Both houses face Donskoy Proyezd with white and red striped facades, which, in a constructivist manner, are strictly and definitely lined with horizontal brick-colored lines marking the floor level of each floor, except for the upper one. The floor markings are enlivened by the diagonal rhythm of alternating windows, which vaguely resembles the step of a giant brickwork - all together create a colorful image of a modern, but not neglecting the context, "front" facade, divided between two houses.
In the rest, courtyard facades of buildings, glazing predominates, and it seems that they tend to be invisible, like a theatrical mechanism carrying backstage scenery framing the performance. The game begins as soon as the observer begins his movement along the Donskoy passage: the red and white facades sometimes merge into one, then diverge, revealing a new mini-street conceived by the architect, crossing the block diagonally, alternately cutting off the corners of both buildings. If you literally take the association with the backstage, then everything that happens in the driveway between the two houses turns out to be the mise-en-scene. Framing the life of the courtyard with theatrical scenes, the author acts like the architects of the era of classicism and baroque, turns life into a performance, but the main difference here is that the “participants” of the improvised performance do not even suspect about it - they are not shackled by a solemn ritual, but live an ordinary life, the audience is random, they may not exist. The resemblance to the theater turns out to be decorative, optional, it can be seen or not noticed, it adorns the architect's plan, but does not intrude into the privacy of the residents.
The theme of the performance is supported by the difference in the heights of the buildings - a twelve-story building facing the red line of passage, six floors below its eighteen-story counterpart, standing in the back of the site. From some points of view, this difference will be clearly noticeable, somewhere - on the contrary, it may disappear, because, obeying the laws of perspective, the first house "grows" and the second "shrinks". Thus, in the absence of real actors, the architecture itself plays out the performance.
