Peking Hotel

The high-rise building with a tower, a clock and a spire on Bolshaya Sadovaya Street closes the vista of Triumfalnaya Square and works as the main vertical accent of this stretch of the Garden Ring. Dmitry Chechulin's design was ready before the war, construction dragged on, and the building was only finished by the mid-1950s, when it was given over to a hotel with a Chinese name, a sign of the alliance between the two countries at the time. The tower rises to seventeen storeys, the lower tiers are decorated with stucco moulding, urns and sculptural groups, and the corner volumes are crowned with turrets. The best point for photographs is the pedestrian bridge over the Garden Ring tunnel: the flow of traffic disappears underground, on the left the building of the Satire Theatre glows, and on the right the hotel's facade is bathed in warm light. Deep in the vista rises another high-rise, the residential building on Kudrinskaya Square. Below, right by the square, stand the vestibule of Mayakovskaya metro station and the long colonnade of the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, so the whole ensemble reads from a single point.

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