Enfilade layout. What is enfilade. Is any row a suite?

An enfilade is a series of rooms adjacent to each other, the doorways of which are on the same axis. In terms of design, this is one of the best architectural techniques.

A bit of history

Arranging rooms in this way began in the era of classicism. Moreover, the enfilade principle was encountered not only indoors, but also in the prospect of designing the streets of entire cities.

Today, the best examples of cross-cutting planning are presented in palaces. So, for example, in the Winter Palace all rooms are designed according to this principle.

According to the architects' ideas, being outside the building, it was impossible to understand the interior layout of the room.

Types of enfilade

Lateral

The axis of the doorways is shifted from the center of the room closer to the windows. It happens that the doors are located very close to the end wall. And if the rooms are large, there are still two meters to the outer wall. Typically, a similar technique was used to create an unusual play of light in a room.

Central

The openings are located exactly in the middle and divide the rooms in half. To implement such a layout, the premises must be placed on the central axis and be either the same in size or proportional.

Double

All openings are duplicated by paired ones located on the inner axis of the rooms. Used when some rooms are longer than others.

If one of the rooms turned out to be inappropriate depth for organizing a suite, it can be brought to the desired proportions using an alcove or bay window.

Why are enfilades convenient?

To appreciate the convenience of enfilades on a true scale is possible only when studying old palaces or estates. Although in practice it can be organized in any house where there is an uninterrupted line of windows. Such a layout is attractive both from an aesthetic point of view and from a practical one.

When the layout of a house or apartment is being developed, it is worth discussing with the designer the possibility of organizing an enfilade for:

• Acceleration of movements inside the house. In complex architectural forms, narrow dark corridors, passages, lobbies, and halls often appear. Enfilades allow you to refuse them and reduce the time of moving from one room to another.
• Increasing the level of natural light. There will always be windows on the right or left in the room, the residents will not experience a lack of sunlight.
• Visual increase in area. With the enfilade principle of planning, the possibilities of using rooms expand. With an enfilade, you can jointly take into account the volume of several rooms at the same time, because from any point you see not 1-2 windows, but 4-6 at once. If the rooms are completely isolated from each other, the areas are also perceived separately.

Where can you implement an enfilade layout?

In historical houses, there are never any problems with the organization of the enfilade, sometimes it is already there. In modern houses and apartments, the situation is complicated by a large number of load-bearing walls (not to mention the curved line of the facade). Today, the ability to plan rooms according to the enfilade principle is becoming an indicator of quality construction.

To hide imperfections in building materials or architectural inaccuracies, designers linearly complicate building plans. Indeed, in practice, it is much more difficult to build a rectangular apartment than a strange broken-shaped room with many load-bearing walls.

In general, an enfilade can be created in any apartment where there are at least three rooms. A series of openings connecting the living room or salon, bedroom and nursery looks quite impressive. The size of the apartment does not matter. It is enough just to focus on its geometry to select the best option for an enfilade:

• with a fully load-bearing wall (as, for example, in the P-44 house), a side wall will do;
• in the presence of a pylon at the window - the central one.

In fact, it is possible to implement such a principle in a tiny kopeck piece, provided that the premises are properly shaped.

As for private houses, the simpler their geometry, the more opportunities for creating enfilades. Whether to use such a solution on each floor, everyone decides according to the situation. For example, if all front rooms are located on the first level, then the enfilade there may be through. At the same time, on the second one, one can limit oneself to short enfilades divided into residential blocks: children's, parental, etc. Full mirroring of the premises here is not a mandatory principle.

How to mitigate possible inconvenience?

It is not necessary to conduct an enfilade through all available rooms, if this does not seem quite convenient. The best option would be a suite for private rooms. In this case, combine enough rooms in the following order: study, bedroom, dressing room, bathroom.

Many people fear the lack of isolation of rooms, but in vain. This is especially true of the dining room and living room or living room and office, which do not need to be separated at all. In any case, the enfilade can always be interrupted by closing one door and organizing the entrance to the room through another.

If you want to isolate the furthest room, you can end the suite not with a doorway, but with an inner window into this very last room. Thus, the principle of movement into the light will be observed.

In addition, apartments after redevelopment are likely to have small additional passages that can be used to duplicate passages. And if it is uncomfortable to constantly pass through the suite, you can provide for darker walk-through rooms that are responsible for the message. It can be dressing rooms or just narrow corridors.

There is no strict requirement for redundant corridors. They were present in the palaces, but they were so narrow that it was inconvenient for many people to move around them.

What to pay special attention to?

• On the principle of connecting rooms. Remember, the enfilade must close. However, this does not mean that its presence requires the complete absence of other doors. In the end part it is allowed to make as many openings as you like.
• For door decoration. Choose doors in the same style with the same trim and door leafs. Although in the front room the opening can be larger and wider.

Do not be afraid to implement non-standard solutions to create an ideal interior for living.

When designing residential, administrative and other buildings and structures, the order in which they will accommodate various premises is necessarily developed. It takes into account the sequence in which various daily processes related to the movement of people will take place in the structure. A certain connection must be provided between the premises of buildings and structures, and it must be organized in such a way that all persons in it can easily and simply navigate, and communication routes should be as short as possible.

In the modern practice of designing and constructing buildings and structures, there are several general concepts in accordance with which their architectural and planning solutions are implemented. These include the following layouts:

• Corridor;
• Enfiladnaya;
• centric;
• Hall;
• Sectional;
• Mixed.

Corridor planning scheme

The main characteristic feature of the corridor planning scheme is that when it is implemented, all rooms are located on two, on one, or partially on one, and partially on two sides of a common corridor, which is connected with one or more staircases. If the premises are located on both sides of the corridor, then windows are arranged in the end walls to ensure its natural light. As for the length of common corridors, in buildings designed in accordance with the corridor scheme, it is 20 meters when illuminated from one end and 40 meters when illuminated from two ends.

Corridor Compositional Scheme

In cases where, in addition to natural lighting from the ends, additional lighting is provided in common corridors with the help of so-called light gaps (that is, widening of the corridors), then the distance between these light gaps should not be more than twenty meters. As for the distance between the window and the light gaps at the end of the corridor, it should not exceed thirty meters.

Enfilade layout plan

The main characteristic of the enfilade planning scheme is that there are no corridors in it at all. In buildings with such a layout, all rooms are located one after another, in sequential order, and they are interconnected by doorways located along the same axis. Most often, the enfilade layout scheme is used in palaces, museums, shopping centers, as well as in some other buildings.

enfilade scheme

Centric composition scheme

The main distinguishing feature of the centric compositional scheme is that its "core" is the main room, which is quite large. Auxiliary premises are grouped around it, having a much smaller area. The centric composition scheme is used in the design and construction of cinemas, theaters, concert halls.

centric scheme

hall layout

For a fairly widespread hall layout scheme, it is characteristic that all functional processes in buildings built in accordance with it take place in a single room. It has a very large area. On the basis of the hall planning scheme, exhibition halls, covered markets and other similar facilities are designed and built.

Hall composition scheme

Sectional layout plan

The sectional scheme is based on the fact that all the premises located in the buildings built on its basis are grouped into groups of the same layout, called sections. The sectional scheme has found the widest application in the design of residential facilities.

Section scheme

Mixed composition schemes

In the practice of building design, more complex schemes have to be used, which are various combinations of those listed and briefly described above. Most often, their use is due to special requirements of an individual or technological nature. It is these compositional schemes that are usually called mixed.

In order to properly organize the interior space of a building, it is important to choose the most appropriate compositional scheme. At the same time, the designer is required to identify which of them will be the most optimal in order to use all the internal volumes of the structure in accordance with their functional purpose.

The Hermitage is one of the largest art museums in the world, the exposition of which is located in more than 350 rooms located in several buildings.
It includes the Big (or Old Hermitage), the Winter Palace, the New Hermitage, the Small Hermitage and the Hermitage Theatre. And those are just the main buildings.

The ceremonial interiors of palaces occupy a special place in the layout of the Hermitage.

View of the Palace Square and the Winter Palace from under the arch of the main headquarters



Winter Palace

In the huge complex of buildings of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, I want to show only one of the components of its architectural richness .
These are enfilades and galleries of halls.

Anfilade is a series of rooms located one behind the other, the doorways of which are located on the same axis. The enfilade arrangement of rooms is most often found in palace-type buildings. The house with a suite of front rooms, with hospitably open doors allows you to see a chain of rooms that go into perspective. During the baroque and classicism, the principle of enfilade placement of front rooms or halls was dominant in the layout of the house..

There are countless examples. But in the Hermitage, one of the main and largest museum complexes in Russia, the enfilades are distinguished by their special magnificence.

Winter Palace from the Neva

Here are just a few examples of these ceremonial halls with their lined front doors, which give great effect to the whole layout of the palaces. A perspective of halls is created, as if stretching into boundless distances.

Big Hermitage. Enfilade of rooms of Italian art

Big Hermitage. Enfilade of rooms and offices

Loggia Raphael. Room for copies of frescoes by Raphael from the Vatican Palace.
The gallery was opened for viewing in 1792. Architect G. Quarenghi

New Hermitage. Upper vestibule and front staircase.
The halls of the New Hermitage opened to visitors in 1852. The gallery of the upper vestibule surrounding the stairs is decorated with sixteen columns of Finnish granite.

New Hermitage. Hall of twenty.
Twenty columns of the hall are made of Serdobol granite. Metal ceiling with polychrome painting. The floor is mosaic, the work of the Peterhof factory.

In all these photographs, there are perspectives of the halls located in one line.
Or galleries and columns in the same room, also going into perspective.

A similar technique for constructing a building plan creates a certain illusion of space.
The enfilades, halls with columns and galleries that go into perspective seem much longer than they really are.

Particularly interesting is the technique of enfilade construction of premises, compositionally connected by the axis of doorways. A reception that received a royal start in the palaces of St. Petersburg, and then picked up in hundreds of noble houses throughout the Russian Empire. In both capitals, in provincial centers, and in hundreds of mansions across the country. In Moscow Empire mansions, an enfilade was also actively used, even consisting of only three small rooms.
But the enfilades of palaces in St. Petersburg, created in the times of baroque and classicism, are large-scale works of architecture that will always amaze our imagination.

"... In this regard, I have a hypothesis that for modern people, personal space is more of an artifact, a fiction, like once "caloric", and talking about personal space is only a phenomenon of modern culture and stroking an anxious reader.
I think that the value of personal space is a polite, politically correct name for the value of our neuroticism. The size of personal space is a direct indicator of anxiety, and the amount of personal space is a beautiful name for the amount of personal fears of a person.
()

So-called "personal space" is a popular psychological term. Everyone knows what it means:

(In fact, not only and not so much the distance, i.e. the volume of personal space, as its boundaries is important for characterizing a person. The state of these boundaries: density, stability, permeability. The ability (ability and skill) to manage boundaries: push, narrow , transform - as needed, consciously and automatically.)

Some people can hardly tolerate other people's touches, smells and sounds.
And other people without other people's sounds, smells and touches are dreary and boring.
Some willingly give themselves into the hands of others (literally and figuratively), allow themselves to be taken care of, groomed and cherished - others cannot stand this. Some are allowed, others are absolutely not.
Both those and others believe that it is their perception of personal space
(perception = sensation + understanding)
- and there is a norm.
What is innate in this "norm" and what is acquired, what is shaped by culture, and what is the environment?

The evolution of ideas about the "sacred right to personal space" is becoming clearer
when studying

Apartment layouts of housing built before the invention of various "theories of privacy".

Below are excerpts from the book "Petersburg Profitable Houses. Essays from the History of Life." (Notes in italics, my bold.)

Gallery houses

At first, they tried to build tenement houses with galleries located along the perimeter of the courtyard (a type of house borrowed from Europe). From the open galleries there was an entrance to the apartment, and sometimes to each room.

Grigorovich in Petersburg Organ Grinders describes the gallery layout: “A small two-story wooden house, painted with the usual dirty green paint and towering in the corner of a dark courtyard, serves as their refuge. The exterior of such buildings is usually plastered with a gallery, which you can hardly climb up a shaky staircase.

Because of the cold climate, the galleries in St. Petersburg did not take root, despite the fact that they even tried to glaze them.

The advantage of the gallery as a kind of common corridor was not appreciated by St. Petersburg residents, who were accustomed to enfilades.
and not experienced in walk-through rooms not the slightest inconvenience .

enfilade layout

The rooms are arranged sequentially, one by one. Doorways - on the same axis. On the way to the back room, you pass through all rest.

Good for ventilation.

Each apartment had two parallel suites of rooms. Along the street facade there was a front suite, the windows of the suite of living rooms looked out into the courtyard. The rooms of the two enfilades communicated with each other.

The suite of front rooms ends with a mirror. Painting by F.P. Tolstoy "Family portrait of the artist", 1830

After studying the plans of various types of apartments of Petersburgers, it turned out that in the second half of the 19th century there were fundamental changes in the layout of apartments - a transition from enfilade to closed rooms.

Previously for centuries there was no need share interior space for partitioned rooms: person did not experience needs for seclusion and privacy.

Then the interior of the house began to be divided into rooms, however open and not isolated.
The chambers of ancient palaces and apartments, as a rule, are walk-through, connected in enfilades, and in none of the rooms No complete privacy.

Of course, the reason is not the "inability" of architects or builders to plan the premises in a different way.

The reason lies elsewhere - in the special sense of self of a person who constantly remained in sight and did not suffer from it none moral inconvenience.

Corridor layout

Only from the second half of the 19th century, separate closed chambers and rooms gradually began to appear in St. Petersburg. First, these are matrimonial bedrooms and offices, then other private rooms. Individuals begin to feel more strongly the need for solitude.

Since the 1860s, corridors have been planned in the apartments, and initially the enfilade is preserved, and the corridors play an auxiliary role - they are used by servants. This is how (according to modern housing terminology) adjoining-isolated apartments were born.

Gradually, corridors began to be used more and more, sometimes without using interior doors.
In the mid-1880s, apartments with isolated rooms began to be built.

Nikolaevsky Petersburg was not like Alexandrovsky, more like a grandiose construction site with a kingdom of fences that surrounded the buildings. Now, under Nicholas I, these buildings were not only completed, but with might and main shone with their eternal beauty. The architect Carl Rossi built almost nothing. In 1832, aged and ill early, he asked for leave to retire and did not touch a pencil until his death in 1849. It seemed that he exhausted himself to the bottom early, throwing all his brilliant energy at once into the streets and squares of St. Petersburg and, devastated, froze in anticipation of death. By 1832, he completed not only the triumphal ensemble of the General Staff, but also much more. He created a completely new, unexpectedly majestic and at the same time chamber ensemble of the Alexandrinsky Theater Square. Both from the ground and from a bird's eye view, this ensemble still surprises with the harmony of the most diverse volumes.

Alexandrinsky Theatre. 1830s

At the same time, the eye notices the graceful pavilions of the Anichkov Garden, lanterns, lattices - all this is combined into a single, unique architectural melody, in which every note is in its place. People experienced such a feeling of admiration for the creations of Rossi when they saw the grandiose, like the Parthenon, the Mikhailovsky Palace and the Senate and Synod buildings connected by an arch, resembling an architectural “organ” with dozens of their columns. And this time Rossi showed himself to be a great master of boring symmetry and harmony. He managed to complete the most difficult task of Nicholas I - to create for the two highest institutions of the empire a building comparable in size and decoration to the Admiralty that stood opposite the Senate and Synod. With the genius of Rossi, all these three structures closed into a single ensemble of Senate Square, along with the Horse Guards arena, the boulevard and the Bronze Horseman in the middle.

Not far from this latest masterpiece, Rossi launched his competitor, Auguste Montferrand. Admiralteyskaya Square became his "field". Here he, sometimes distracted by other orders, built for almost half a century. First, he erected a majestic building with three facades - the Lobanov-Rostovsky house. At the same time, Montferrand undertook a risky business - the restructuring of St. Isaac's Cathedral. It was as if the building was enchanted. Since the end of the 1760s, Rinaldi, then Brenna, could not finish it. Montferrand was more fortunate. He managed to finish the cathedral just before his death in 1858. And he began this work in 1818, that is, he erected a titanic structure for 40 years!

E. A. Plushar. Portrait of the architect Ricard de Montferrand

This column, dedicated to Alexander I, became the "last point" in the work of several generations of architects who decorated the front center of St. Petersburg. It is important that the overall result of their work was not just "building", but a unique ensemble of ensembles. Indeed: magnificent buildings stand around the squares, which, in turn, merge with the space of the Neva. "Water" (and in winter "ice") square, created by nature itself between the Peter and Paul Fortress, the spit of Vasilyevsky Island and the Winter Palace, smoothly flows into a string of man-made squares. Palace, Admiralteyskaya (now Admiralteisky Prospekt and Aleksandrovsky Garden), Senatskaya (now Dekabristov), ​​as well as Birzhevaya Square and the Field of Mars form a majestic complex of open urban spaces demonstrating the unity of the creations of nature and man. It is known that the idea of ​​a "enfilade" of squares along the Neva was already laid down in the plans of the architectural commission of 1762, but it was realized only in the Nikolaev era. These squares are merged together by their history and architectural design, while they are not similar to each other. Palace Square, pulled together by an elastic arc of the General Staff building, is, as it were, folded into a kind of funnel around the Alexander Column. Admiralteyskaya Square, even before it split into a avenue and a city garden, was a grandiose parade ground on which the entire Russian guard lined up on solemn days. The coolness of the Neva and the bitter memory of fratricide in December 1825 lives next to the Admiralteyskaya Senate Square, and behind the creation of Montferrand is St.

marginal notes

In general, the Frenchman Montferrand was not only an outstanding architect, but also a remarkable engineer. When the entire royal family arrived at the installation of the first column of Isaac on March 20, 1828, they did not have to wait long. The ascent of the huge column took only 45 minutes, 5 minutes longer than the ascent of the famous Tsar Bell from the pit in the Kremlin, which was cast, but could not be pulled out of the pit to Montferrand for almost 100 years. And the unsurpassed engineering feat of the architect was the hoisting of the Alexandria Pillar on Palace Square. On May 30, 1832, ten thousand citizens gathered around the place of ascent together with Nicholas I. All of them saw how, with the help of ingenious devices, a column weighing 650 tons and almost 50 meters high was lifted and installed in 100 minutes! A real world engineering record!

In 1839, the Frenchman A. Custin, accustomed to the close comfort of Paris, the enfilade of these squares seemed like a wasteland surrounded by rare buildings. For a Russian person, the chain of these squares is an architectural symbol of an entire era of the great empire with its vast vast expanses. These squares meant and still mean a lot to the heart of every Petersburger. Here and now one can feel the slow and inevitable movement of time and at the same time the elusiveness of every moment. In the inextricable fusion of architecture and nature, in an amazing combination of subtle northern colors and shades, there is its own depth, clarity and watercolor elegance.

The heart of St. Petersburg was the Admiralty side. At that time, unusually talented people gathered here, lived side by side, sat in the same salons and pastry shops, argued, made friends, quarreled: A. S. Pushkin, N. V. Gogol, M. I. Glinka, V. A. Zhukovsky, and A. Krylov, V. A. Tropinin, P. A. Vyazemsky, V. F. Odoevsky and many others. Almost all of them singly and in groups could be seen on Nevsky Prospekt.