We have already told the fascinating story of the creation of the house, which received the proud name Skuratov house from the owners and was completed in 2014. Literally twenty steps away, at the corner of Second Neopalimovsky Lane, there is another house built by Skuratov more than ten years ago in 2001, when the architect was still working as a general manager in the studio of Sergei Kiselev. As often happens in such cases, the two houses turned out to be different and similar, looking at them, turning your head on Burdenko Street is a kind of academic pleasure. Here you can understand the vector of development of the author's position, and feel the degree of stability of its basic principles. In particular, it is important that two Skuratov's houses, being next to each other by pure chance, successfully solve the problem of humanizing the urban space around them - despite the variegatedness, if not the exaltation of the immediate environment.
Here, behind the Garden Ring, on the backyards of the Bolshaya Pirogovka street, the city speaks in very different voices. The strongest pressure comes from the building of the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation, built in 1993, with its gold glass and porcelain stoneware. It is very close, coming to the eastern border of the site. However, gigantism was instilled in the place much earlier by the Frunze Lev Rudnev Academy, which combines in its own way amazing architecture with a considerable Red Army sweep. And so it happened: wooden mansions - and one of these stands just opposite the house of Sergei Skuratov, side by side with giants of different architecture, and sometimes without architecture at all. Everything is barely diluted by the moderation of tenement houses of the early 20th century. The urban atmosphere turns out to be tense, contrasting on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
In such an environment, it is not surprising to want to bury yourself, to bury yourself in the ground. This is partly what the new Skuratov house is doing: it is "planted" in a wide pit below the sidewalk to the height of a human being - 1.8 meters. This made it possible not only to increase the height of the basement floor ceilings up to the "front" 5.5 m against the also considerable 3.6 m of the residential floors of the building - but also to create a special space in front of the facade, separated from the street by the plastic slope, as well as by the sculptural stairs and ramps. And three young linden trees; they are here just like "three poplars", since Plyushchikha is nearby. Anyone can go down here, but the space feels like a semi-private, quiet even compared to Burdenko Street, where cars rarely drive. Finding ourselves below, in front of the shop windows, we see only the feet of passers-by, and even then barely; in addition, the space is carefully protected from the rain by a large console: deep, with an extension of about three meters, and high, four floors up. It turns out almost a "cave", although more precisely - an analogue of a portico without supports.
You feel something similar, standing in an archaeological site or, for example, discovering the Church of St. Vitali in Rome: almost under the feet of a passer-by on the street Nazionale. You walk along a noisy sidewalk, and suddenly - steps, some other world, from another layer, outside the modern city.
I must say that this effect of the "cultural layer", an imitation of sensations from the ancient city, Sergei Skuratov has already used in several projects of residential buildings, separating the outer space from the inner one by the difference in elevation, organizing the entrance as a "immersion" into the house. It seems that the first such experience was Art House on Serebryanicheskaya embankment.
What is important, the space of the first tier is more than half public: a beauty salon and a charming mini-cafe with the telling name "Ku-ka" (from the first syllables of the words "cookery" and "cafe") are located here. Entering the cafe, we can go through the house and look into the courtyard: we cannot go out there, the courtyard is only for the residents of the house, but it is clear that from the opposite side there is the same pit with steps as from the street side. In the courtyard there are three linden trees, pandanas lined up along the street, and a maple, an old tree with a luxurious crown, which the architect preserved, complicating the silhouette of the house for this and organizing the core of the courtyard under its crown. Sergei Skuratov, I must say, generally has a special relationship with trees - in the early 2000s, when the theme was not at all sonorous, he not only preserved a beautiful oak tree near the wall of a house in Zubovsky Proezd, but also made it an important part of the composition.
Zubovskiy proezd, oak at the northern facade:
Skuratov House:
But back to Skuratov House. Both its recessed mini-square in front of the shop windows and the inner courtyard are lined with bricks, as well as part of the sidewalk along the street facade. I must say that now, in our days in the center of Moscow, you can find any kind of pavement, from granite to yellow brick from a fairy tale, and two years ago, when the house on Burdenko Street was being completed, the struggle with asphalt was still only in its first, tiled phase. So here Sergey Skuratov acted to some extent as a trendsetter, proposing not tiles or even granite, but a brick lining on a plate, continuing the main theme of the house. This makes the house seem to have “sprouted” into the city, spreading around itself brick “roots” or even a spot of earth of a different quality. In any case, a passer-by, even looking only at his feet, seeing this unexpectedly church floor made of warm-colored terracotta rectangles under his feet, may be surprised, raise his eyes, or even go down to a cafe. The brick pavement - seemingly a detail - serves as an important key connecting the house to the city.
Also, the floor on the terraces, which are occupied by the exploited roofs on three tiers, is lined with bricks. On the roof of the tower there is a private terrace; on a five-story volume - a public one, open to all residents of the house, Sergey Skuratov even placed a bar counter with a coffee machine there. The lower terrace is on the roof of the basement at a height of three meters from the ground level, people coming out here find themselves almost above the heads of passers-by. And in general, the terraces consistently grow upward, making the volume open - the house becomes not like a closed box, which is usually for Moscow, but an inhabited mountain. In a word, it is built into the urban space in a slightly different way; it works with this space on a multilevel and different scale.
What comes first of all from a thoughtful attitude to the context and a creative reaction to a variety of restrictions, from high-altitude to the requirements of insolation. The house sits on a two-storey underground car park, but is made up of three different volumes - each of which denotes or responds to one of the types of surrounding buildings. The 11-storey tower takes up a large scale, but does everything in order to appear graceful - tall and slender. The middle of the house is five-story, it "catches" the scale of the apartment buildings and the nearby house built in 1959. And finally, on the border with the Accounts Chamber, where it was impossible to build anything high because of the insolation, a city villa built into the house appeared, the luxury of our time, crème de crème of real estate offers. A couple of similar villas are known in Molochny and Korobeinikov lanes. In this case, a two-floor mansion with a garden behind a dense brick fence, with geoplastics and Martian red trees inside, which adjoins the house, is not only an exclusive lot, but also an urban planning reaction, a para-pandan of the Smirnov-Lopatina wooden house, standing on the street opposite. And in general - the memory of pre-Petrine Moscow, which consisted of gardens behind fences and houses in the depths.
However, outwardly, the house is not divided into parts, but rather tries to tie a knot, since it has two heads. One - a console-"TV" of the five-story part, hangs over the street, looks strictly to the north, although slightly turns the windows to the west, towards passers-by walking towards the Garden Ring. What completely breaks the imagery of a five-story block lined up along the street - it seems more transverse than longitudinal. The second “head” is at the tower, this is also a large, three-story height “TV”, it looks to the east, but turns slightly to the north, in the direction of the street, avoiding the windows of the Accounts Chamber. In the first versions of the project, instead of bricks, Skuratov considered both green copper facades and rusty corten facades - if one of them took root, then the resemblance to a fantastic, but at the same time retro, robot, some Valli, would be absolutely undeniable. The house noticeably "looks" around, with wary curiosity examines the surroundings, as if from a periscope. The city looks at the house, but the house also looks at the city. The "views" of TV consoles serve as facades, faces, and a hint of the personality of the house. The most striking sculptural image is from the Garden Ring, more precisely from the 2nd Neopalimovsky. Hence, most of all, you are surprised - how much the house is, for all the brutality of the rough dark brick, a small, even fragile creature. I remember that a similar effect of a creature, a mythological animal, was described by Grigory Revzin in relation to Skuratov's house on Mosfilmovskaya.
A counterweight to the sculptural "heads" is a smooth cut of the ribbed brick mesh of the facade along the street. It starts on a five-tiered volume just behind the console, and quickly grows into a tower. The whole plane, indeed, seems to be the result of a section of the volume - firstly, the lower terrace was "cut out" here, stepping back from the edge and opening a view of the wall from a distance, without excessive lifting of the head. Secondly, the internal structure of the house seems to be manifested - revealed, like on a cut of a rock, the internal structure of the house. However, with amendments: the windows are combined in two vertically and fold in a deceptive rhythm, forcing us to mistake the house for a five-story building. In recent Moscow architecture, there are many examples of the struggle between proportions and scale, but in this case the task was performed masterfully - thanks to the perspective reduction and the pause formed by the terrace, from the street side the house is really perceived as a five-tiered one, and not at all eleven-story. That is, it forms a pair of apartment buildings.
The street facade has the most windows - they fill almost all the rectangles between the embossed edges. Other facades are much more sculptural. There are fewer windows here, their wide, gentle slopes make the wall palpably sculptural, consisting of planes juxtaposed at different angles. The angles of the slopes fall into resonance with the bevels of the volumes and the frames of the consoles - all this makes the house faceted, like a blank of a sculptor who has just begun to cut off the excess.
In addition, as we remember, the house is entirely brick, the brick texture serves in it as the strongest means of generalizing the form. Strictly speaking, it is covered with bark of small, rough and multi-colored - from dark brown to yellow Hagemeister, behind which there is a ventilated void, insulation, and only then large bricks of the main walls. But this "bark" was made, as is customary in the bureau of Sergei Skuratov, in good faith: all the little things were drawn and executed according to drawings: wide and sharp corners, window sills, sandriks, lower surfaces of consoles - it took a lot of bricks of atypical shape, but the house is covered with brick like leather, from top to bottom, and seriously embossed. Considering that the technology of manufacturing modern facades tends rather to overlapping planes, it is obvious that creating thicknesses that are pleasing to the eye, telling the subconscious about the reliable massiveness of the walls is also a retro element as opposed to high-tech - forcing modern architecture to look somewhat more conservative than she could. However, there is no trend in modern architecture that is more relevant than this one. Modern architecture finally realized that not all technological innovations are pleasing to the eye, that human comfort, even visual, should be taken care of - only in this case the buildings begin to “speak” and receive a response from their spectators, frequent and rare. So Sergey Skuratov is more than trendy here.
Another element, let's say, of historicization: some of the bricks on the outer planes of the walls are extended two or three centimeters, which adds relief and shadow strokes, especially in the oblique rays of the evening sun, for example, on the western wall. There are no protrusions on the slopes, which is why they also seem to be a kind of cuts, sections of the wall mass. Both the layout of the embossed bricks and the stretching of a variegated but dark color are drawn one by one. The color may seem darkish, but there is also a secret here - the ray of the sun makes it reddish-gold, red, which is quite picturesque.
In some angles, the house looks like a fortress tower. Although the memory of the neighborhood of the Zemlyanoy city, the fourth ring of the Moscow walls, will be stretched - fortifications there were mainly wooden and others. Skuratov's house looks more like a tower of a Florentine family from some 11th century, a semi-fortress with a donjon. And the multicolored tone of the walls, and the windows, in places like loopholes - a lot indicates the well-known, although not devoid of subtlety, method of "grafting" the terrain with an echo of history, which she did not have. However, this is only one of the faces of the house, and Sergei Skuratov, giving a hint of something ancient, immediately obscures it, removes the mask, emphasizing the modernity of the building with the shine of the glass of the fences, the thin metal of the window sashes, or at least the fact that he breaks the brick mass with thin shiny seams … The architect acted in a similar way in Art House, placing frames of metal balconies on the front facade - he compensated for the barely outlined pathos of antiquity, turning it into a serious, but game.
Skuratov House seems to be an important touch in the architect's portfolio, it is not without reason that it is called so pathetically. He fell into that range of possibilities when the jewelry finishing of details, multi-component work with the poetics of material, volume and space was already superimposed on close attention to the urban environment, to the environment that the house creates around itself. It is not surprising that Art House is mentioned here several times, which preceded the house-brother by several years, although not the twin of the house on Burdenko Street: they develop similar themes in different ways, but richly, densely, leaving no lengths and voids. In this sense, both houses are artistic, they declare themselves as works of art: they absorb all possible information about the environment, process it, pass it through their own recognizable, in their own way, very bright plastic language, turn it into an experience of comprehending both the city, and space, and material. as "architectural matter".
