The building of the 4th Women's Gymnasium, designed in the neoclassical style, was constructed according to the project of architect M. K. Geppener in 1887-1888 on the site of the former Widow's House park, which served as a shelter for the widows and orphans of military personnel and officials.

At the time the gymnasium was being built, new approaches to the organization of educational institutions emerged. In 1882, the Society for the Protection of Public Health discussed the unsatisfactory condition of urban and rural schools. Architect P. Yu. Syuzor proposed creating a "model" school, paying special attention to the functionality of educational buildings. The design had to take into account the requirements of the educational process, including hygiene, lighting, and the volume of classrooms. These new requirements influenced the architectural appearance of new educational buildings.

The gymnasium on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya became a vivid example of such changes. The layout of the building was rational: each floor was crossed by a wide central corridor, with classrooms located on both sides. The upper floors were illuminated through large windows, almost the full height of the walls. On the second floor, in addition to seven classrooms, there was a hall for singing and dancing. The first floor housed rooms for governesses, a cloakroom, an inspector's office with a reception area, the apartment of the chief supervisor, and facilities for staff. Heating was provided by Dutch stoves.

The main facade of the building is symmetrical and consists of three parts, decorated with pilasters and pediments. The facade is adorned with rustication, and the building is horizontally divided by a plinth, an intermediate cornice, and a crowning cornice with a denticulated frieze. The vertical rhythm is set by rusticated pilasters. The window openings are arranged at equal intervals: on the first floor, windows with frames and keystones; on the second, with frames and architraves; on the third, with simple frames. The end and courtyard facades are more concise but executed in the same style as the main facade.

On the central part of the main facade, there was originally an inscription with the date of construction and the name of the gymnasium, but only the date, 1887, has survived to this day.

The 4th Women's Gymnasium was transformed in 1870 from the women's school of the Empress Maria Feodorovna's institutions and was initially located in another building. After the revolution, the gymnasium was closed, and in the 1920s, a regular school was opened, where B. E. Chertok, a well-known designer of rocket and space technology and associate of S. P. Korolev, studied.

According to some sources, after the war, the building housed a laboratory for preserving Lenin's body; it is now the Research Center for Biomedical Technologies of the All-Russian Research Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants.

Today, the building houses the Department of Foreign Languages of the I. M. Sechenov Moscow Medical Academy.