“The Autumn of the Patriarch”. Architecture of the Central Moscow Hippodrome created by I.V. Zholtovsky

Abstract

The article deals with the latter stage of creative career of one of the top Soviet architects, Ivan Zholtovsky (1867–1959). In the 1950s, this master, who had the status of the patriarch of the Soviet architectural school and the leader of his own workshop-school, was in charge of the designing several large buildings in which monumental classical forms got a strongly marked crisis character. Perhaps the main work in a number of Zholtovsky’s later pieces is the reconstruction of the Central Moscow Hippodrome (1951–1955), which clearly embodied literary centrism as well as some obsession with decorative in late Stalinist architecture. Solving a major urban planning problem, Zholtovsky used a non-standard composition of the building. In such a case he rejected the canons of classicism and renaissance, which he usually sacredly honored. Instead, he apparently considered ensembles of the Hellenistic era as sources of compositional logic, and such a choice is stunningly accurate for a conclusion opus of the grand Stalinist style. Along with that, the building of the hippodrome can be described as a kind of compendium of quotes taken from earlier buildings of Zholtovsky, including the first one – the nearby mansion of the Racing Society (1903–1905). Loquacious pomposity and a tendency to self-repetition are symptoms of decline, but this final phase of style and its specific manifestations in the work of the architect are certainly worth research attention.