In Moscow, it is customary to call residential complexes a sugary-romantic: something sunnier and softer, in order to immediately convince the buyer that he is buying an apartment not on the outskirts of Moscow, but at least in Sochi. And suddenly - elephants. Also, in general, romantic - elephants are not found here. Either these are pink elephants from a children's song, or from a well-known anecdote, namely a monument to an elephant in his historical homeland … In any case, the move is not ordinary, and the houses are also not quite ordinary.
Modern housing tends to grow upward like a comic rocket on a launch pad, a perfect example - the newly built towers standing next to the "elephants". The Lyzlov houses, on the contrary, are trying to dissolve in the landscape and in the poor surrounding buildings, echoing the slope of the Yauz coast. The houses could have been even lower in height, but in order to save space for the park on the banks of the Yauza, “the building area has been gathered up and the houses have become larger,” the architect complains.
Everyone around is trying to enclose their elites with more powerful fences, and Lyzlov, on the contrary, is drawing a new street between the buildings in order to open the passage to the river and the park for the surrounding residents, as well as attract them to shops and cafes, which will be located in the lower tiers of houses. This, however, does not prevent him from creating more closed, calm courtyards in the corners between the buildings.
Finally, it is now fashionable to tie windows, in memory of constructivism, in horizontal ribbons, and Lyzlov deliberately pulls them up, emphasizing the vertical cells, similar to the same “ribbon windows”, only inverted by 90 degrees. The lintels between the windows will be painted in red and black, in a checkerboard pattern, which in combination with light "frames" will give a mosaic set that merges from afar into the desired pink tone of an elephant "skin".
An investor suggested calling the houses elephants, according to whom zoomorphic comparisons are relevant in modern design. Indeed, everyone is accustomed to combinations of the "predatory jeep" type, reviving the owner's idea of the favorite thing. The house is something big and kind, elephants just fit. Moreover, in profile they are really remotely similar to elephants - each large building has a very high passage that separates most of the house - the imaginary body of an elephant from a thin "trunk". The elongated shape and location of the driveways, according to Nikolai Lyzlov, arose from the observance of insolation standards - apartments cannot be placed here, they will be poorly lit. However, this quite practical form provided the necessary hint, and the houses became “elephants”. Lyzlov's co-author Vitaly Stadnikov even drew a picture: one elephant, smaller in height, with a height of 67 meters, is a girl, the second, who has grown to 83 meters, is a boy.
The elephant is an inexhaustible topic, but another comparison is interesting. Everyone who has played chess knows that there is such a figure - a rook, she is an officer, she is an elephant, which is most often depicted in the form of a fortress tower. So, if we imagine that all our new elite housing is a kind of boat for sailing into a bright future, then it is quite understandable that it is usually built in the form of a tower, but Nikolai Lyzlov proposed a more original version - the elephant itself.
The arrival of elephants means the transformation of the old industrial zone into a beautiful and habitable place. The Lyzlov House is being built on the site of a tannery that has been polluting the upper reaches of the Yauza for a very long time. The water in the river will become clear, the bank, and there is no embankment here, will be cultivated. On the other side of the Yauza, one of the rays of Sokolniki comes out to the park, after walking a little you can get to Losinka. Elephants turn out to be a symbol of a new eco-friendly area.
