So, the main context of the building is the railway, the main spectators are people who come to the city by train and sitting in a compartment on suitcases, looking out the window. Usually, not only in Moscow, but even in European cities, they see something very industrial, some kind of station backyards. The building of Andrey Romanov and Ekaterina Kuznetsova is a gift for such spectators.
One of its volumes, the one that is located closer to the tracks, is stretched towards the trains with a long "nose", which with its swiftly smooth outlines resembles a modern high-speed locomotive. This is typical for the design of cars and trains: the object is drawn as smoothed as possible, practically - in order to reduce wind resistance and help it slip between the air currents with minimal loss of speed. Outwardly, this technique, inherently technical, creates a feeling of flight - firstly, everyone knows: everything that moves quickly, starting with missiles and airplanes, has such noses, and therefore the shape is associated with speed. And secondly, a pointed elliptical outline in itself is associated with speed - it seems to be weathered from constant forward movement.
The walls of the lower floor are entirely made of glass, and the "nose" is placed on thin round legs, the whole building looks suspended, hovering above the ground and overcoming the force of gravity, evoking thoughts of levitation. And making us remember dreams of future technologies, magnetic levitation trains. “He meets trains and he himself is like a train,” say the architects. And it really looks like it’s another locomotive, only bigger, which means it’s a monument to the locomotive. In this sense, the facade is very sensitive to its immediate surroundings, because its context is trains.
However, the described "windiness" has another meaning, more architectural than locomotive. The authors deliberately incorporated the theme of thinning into the plastic of the facades - by their own admission, Andrei Romanov and Ekaterina Kuznetsova, this is one of their favorite themes. Indeed, she is also present in the house for Gorokhovsky lane. So it’s curious to figure out what this topic is and what it means.
In the described building, the winding effect consists of several techniques. Windows of different sizes, wider and narrower, are grouped at the point of the sharpening of the facade, there are more of them, and the masses of the wall are less, less matter. Coastal rocks are weathered in a similar way: soft rock leaves, hard "ribs" remain, forming a bizarre layered frame. Here, in this role - interfloor floors, complemented by thin vertical lintels: the frame is asymmetric, but rigid, geometrized.
The second way - the wall is made layered. Panels made of silk-screened translucent glass are inserted into the windows, they are deeper than brick, but higher than glass - they create a third intermediate layer, the surface gradually becomes thinner, again similar to the weathering of limestone rocks. It must be said, however, that the technique of a layered facade is as ancient as an order. He was especially fond of the Italian Renaissance and French neoclassicism. In the "classical" case, however, this was done at the expense of the wall, which was covered with stepped panels. And here - at the expense of the window.
The third technique is the color of the brick, which very smoothly changes from dark brown on the "calm" central parts of the facades to very light ocher on the "weathered" ledges. Likewise, the rocks become lighter on the ledges.
By the way, this is a special Dutch brick, if you touch it, sand is poured from it - after it is on the facade, the brick will sprinkle a little for a while and will soon acquire something similar to the patina of time.
The imitation of wear and tear, consistently carried out from the shape of the volumes and windows to the color and shape of the brick, creates the effect of artificial aging of a completely new building and makes you recall the purposely torn jeans that are now sold in all brand stores. The tendency to imitate the nonexistent age of a thing has existed in contemporary art for a long time and has already become entrenched even in fashion.
By the way, the theme of shabby time continues in the courtyard of the building - there is a stone pavement around the perimeter, and a lawn in the middle, and the border between grass and slabs on one side is conceived to be uneven. The seams between the slabs gradually increase - the sidewalk "dissolves" in the grass, imitating a ruin, but only very new, fresh and beautiful.
The described techniques add up to something like thinking about time. In modern classics, this corresponds to the ruins, of which there are many. In deconstructivism - metal frames and holes in inclined structures that fall like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Here the topic of time is solved more accurately. The house is completely new, but it contains a hint that it may have stood here like a rock for centuries. After all, a rock can stand like this for a very long time before the wind, understood by passing trains, will round it to the shape of a pebble. It turns out that the hint inherent in this modernist kind of artificial ruin points us to a much older time.
So, this house uses the archetypal forms of early modernism, which admired technology that could transcend time, quickly transporting people through space: steam locomotives, airplanes and ocean liners. But time tends to age material that flies in time. Which thought was alien to the formal search for constructivism. But the considered building connects these two things: a form that flies through time, and the result of the impact of that very inexorable time, with which it, flying, comes into contact. And so the house looks like a reflection on the theme of the archetypes of modernism. Moreover, by themselves, these reflections belong not so much to a specific building, but to the direction as a whole. This case is interesting in that here the tendency is felt, subtly played out and, in general, does not give rest to the authors, sprouting in their works.
