The house with the real estate name "Savvinskoe Podvorie" owes its location to its intricate name and, of course, is not a courtyard. Architects call it more modest - a house on 2nd Truzhenikov Lane or a house on Savvinskaya Embankment, because the building stands at their intersection and fixes the angle of their meeting.
It is very clearly visible from the Kievsky railway station and from the Andreevsky bridge, and this is a very convenient point of view. From a distance, it is obvious that the house belongs to the same typology as the neighboring buildings of the last decade, demonstrating various variations on the theme of not very high residential towers and turrets of varying degrees of elite, brick, and plaster. Furnished with loggias, balconies, turrets and light curves. Similar buildings of various modifications grow quite densely between Plyushchikha and the embankment. And the house of the company "Sergei Kiselev and Partners" fits into their society as if it were their own, causing a slight shock of criticism at first glance. And at a second glance, it becomes clear that the building still differs from its neighbors - a touch of a certain gloss and "good manners", and at least because it is clean and not covered with either white or black streaks characteristic of brick and plaster. And it is unlikely to be covered - the facades are faced with porcelain stoneware with a very high precision of fit.
The arrangement of the tiles on each element of the facade was carefully calculated so that the pattern of the tile seams became akin to the ornament covering the facade, the grid, which, with the help of a strictly defined module, lays out the walls. For example, the planes facing the courtyard and therefore simpler are filled with rectangles and divided into floors by horizontal lines of tiles of the same color, but half the height and width. Sergey Kiselev's favorite "corporate" theme is a striped facade, here it is solved modestly and graphically, only due to the seams between the facing tiles.
Aside, we note that in Moscow now many simply ignore this factor, use simple square tiles and cut them at random, taking advantage of the flexibility of the material. And for Sergei Kiselev, the cladding becomes a formal expression of the proportional module applied to the facade: the width of the large windows corresponds to two tiles, and the small ones correspond to one. And respectively, four and two small tiles and horizontal stripes. This is the most primitive example - but the curved front facade facing the embankment is just as carefully and modularly designed, only there the plot is reversed: the horizontal lines are made of large high tiles, and the main surface is made of small and elongated ones. In order for the drawing to look more ideal, during the construction the cladding was fitted with a minimum error of half a millimeter. So now you can vouch - the thickness of all the seams on the house is very close to four millimeters.
The graphic game, begun by the pattern of the cladding, is continued by the window frames, one third of each of which is made solid and vertical, and two are divided into three horizontal parts. Needless to say, the height of the small horizontal panes in the courtyard is equal to the height of the "main" tile, and on the embankment - two, which, accordingly, are widowed less. Meticulous mathematics is carefully thought out and consistently implemented - you want to consider it the geometric alter ego of the house. She calculates, interprets the facades and unites them into one whole at a very rational level - a game designed for people obsessed with logic and precision.
For the emotional sphere, there remains the general impression of conscientiousness and also the ribs protruding from the semicircular front facade at the most spectacular point facing the Kievsky railway station. This is the only element of the facade that looks more or less irrational, as if something gnawed two verticals out of a semicircular volume, but could not cope with a more rigid frame - a sort of hint of a super-fashionable theme of ruins. Although, in practice, this motive may well be inscribed in the system of rigidity and wind resistance, which is so well arranged here.
Such meticulous attention to decoration is usually characteristic of "facade" solutions. However, if you walk around the house, or look at it from a bird's eye view - for example, in the picture, then it may seem like an example of the "inside-out" layout, beloved by the classics of constructivism. It looks like it is composed of four towers of different heights, which on some whim have merged into one volume, clinging to the elevator hall. However, there is nothing arbitrary here, but there is a need to combine apartments of different types and sizes in an expensive house, from 2 to 5 rooms. Apartments of the same type are assembled into vertical “blocks” of different heights. Where one finishes its growth, the others get a large open terrace placed on its exploited roof.
Outside, the volumes differ in the color of the tiles and the pattern of their arrangement: for example, the 5-room volume got more brown, the 3-room - gray, and the most luxurious 4-room ones got a curved facade, providing a fan of views of the Moskva River, the already mentioned “ribs »And more complex two-tone striping.
So, we have: the best apartments by the river, with the maximum view and some minimal decorations in the form of "ribs", round supports and "dancing" windows in a checkerboard pattern. There are the fewest of these apartments - at the same time, the middle front line of the embankment is observed. Further into the depths of the site, the house “grows”, in a Moscow-style stepwise manner, opening views for the inhabitants of the upper part of the 3- and 5-room volumes, endowing them with luxurious terraces.
At the end of the day, the house seems very practical. Almost nothing in it is "stretched" under the architectural solution - on the contrary, architecture only forms the necessary, and this favorably distinguishes the new house from the silly brick "neighbors", whose asymmetry comes from fantasy, not from benefit. Necessity, having cast into a relatively picturesque volume and, along the way, yielding to city restrictions, is formed by meticulously calculated and neatly executed facades. So the building seems doubly rational. Rational, as you know, can be understood in different ways: for the British, it is primarily a mathematical proportion, for example, take the golden ratio - the golden ratio, for the French - the bank balance, a concept from the category of profitability, and in Russian, a rational approach to life means pragmatic, without unnecessary bells and whistles and frills, in particular. Here you can find the embodiment of different varieties of the concept - pragmatic high profitability inside, outside, in the rhythm of facing tiles - something mathematical akin to the Golden Ratio.
In such a high degree of rationality, one would like to discern something absolute - for example, an attempt to show how exactly one should build houses very well in this typology well known to Moscow. A new level of development for something that has become very familiar in 10 years.
