The impressive composition is composed of two office buildings, almost equal in volume and proportions. The first is glazed and stretches along the highway, the second is a generalized image of a dilapidated antique bridge: one arch is intact, the other starts from the side of the road and breaks off in the middle. The place of the hypothetical "collapse" hangs over the sidewalk and turns into a remote console-balcony overlooking the small square "Kuntsevo" on the opposite side of the highway and further to the University, to Troekurovo and Troparevo.
The house in the form of an arch will become the second "Roman" accent on the line of Kutuzovsky Prospect, where Bove's Arc de Triomphe took root in the late 1960s. For a pedestrian, the distance between them is large, for a car - 5-10 minutes, which allows you to build a strong logical connection between the two landmarks of the road to the west, which we have is the Mozhaisk highway, comprehending it as Roman or leading to Rome. This is the urban planning meaning of the building, which, at an average by modern standards, actively participates in comprehending the urban fabric, structures it, adds to the existing "text" - and thus, already at the design stage, claims to be a new attraction of Kutuzovka.
The "Arch-Bridge" is covered with rusticated stone cladding and cut through with square, rectangular and even constructivist corner windows. There are a little more of them from the side of the neighboring house, where they respond to the rigid rhythm of its panel grid, and further, to the arches, the windows become smaller and thinner. The openings scattered in a thoughtfully chaotic manner do not disturb, but rather revive the stone-like surface of the arch, on the scale of which they look like traces of fallen stone blocks, developing the theme of ruins with geometric convention. At the corner facing the highway, the masonry thickens, turning into a blurry archivolt of thin long slabs. All together quite accurately recreates the feeling of Roman concrete - gigantic, with rare chipped stone mass.
The culmination of the architectural plot is at the intersection of the glass and stone parts. A shiny rounded "nose" passes under the "preserved" arch of the "bridge" and emerges from the opposite side. The plane under the arch is glazed - the "nose" seems to overcome some matter, which is why the docking unit looks like a "teleport" covered with a film from a science fiction movie.
Everything together reminds the ruins of a city outpost through which the aluminum-glass modernity tries to penetrate "inside": the ambassador of modernity, a cruciform skyscraper, stands at a distance "on that" side, and the "vanguard", meanwhile, found a loophole, opened a portal for itself under " ancient "arch. The result is a very capacious and accurate image of the current relationship between the architecture of the center and the outskirts. With this plot, the house greets its spectators, leaving the city along the Mozhaisk highway.
Comparison of diverse forms by "threading" one of them into another is a favorite technique of Alexei Bavykin, dating back to the plastic searches of the 1920s. group ASNOVA Here, however, it takes on a different flavor, because it happens not only on the formal, but also on the semantic level: the conventionally old is opposed to the ultra-new. At the same time, at the stand of Arch-Moscow 2006, the architect proposed an exact historical analogy of his project - the Roman bridge of the censor Emilia (or Ponte Rotto 179-142 BC). Which is interesting in that there is already a semicircular shape cut into the arch - this is how one of the supports ("bulls") of the ancient bridge is solved. Consequently, the form can be understood as entirely borrowed from the ancients, and not arising through avant-garde design, which, however, does not remove the plastic heterogeneity of the two compared parts of the composition.
In general, one of the most curious features of the project is the subtly orchestrated interaction of historicism and modernity. Note that, unlike the ancient prototype with its Corinthian capitals, tritons and mascarons, there is not a single order form in the arch - only the image of a man-made stone massif, in which, akin to a good theatrical scenery, impressions and sensations are compressed, the smell of historical memories of various kinds, folded into the piggy bank of human experience from the Romans to the architectural avant-garde. It is interesting that they all live and interact within the same plot - a bridge, similar to the Moscow Rostokin aqueduct, masonry of flat slabs, reminiscent of something Roman-Byzantine, and corner windows of the avant-garde, successfully playing the role of the lost blocks of cyclopean masonry. Approaching from afar, one can decide that the squares, of which the "bridge" is made, are the size of the window of a neighboring house, but when you get closer to understand - no, here it is, an elegant stone facing. All this is close to the set design, to the kind of scenery that is itself a performance on the theme of the history of architecture. This arch is not a copy, not a revival or classicism, but the reflection of a historian, and when this historian is an architect, then the reflection turns out in the form of a house. Or a house in the form of a reflection on the history of architecture, all at once, including the avant-garde.
The antagonistic glass case, as opposed to the historicism of the neighbor, is filled with hints of nature. Two oval supports are made similar to hypertrophied long poplar trunks - approximately in the middle they stratify into two “arboreal” processes: one from “this” side holds the “nose” penetrating the arch, the other from “that”, growing through the corner with open balconies. This theme has already been used by Bavykin in the “poplar house” of Bryusov Lane and apparently came from there. But here the trunks are more generalized, their meaning is more global. It turns out that the "bridge" is city and stone, it is permeated with humanitarian historicism, and the glass alien invading it is not just an ultra-new, plastic-movable, but also a natural element. I recall the Kipling jungle, entwining the stone city, and it turns out that the rush of the current bio-modernism is a little akin to this jungle.
