Rogozhskaya Zastava is an area of cultural contrasts. Ilyich here at ease neighbors with Sergius of Radonezh, the Andronikov Monastery with the Hammer and Sickle, the old and new cities crash into each other with stunning clarity - a timid, but in places continuous front of 2-storey historical buildings with difficulty restrains the onslaught of multi-storey panel high-rise buildings. The ragged urban fabric of this area is the result of an unsuccessful attempt to combine the old city with the new, the most striking example of which was the renovated in the 1980s. School Street. Directly "behind", close to the monuments of historical and architectural experiments, a real industrial zone begins, closed territories, warehouses, rolling mills and other wonders of industrialization - downright technical paradise, although by now it is noticeably outdated.
So, the environment is very contrasting - and the project of Pavel Andreev's workshop is sensitive to this note, it seems to absorb all the architectural duality and rigidity of the context, reinforces and embodies in architectural forms - reaching in this matter to the iconic laconicism. The gigantic, almost 100-meter-high house consists of two rectangular buildings: one black, the other white. At the level of the upper floors, the black volume stretches out in an L-shape and cuts through the white one, in which a large aperture of several floors has been made for this. At the junction, the two forms seem to be connected by a large "hinge" - as if the giant plates could once rotate around an axis, and then froze at a certain angle - one along the square, the other along the Entuziastov Boulevard line. Inside, the role of a hinge is played by a round hall, which is present on all floors and thus penetrates the building vertically "through and through", putting it on an axis that is only partially visible from the outside.
So, everything has been done so that the building appears to be a representative of technical progress, a part of a mechanism, or, in general, a house-machine, which can, obeying the need, turn its bodies at the desired angle. Such a house becomes a plastic representative of the "technogenic" part of the city - a kind of high-tech "propylaea" of the Rogozhskaya Zastava.
In this sense, the building inherits the industrial variety of constructivism of the 1920s, that branch of the avant-garde, whose representatives were fond of reproducing various technical wonders of their time in frozen and enlarged architectural forms, for example, they built houses in the form of a tractor or a steam locomotive. Since then, technical associations have entered the piggy bank of modernism and have become the norm - most of the works of the 20th century can, with one measure or another, be compared with something technical - most often a ship, train or rocket. However, in this case, everything is a little different - there is no image of a specific object, but there is a hinge, magnified many times and from the inside appears to be the most classic of the known interior techniques - a round hall furnished with supports similar to columns.
Then a somewhat different analogy arises - with a fragment of some very large, unimaginable mechanism, which for some reason ended up on the ground and is used as a house. This image seems to be more correct, because the building is going to be overgrown with greenery in places - on the open loggias and roofs of the lower floors, and also - hanging gardens will be arranged on the site at the base of the visible part of the "hinge". If this ecological gesture is realized, the resemblance to an element of a giant mechanism, somehow embedded in the earth, will only intensify.
