three decades after the completion of the work, the avenue still brings imbalance to the structure of Moscow. From the adjacent embankments and from the southwestern part of the city, the building elements of the avenue look like alien bodies.

But even though many historical buildings were transformed during the creation of Novy Arbat, this project made it possible to preserve the reserved parts of some Moscow streets, primarily the Arbat.

Transportation

Traffic on the street without traffic lights, two-way. Opposite sides of the street on its different segments are connected by six underground passages. There are no ground crossings. In the original version of the project, it was planned to separate traffic flows from pedestrian masses, but this idea was not implemented.

Vkusny Novy Arbat

Restaurants located on this street provide an opportunity to taste dishes from different cuisines of the world. Among the most famous are "Navruz", "Peking Duck", "Zyu", "Yakitoriya" and "Tropicana". The longest history is at the Prague restaurant. It first opened its doors to visitors in 1872.

New Arbat: shops

During the Soviet Union, supermarkets, department stores and other retail outlets located on Kalininsky Prospekt, such as Novoarbatsky, Voentorg,"Moskvichka" and "Spring" opened up an amazing world of scarce goods for Muscovites and guests of the capital.

Even without the reputation of being the main shopping street (like Tverskaya), Novy Arbat is very popular these days. Investors often fight for the opportunity to own priceless retail real estate on this street, constantly reshaping the existing shopping malls in order to increase the usable area, and they plan to build exclusively shopping centers on the remaining vacant lots. The most famous stores on the left side of Novy Arbat are Adamas, Wild Orchid, Cashmere and Silk, Naf Naf, Delta Sport, Novoarbatsky Trade House, Moskvichka and Esso. The right side cannot be called as lively. There, the sidewalk is not as wide, and there is less available space for retail outlets. But it is on this side that the famous Moscow Book House is located.

Among the stores mentioned above, there are no objects with an interesting history, since Novy Arbat is still too young for memoirs. But there are a great many outlets with an entertaining present.

In addition to reorientation and reconstruction, Novy Arbat plans to surprise residents and guests of Moscow with a series of new interesting projects.