This is a very well located house. It is located in the park-academic zone of the city, on the border of the green massif of Vorobyovy Gory, it stands above the pond of the Palace of Pioneers and is reflected in it.
The building consists of two residential houses, plates of the same height and proportions, placed in parallel at some distance from each other and connected in the lower part by a three-storey public stylobate, in which the entrance to both houses is located. All together, if you look at the plan, it looks like the letter "H" inscribed in a perfect square - the two sides are formed by high plates, in the middle is the "crossbar" of a large hall burdened with offices.
An interesting typological collision arises here. Usually - and even quite often - a glass "dressing room" is placed in front of a multi-storey building, or, in the event that it is, for example, a store, stretches along it, but still, as a rule, protrudes forward. But here everything is the other way around: the glazed entrance is "hidden" between two houses, removed in the depth of the composition. Which, as a result, turns out to be, firstly, at first glance paradoxical, and secondly, very characteristic of the architecture of Vladimir Plotkin.
The ensemble has no center, or rather, it deliberately and literally sags, falls through - from 19 floors to three. On the other hand, we can say that, on the contrary, there is a center, but it splits into two similar houses, which "repel" from each other in the same way as, according to the laws of physics, equally charged particles are repelled, ending up at opposite ends of the square. But they do not quite fly away - there is a visible connection between the houses-"particles" - the very glass three-story stylobate, which one would like to compare with molecular bonds, in the form in which they are drawn in textbooks.
So, there is no center in the place where we are used to looking for it - and at the same time, symmetry, geometry and patterns - very rigid - are present, they are simply taken not from classical schemes, but as if from the laws of physics or mathematics. Note that the house stands between the two main centers of Moscow scholarship, the University and the Academy of Sciences - is it not from them that it was charged with physical and mathematical emanations? At the same time, the building is opposite to the Stalinist skyscraper of Moscow State University, and precisely because of the bifurcated non-classical composition.
The sophisticated play of binary juxtapositions continues on the facades, where two colors - brick red and dazzling white - take on the roles of representatives of two main types of architectural matter - foundation and decoration. Brick surfaces are cut with deep loggias, they are more material and can allow themselves chiaroscuro and some degree of massiveness - within the framework of the strict geometry of the whole. White color, as it should be, is pure and ephemeral, it is combined with glass and concentrates in large spots on the external facades, "hugging" one corner and going to one end of each house.
In general, it turns out that two identical houses are mirrored relative to a common center. Together with the reflection of the entire building in the water, this mirroring of the facades develops into one common geometric game - as if somewhere above the entrance lobby - an invisible mirror is placed above the crossbar of the letter "H", and one half of the house is a reflection of the first, but it's not clear, what a "real" one. But this plot well explains the square symmetry of the ensemble, which, being in fact a simple Moscow elite house, in some - artistic - its part appears as a kind of abstract scholastic studies, a complicated continuation of the "square" and "round" houses of Vladimir Plotkin of the nineties. But do not think that the architect has returned to his previous search - in fact, the house is finished now, but it was designed five years ago, in 2002, so it can be considered a logical continuation of “those” reflections, which have finally been realized only now.
As always happens, in the process of incarnation, aesthetic scholasticism merges with our reality, partly intentionally, partly yielding and losing something. Specularity, for example, has a completely pragmatic rationale - behind the brick walls facing inward, various communications and technical rooms are hidden, there are no apartments here, because the plates are too close and an effect called "window to window" could arise.
In addition, in order not to spoil the landscape, the plates are oriented with their ends to the slope of Vorobyovy Gory. And in order to better show the surrounding beauty to everyone entering and leaving the building, the architect turned the “crossbar” of the hall located between the houses into a large panoramic window. It could have been two strictly thought out, like the Renaissance, landscape paintings, one overlooking a pond, the other on the Moskva River, enclosed by a perspective frame of buildings. All of this was even built. And then they immediately redid the interior of the hall, completely blocking all the views - not to disappear in the same square meters. Nowadays, aesthetic admiration of the surroundings "just like that", without any visible benefit, and even in a public space, is an almost inaccessible luxury. What can you do, a period of accumulation.
This house, however, is so good that even having lost some part of the original design, it stubbornly "keeps the brand", does not lose its abstract values and "mathematical" beauty of the lines.
