«House of Polar Explorers», where Arctic explorers lived
The Polar Explorers’ House is a spectacular Italian–style residential building built at the beginning of Nikitsky Boulevard, and is one of the most elegant examples of pre-war Soviet architecture. In the 1930s, the Polar explorers were the top league, seven heroes of the Soviet Union lived in the house. The whole country followed their mythologized exploits, just as it followed the fate of astronauts a quarter of a century later. G.A. Ushakov, M.P. Belousov, N.N. Zubov, A.V. Lyapidevsky, I.I. Cherevichny, P.P. Shirshov and others lived in the house in different years. The building faces the boulevard with an almost symmetrical facade and is topped with a wide cornice. The protruding side risalites at the height of the last floors are facilitated by elegant galleries of the Corinthian order and walls painted with geometric ornaments. The central part of the facade is divided by square pilasters with Corinthian capitals and cut through by loggias. The walls of the loggias are painted in ochre-red, contrasting with beige. This is the main color of the building. All this creates an elegant Renaissance image characteristic of the architecture of Moscow in the second half of the 1930s. The left wing of the building differs in the size and shape of the windows and is slightly rotated relative to the plane of the facade. The House of Polar Explorers remains a rare example of the boulevard ring development, bypassed by the implementation of reconstruction plans for Moscow in the middle of the XX century.
Address: Moscow, Nikitsky Boulevard, 9
