The aesthetics of the Russian avant-garde, which was perceived ambiguously by contemporaries of Kazimir Malevich, gave rise to controversy and caused strife in the artistic environment, today serves as an inexhaustible source of inspiration for architects and designers, is a noticeable creative guide and a kind of reference point. A striking example of this is the interior of a Moscow apartment, the recent work of the architectural bureau TOTEMENT / PAPER. By its outlines, the apartment on the plan resembles the Latin letter L and consists of a wide rectangular part with three window openings and a long narrow “wing” with one window.

Before the reconstruction, the two bearing concrete walls broke up the space into several small closed spaces by meter size. Thus, initially the imagination of architects was to some extent limited by the characteristics of the layout. Customer requirements for the functional component of the interior turned out to be quite traditional. The owner wanted a bedroom with a dressing room and bathroom, a guest room and an open large lounge that includes a living room and a kitchen-dining room. However, with the cabinet, another necessary room, everything was not so simple. “The customer was expecting an original solution,” recalls one of the authors of the project. Valeria Preobrazhenskaya. - The office was conceived as the heart of an apartment, a personal area not tied to the window in terms of planning. Initially, we proposed a more complex version of interior design, according to which the space was filled with curvilinear shapes. However, the concept has changed, and as a result, the cabinet, which hid the details of the supporting structure, turned out to be the only non-orthogonal three-dimensional element in space. ”

In accordance with the logic of the development of the interior of the apartment appeared foreground and background. The foreground is a salon, the space of which is formed by closed volumes of the office, guest bathroom, as well as a sofa group. The background, a private area (guest room, master bedroom with bathroom), reminds a separate backstage, which is, nevertheless, an extension of the common space. In this configuration, the corridors are connected into a single system, a hall area with a private unit and a guest room with the master bedroom.

According to the authors, the white color that prevails in the interior allows to optimally reveal the shape of the object. It is noteworthy that the most famous architects of Malevich, Alpha and Gota, were also white. However, in the color palette of architects, along with white and black, red is also present. This is what it says Valeria Preobrazhenskaya: “Indeed, red, as a tribute to the master, appears in the form of accents, strokes, details. According to Malevich, this color symbolizes movement, energy, progress. But after all, the parallelepiped architecton itself is designed to create tension and dynamics, to form the necessary scale, to make turns of the walls without unnatural transitions. ” As architects themselves sometimes joke, minimalist concepts appear not from a lack of means of expression, but as a result of careful selection in terms of their oversupply. Project Levon Airapetova, Valeria Preobrazhenskaya and their colleagues demonstrates the validity of this observation and convinces us that any design problem can be solved elegantly if the add-in as a set of professional skills has a reliable ideological and philosophical basis.

Levon Airapetov: “All orthogonal structures of the interior, both planar and voluminous, are only the background, the environment for the main object, where two elements are combined -“ white ”and“ black ”, form and emptiness, external and internal. Interactions - merging, interpenetration of opposites as the basis for the birth of a new form, a new type of movement and, in the end, a new image - this is the main idea of ​​our work. ”