The construction area is notable for its internal duality: here is one of the undoubtedly striking Moscow monuments - the Donskoy Monastery, with its perfect square of brick walls and two cathedrals - a miniature Godunovsky and a giant - from the end of the 17th century, standing in the very center of the square. The second feature of the neighborhood is the monuments of constructivism: a long thin plate of the student house-commune of I. Nikolaev and the rhombic houses of the N. Travin experimental quarter on Shabolovka. The Middle Ages and the "classical" avant-garde are two poles, and the rest is a green area, where there are brick factory buildings of the 19th century, grayish Stalinist and whitish Brezhnev houses. And the big wrong spot of the Krasny Proletary machine-tool plant, embracing the square of the monastery walls from the north-west, coming up very close to them.
Six months ago, control over the plant passed to the well-known development company Vedis-Group, and in the spring it held a custom-made architectural competition for the concept of building up its territory with a block of residential buildings. The competition was attended by seven foreign architects and only one Russian - Sergei Skuratov, whose project won the second place: the customers liked the concept, but they were frightened by the too tough and unusual, "modernist" presentation of pictures.
Thus, the concept remains in the project, but it is nevertheless very interesting, since it illustrates a relatively new trend: iconic architects are now ordered not separate houses within the Ostozhenskaya "golden mile", but entire blocks within the historic city. And consequently, new principles come into the planning of city blocks.
First, it was proposed to raise green courtyards above roads and sidewalks by 4.5 meters - at this height there will be squares with grass and even large trees. Below are shops, offices and garage entrances. Thus, the space is functionally divided not only horizontally, but also vertically. A similar technique is already known in Moscow, but in single buildings, and at the block level, it appears here for the first time. In the usual, primitive view, urban planning is something flat, projected onto a map, but here the volumetric approach and an attempt to radically rebuild the allotted part of the urban space, giving it a new quality, are obvious.
The peculiarity of the resulting quarter is the absence of a fence and "permeability" - the ability to cross it far and wide, for which the coordinating authorities have been fighting in recent years and which Muscovites dream of recalling the past. We can say that in the concept of Sergei Skuratov, a variant of creating an “open” city through the vertical separation of public and private space is proposed. Which seems to be one of the promising ways of transforming Moscow from a semi-feudal agglomeration, partitioned off by the notorious bars, into a European capital with a large number of interconnected public spaces.
Outwardly, it looks like this. Looking at the model, you might think that we are facing a small city, the roads in which are washed by water streams. As if there were houses and courtyards, but it was raining all the time, widening and deepening the passages between them. The theme is supported by the layered stepping of the road surfaces, reminiscent of the bed of a mountain stream; it was assumed that light terraces would be preserved at least on the sidewalks. In addition, many houses almost half overhang the streets, being included in the image of the stream passing along the street and at the same time freeing up space in the courtyards.
The motive of the elevated city mirrors another one, loved by Sergei Skuratov and used by him in Tessinsky Lane - an imitation of the “cultural layer”, when a depression is created around the house, as if it was overgrown with earth and was then dug up by restorers. In this case, the move is the opposite, but similar - the architect is also experimenting with the "planting" of the house, but only does not deepen it, but raises it, constructing a slightly different story than in the case of the "excavation".
The second and most noticeable feature of the concept is entirely generated by the nature of the urban environment - it can be understood as an artistic reaction to the properties of the "genius of the place", the main feature of which, as already mentioned, is duality, a combination of pearls of ancient Russian and avant-garde architecture, which can be traced in a simpler level - through the neighborhood of brick factory buildings of the XIX century and disseminations of typical panel buildings of the Soviet era. On the north side there are more brick houses, on the south there are more panel houses. Therefore, Sergey Skuratov divided the houses in the conceived quarter into two colors and types - some brick and with sloped hip roofs, rethinking the image of the Moscow context in a key similar to the Skuratov houses in Tessinsky Lane. Others are white and with flat "modernist" roofs, not panel, of course, but covered with light limestone.
“This concept was born from the analysis of existing urban planning directions,” says Sergei Skuratov. If you mentally continue the streets and internal driveways of neighboring quarters, it turns out that two directions intersect on the site - the lines of the 2nd and 3rd Donskiye passages "look" to the south-southwest, and Malaya Kaluzhskaya street just to the south-west, an angle of about 150 degrees is formed between them. The architects extended the lines in the area of the proposed development and drew several parallels for them, which intersected and formed a slight bend in the inner driveways of the new quarter. Light houses with flat roofs were placed parallel to the first direction, and red ones with sloping ends along direction number 2. On the one hand, there were more white houses, on the other, red ones, and in the central part they mixed without breaking, however, building.
Therefore, the composition of the quarter is very similar to the layout of military forces during a battle. In which there is a deep historical truth, because in 1591 Boris Godunov fought here in Kazy-Girey. Then the Donskoy Monastery was built on the site of the Russian camp.
The second analogy that comes to mind is the abstract paintings of El Lissitzky and Malevich, which also consist of multi-colored parallelograms, lined up at a slight angle to each other. It is hard not to recall the poster "Hit the Whites with a Red Wedge" - graphically it is not very similar, but noticeably echoes in meaning.
However, the political and historical background arose more by accident than deliberately. First, the “alignment of forces” is the opposite, the Reds are “fighting” for historicism. Secondly, the author offers other ways of interpreting the color scheme - for example, the entire Donskoy Monastery is red and white, with brick walls and white stone trim. With regard to the textures used - brick and stone, the concept of Sergei Skuratov is closer to the monastery.
The resulting concept is an artistic statement on the specificity of the area. For modern Moscow, this is an urban planning experiment - hence the comparison with the neighboring block on Shabolovka suggests itself. There - an innovative saying, the houses were turned 45 degrees towards the street. Here, instead of a self-valuable innovation, there is a consistent presentation of the results of the analysis of urban space, all angles and lines are dictated by the situation. However, the courage in the modern concept of Sergei Skuratov is no less - probably, this did not allow her to win the competition.
The project studies the environment (color, light, directions) and produces the result - but it does not passively adapt, but vividly invades the area, “absorbs” and interprets its problems. Paradoxically, one of the consequences of rigid logical constructions is the picturesqueness of the space that could eventually arise inside the quarter - the streets, mainly due to the alternation of multidirectional facades, seem slightly zigzag, and the buildings hang over the sidewalk by almost a third of their width, causing distant allusions with the Western European Middle Ages.
