When composing the exhibition and lecture program of the Biennale, Bart Goldhorn tried to show as convincingly as possible what attention is paid to low-budget residential construction in the West. I remember that Stefan Forster gave a fascinating lecture on how a united Germany is struggling with the legacy of the Soviet five-story buildings by overhauling them. Russian architects, on the other hand, demonstrated mostly elite rather than massive projects. Unless, of course, we exclude the exposition of the Moscow Committee for Architecture and Architecture in the State Tretyakov Gallery - but there the aesthetics of the future mass housing is, shall we say, unique.
The architects of the ICube bureau turned out to be the only Russians who worked in a targeted manner. They presented at the exhibition "The Quarter Issue" a conceptual work entirely devoted to mass housing and created specifically for this exposition.
True, unlike Mr. Forster, who literally “cuts out” a panel house, and then reassembles it into a neat German townhouse, the ICube project is on a larger scale, and the addition of new infrastructure between the houses is used as a means of transforming the building.
To think about the possibilities of reconstruction of the panel microdistrict, the architects chose one of the standard microdistricts of Chertanovo. The project is called +1, which symbolizes its main idea - the creation of an additional "ground floor" to accommodate various service functions. It is a one-storey volume of complex configuration, which is being built next to the house and forms inner courtyards between neighboring buildings - more closed, private, like European ones.
In plan, this structure resembles a sheet of paper from which many holes have been cut, leaving a complex geometric pattern. It was applied to the plots of the block with panel houses so that the "holes" became courtyards. Moreover, the geometry of this structure is not repeated anywhere and all courtyards have a unique shape.
As a result, old panel houses are united by a common "stylobate" or "basement" floor. Although neither the one nor the other definition, strictly speaking, is inapplicable to this structure, since the houses both stood on the ground and remained, and the basement "bypassed" them around, creating the effect of a visual "subsidence" of nine-story buildings, as if they had gone one floor underground. Since the "stylobate" is closely adjacent to the walls of houses, the exit from the entrance to the courtyard, which is, as it were, in the private use of residents, is through these new extensions. They open into the space of the courtyards with extended, all-glass facades, a bit reminiscent of the ensemble of the Palace of Pioneers on the Sparrow Hills of the 1960s, where such semi-underground rooms under the stands of the stadium were used to accommodate various circles. Well, the comparison looks quite logical, given the production time of the renovated panel microdistricts themselves. From the outside, again through the first floor, the entrance to the garage is provided, located at the "minus first" level.
The entire vast "one-story island" has an exploited roof. As conceived by the authors, it can serve as a recreational area, with a variety of landscaping and even gardens. There are also “light wells” in mind. All premises of the "additional floors" are interconnected and, as expected, should be used for a variety of functions - shops, clinics, schools, kindergartens, entertainment areas, etc. etc. It seems true that schools with kindergartens are unlikely to be allowed to be located in such a "semi-underground" room, but shops, dry cleaners, laundries and other service sector facilities seem quite real.
ICube's way of transforming the living environment seems to be ingenious and inexpensive. We do not have to wait for a total reconstruction of houses, similar to the experience of the former GDR, in Moscow - except perhaps overhaul and renovation of facades. In this case, the quality of life could be affected by the adjacent infrastructure, which, in fact, was designed in a minimal amount on the lower floors, even in the panel nine-story buildings - but over time, however, it is incredibly outdated. Modern houses are already unthinkable without a "stylobate" stuffed with service functions - and ICube decided to provide this element to old houses, "pulling" obsolete housing to the level of the current infrastructure.
