Hotel Metropol

The Hotel Metropol on Teatralny Proyezd is one of the largest public buildings of Moscow Art Nouveau and a significant architectural monument of the style, largely defining the appearance of Theatre Square and Revolution Square. The complex was built between 1899 and 1905 on the initiative of the entrepreneur and patron Savva Mamontov, and the original design was drawn up by the English architect William Walcot.

The land for construction was acquired in 1897 by the St. Petersburg Insurance Society, and a year later Mamontov, together with partners from railway projects, founded the Northern Homebuilding Society, which chose for the building the Art Nouveau style then only just emerging in Europe. Lev Kekushev was invited as chief architect, and Mamontov initially envisioned housing in the complex a gigantic six-tier opera house with nearly three thousand seats — larger than the Vienna Opera — with Viktor Vasnetsov, Konstantin Korovin, and Mikhail Vrubel involved in the decoration. The theater idea was later abandoned, and in early 1899 an international façade competition was held simultaneously in four countries, won by Walcot's design.

The hotel's façades are marked by strict lines with pseudo-Gothic elements — turrets and pinnacles — while the ground floor, faced in red granite, contrasts with the smooth stuccoed upper tiers. The building is adorned with majolica panels made at Mamontov's Abramtsevo workshop: the central place on the main façade is occupied by “The Princess of Dreams,” based on a painting by Mikhail Vrubel, while the neighboring compositions were made from designs by the artists Alexander Golovin and Sergei Chekhonin. A sculptural frieze on the theme of the changing seasons, the work of Nikolai Andreyev, encircles the entire perimeter of the building.

Opened in February 1905, the Metropol was dubbed by contemporaries the Tower of Babel of the twentieth century: it was the first hotel in the city to have refrigerators, elevators, telephones in the rooms, and central hot water supply, and in 1906 Moscow's first two-hall cinema opened at the hotel. During the October Revolution the building was held for six days by a detachment of military cadets, and it took an artillery bombardment for Bolshevik forces under the command of Mikhail Frunze to take it by storm. From 1918 the former hotel became the Second House of Soviets: it hosted sessions of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee attended by Lenin, Trotsky, and Kalinin, housed Yakov Sverdlov's reception office, and for several months one of its rooms was home to the poet Osip Mandelstam.

A large-scale restoration in 1986–1991, carried out by a Finnish company together with the Mosproekt-2 workshop, restored the historic appearance of the façades and interiors, including the famous glass dome over the main restaurant hall. The hotel reopened on December 5, 1991, with an international five-star rating, and passed into city ownership the following year. Since then it has hosted heads of state and celebrities from around the world — the hotel remains both a symbol of pre-revolutionary luxury and a witness to key events in the Soviet history of Moscow.