At the beginning of Malaya Dmitrovka, not far from the Rossiya cinema and the delightful Church of the Nativity in Putinki, next to the gigantic 70's trunk MGTS is finishing the finishing of a new office center designed by Pavel Andreev's workshop. However, a person who does not know about this and is in a hurry about his business somewhere along Dmitrovka - no matter by car or on foot - may easily not notice anything. Unless he will be glad that they restored rather than demolished a couple of small, but typical and pretty Moscow houses of the late 19th century. The houses look great - they really shine, and the new building of the office center is not at all noticeable unless you specifically look for it.
If you look, it turns out that it is quite large - from the side of the courtyard, an impressive L-shaped building with a restrained architecture and a complex configuration stuck to two "old" buildings. In order to get a full picture of the new building, you should approach it from at least three sides, entering the gateways and passing through the neighboring yards. The office building literally sprouted inside the motley Moscow buildings, and so cleverly that it could easily be mistaken for several different buildings. Almost 15 thousand new square meters have appeared, but where, from where, it is not clear. Quite simply, the wonders of the mimicry required for the construction of the city center - the new building does not in any way stylize the environment, and yet it hardly changes it; contextualism, close to the absolute.
In fact, everything is, of course, somewhat more complicated. For the office center, which began to be designed 4 years ago, in 2004, two plots were allotted - possession 7 with a two-storey apartment building of the late 19th century. and possession 9, which preserved the "main house of the urban manor of the eclectic period," a building that is taller than its neighbor, decorated with lavish but skillful stucco molding, built in the last third of the same 19th century. Both houses were restored (this was done by the company "Mars" according to the project of the restorer Grigory Mudrov). The rickety risalits of the house number 7 were leveled, its floors were replaced; cleaned and restored the stucco molding of house 9, restored some of the interiors, in particular, preserved the cast-iron staircase. I must say that now the stucco molding on the facade of house 9 looks great.
The most visible part of the new building adjoins the house on plot number 7. Here, in the opening between the former tenement house and the giant MGTS building, there is a corner gleaming dimly with porcelain stoneware - or rather, a whole bunch of various rectangular volumes, crowned with the likeness of a small elevator tower. As if all the plasticity of a modern building driven into the courtyard could not stand the loneliness and pulled everything that was possible into this single opening - trying to show itself somehow.
The most noticeable element of the facades of the new building are metal panels covered with rows of strongly protruding horizontal ribs of oval cross-section. At a cursory examination, they resemble slats, which are popular in modern Moscow - large external blinds, although in fact they are not. An illusion arises - if one is deceived and decides that there are lamellas in front of us, then one might think that there is much more glass on the facades than there really is. The protruding risalit, for example, may seem entirely glass, only covered with metal stripes, which slightly intrigues the viewer and enhances the hi-tech effect.
Further, making our way through the courtyards, we find quieter facades - there is more porcelain stoneware, less glass and ribbed high-tech decorations. Walking around the house, we see how its silhouette is bizarre, steps, then recedes, then rises. This technique is not arbitrary and is caused not at all by the desire to complicate the silhouette, but by the need to ensure the insolation standards - in other words, not to block the windows of neighboring residential buildings, while ensuring the maximum amount of space (about 14,000 square meters), says Pavel Andreev. The fact is that in buildings 7 and 9 along Malaya Dmitrovka there were previously two dispensaries - a skin and neuropsychiatric one. They were transferred to a new building with just such an area - accordingly, on Dmitrovka it became necessary to “select” the same volume. Its sloping silhouette visually demonstrates the "petrified" process of struggle between the desired area and city restrictions.
If we enter from the gateway from the side of Degtyarny Lane, we find "stone" walls topped with an angular crown of transparent metal structures. But the walls part, revealing a "focus" - large, floor-high glass steps, a kind of glazed cascade. This volume arose for a reason, but in response to the through arch existing in the restored manor house. From the street through the arch (of course, if the iron gates are opened for you) you can get into the inner courtyard. On the other side, the described glass volume points to the entrance to the same courtyard. Although, frankly, walking around, it is impossible to guess that there is a courtyard inside, if you do not know about it in advance. And in the courtyard there are supposed to be flowerbeds and benches. It is so mysterious, this Moscow office complex, large, but so successfully hidden behind the screen of historical buildings.
