ulitsa Ilyinka, 12 (Moscow)

 office building, 1904_construction, 1770s construction, 1780s construction, object of cultural heritage of regional importance (Russia), 1888_construction

The Russian architect Matvey Fyodorovich Kazakov (1738–1812) constructed a rental property for the merchant P. Khryashchev in the 1780s. Since the function was basic, small and medium-sized apartments for merchants on the upper floors and shops on the bottom, the design of the façade was pretty simple. In the late 1880s early 1890s the Serpukhov City Society requested the architect Roman Klein to modify and redesign the façade. Two columns of bay windows flank the three large arched windows of the second and third floors. Above these windows was a now vacant space for a sign that indicated the function of the building. The decorations tend toward European and baroque ecleticism. Note the relief frieze above the third floor with the expressive lion faces, the griffins below the round windows, the women atop the pilasters supporting small porticoes and the occasional hammer and sickle found mixed in among the decorations. Before the 1917 revolution, this building was the Russian Foreign Trade Bank and the Siberian Bank. During Soviet times this was the archive of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.