White House
— — the white stone the century kept testing.
Not only on a wall.
“The seat of the Russian Federation's Government, on Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment about three kilometres west of Red Square. White marble, a stepped tower, a building most of the world recognises from one news clip or another: tanks on the bridge in August 1991, smoke on the upper floors in October 1993. Repainted, restored, still working. The river runs past on its way to the Oka. from the studio
White House, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Russian White House, Dom Pravitelstva (the Government House), stands on Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment in central Moscow, about three kilometres west of Red Square. Architect Dmitry Chechulin designed the complex in the 1960s and 1970s; construction finished in 1981. The thirty-nine-storey central tower in pale dressed stone sits on a long horizontal base block, with the Moskva River curving past its south side and Free Russia Square on its eastern approach. It has served as the seat of the Russian Federation's Government since 1994.
The cladding is what the eye lands on, a pale dressed stone that reads almost luminous against Moscow's grey winter sky. The building took heavy damage in the October 1993 constitutional crisis when tank rounds struck the upper floors and fire blackened the facade for several storeys. A full restoration finished in 1994; the marble was cleaned or replaced, the offices rebuilt. The tower's silhouette, square-shouldered and stepped above the river, has become one of the recognisable shapes on the Moscow skyline.
Two dates do most of the work in the building's memory. In August 1991, Boris Yeltsin climbed onto a tank outside the entrance to address crowds opposing the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev; the photograph is one of the closing images of the Soviet century. In October 1993, the same building was shelled during the standoff between Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet; the fighting killed about 150 people by official count. The address itself, Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment 2, carries both.