On June 6, 1999, on the day of the bicentennial anniversary of the birth of A. S. Pushkin, the Natalya and Alexander rotunda fountain was opened in memory of his wedding with N. N. Goncharova, who lived nearby, in a wooden mansion on the corner of Bolshaya Nikitskaya streets and Skaryatinsky Lane, Nikitsky Gate Square, Moscow (now the Embassy of Spain is in this place).
Famous Moscow architects Mikhail Anatolyevich Belov, head of the author’s Belov Workshop, professor at the Moscow Architectural Institute, and Maxim Alekseevich Kharitonov, director of Arkada LLC, developed the fountain project. Doric columns of gray Carrara marble brought from Italy are installed on a granite pedestal.
A golden dome, symbolizing the dome of the Church of the Ascension of the Lord, is installed on a high entablature. Inside the rotunda are sculptures by N. N. Goncharova and A. S. Pushkin, made by Mikhail Viktorovich Dronov.
A hemispherical all-welded dome with a diameter of 3 m is fully assembled at the Experimental Production of the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino. The ribbed-ring base of the dome and 2400 petals of the cover are made of stainless steel. Petals 2 mm thick were formed on a laser-controlled press, processed by high-temperature annealing, etching and electrochemical polishing, and then coated with titanium nitride. Electric welding was performed by the argon-arc method.
The total mass of the dome, including the inner hemisphere, is about 1 ton.
Nearest metro: Tverskaya, Pushkinskaya, Chekhovskaya, Barrikadnaya, Arbatskaya (Filyovskaya Line), Arbatskaya (Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya line).
