According to the authors, the image of this house originated from the material. The house is located in the center, in the "German Sloboda", and the customer insisted on the most traditional plaster surface of the facade. Not liking this material because “modern architecture does not know any interpretation of plaster,” the architects decided, “since it happened,” to try to find their understanding of the material in the project and rehabilitate it in their own eyes. In search of an adequate solution, the authors walked around the city for some time and photographed different houses.
It is known that Moscow architecture for the most part consists of plaster facades, we have more of them than anywhere else. The recently dried up "Moscow style" mainly used plaster precisely because of its tradition, having managed to finally discredit it - which is probably the reason for the judgment about the absence of an image. To return the material back to the arsenal of modern architecture means to wash it of annoying associations, which, in fact, is happening in the project of Andrei Romanov and Ekaterina Kuznetsova.
The architects explain the found facade in this way. It combines two textures - a light rough one on the protruding parts and a dark one with horizontal stripes in the recesses. The surface is thinning layer by layer (light - dark - glass of windows), approximately as it happens in wind-blown seaside rocks. The facade is associated with weathered layered limestone, the house seems to be its own frame, thin and graceful due to the small size of the walls. The impression is supported by the fact that the "frame" of the only volume protruding from the total mass is twice as thin as the main one - as if this part, due to its "leeward" position, had worn out more strongly. As is sometimes the case in limestone rocks, the lower layer is "weathered" more than others: the lower floor is entirely glass, and the protruding volume is set on "legs", which adds a subtle hint of levitation to the feeling of a thinned frame.
The novelty of the interpretation, in relation to the classic plaster facades, must be recognized as obvious - we can say that the house even opposes itself to the traditional solution. The peculiarity of plaster is that it is applied over the wall, and then, in the next layer, relief or columns are applied. The decor is superimposed, the surface moves forward, the matter grows - this process is easy to observe on two eclectic facades of the second half of the 19th century, adjacent in the ADM site. Here, the opposite is true: matter becomes thinner, erodes, “dissolves”, leaving behind a geometric structure eaten away like a sponge. Of course, in reality everything is not so - we have only an imitation of thinning of the surface, builders will continue to apply plaster to the wall and the thickness of the wall will grow at this moment, not decrease. The point is different, in what this building will tell us when it is built. And here we must admit that the initial denial of the banal material allowed the architects to create an image of the house that denies this material. A new and very modern look, which is especially noticeable in contrast to the lush "neighbors".
