The area between Savvinskaya embankment and Pirogovskaya streets is an amazingly colorful and actively developing place. Constructivists built here, they built pink brick houses in the 1980s, then they built throughout the 1990s, very different things, including those that got into professional magazines. One of the newest notable structures in this place was the house of Sergei Kiselev, completed last year, "Savvinskoe Podvorie", which is distinguished by restraint of forms and precision of execution of details.
The site for which the new project of Dmitry Alexandrov is intended is located nearby, but further from the river and is hidden in the depths of the courtyards facing the 1st Truzhenikov lane, which stretches inside the block parallel to the embankment. However, this place falls on a relatively high elevation of the hill above the river - the bank is high here, and the house will be clearly visible, especially if you consider that its architecture relies precisely on the brightness of the solution.
The complex consists of two volumes, standing side by side at a distance of fifteen meters - as much as needed for proper insolation. One of them is higher - 13 floors, it should be covered with bright tiles of Spanish origin, creating a mosaic effect: small yellow squares randomly alternate with different shades of yellow-green, creating together a motley carpet surface. The second building is lower, it has 10 floors, and its color scheme is more restrained - this is the dark brick, which is now popular in Moscow, also varying from brown to reddish. Thus, on the surface of the two buildings, the effect of a certain color “ripple” arises, a texture created on a plane using color - because of the “uneven” pattern, the walls seem coarser than they would actually be to the touch.
The colorful "roughness", leading the observer out of the sphere of correct geometry, is supported by the rhythm of the windows. Firstly, it is also "knocked down", deliberately chaotic, very narrow windows coexist with very wide ones, and the middle ones - a little more to the openings, in a word, everything is done so that the viewer is lost in counting the principles of the arrangement of window openings. Secondly, all the windows are surrounded by protruding white frames, which draws attention to them and to their composition, making the dance of various rectangles the next step after the carpet ornament of the wall surfaces.
Some regularities in the location of the openings, however, are observed: the windows gravitate towards the corners, turning into deep loggias when the shape breaks - which is especially good on the southern facade, which gives the upper floors a view of the Moskva River. On the opposite northeastern wall, facing the alley, the openings line up in thin vertical threads, only at the top - closer to the penthouses - turning, again in a constructivist way, capturing the corner, into tape panoramic stained-glass windows.
Both buildings - the architects call them "a boy and a girl" (male & female), which is quite accurate, are combined into a seamless, inseparable composition. The inner walls, facing each other, are flat, and the “outer” corners are cut off with large planes. The fact that there are two buildings, and not one, is a consequence of a conscious need. The plot is almost square, and it is impossible to build it up entirely with one "thick" volume for at least two reasons - firstly, the total building density, that is, the ratio of the area of the yard and the area of the base of the house, will be too large for the existing norms, and secondly,in the core of such a volume, too much unprofitable space of internal halls and hallways, devoid of daylight, is formed.
This is how the image of a pair, connected by glass passages, overhanging at the 7th and 10th floors, appeared.
Special mention should be made of these crossings - winter gardens of some apartments are planned in them. That is, these are such very large "glazed loggias", stretching for an impressive length, at the same time forming visible compositional connections between the two houses. Outside, they are gripped by metal trusses and are a bit like the arrows of construction cranes, as if they were stuck in the thickness of the house. This hi-tech technique, I must say, is already well known in Europe and in Moscow. But the views from the balconies-farms should open up enchanting - on the one hand to the river, Kievsky railway station and Kutuzovka, on the other - towards the Devichye Pole public garden and the Garden Ring. That is, hanging over their own courtyard at a height of more than 20 meters, the happy owners of winter gardens will be able to admire the surroundings in complete isolation from reality.
