Four towers are lined up along the banks of the Moskva River, in front of Andrey Bokov's Yantar stadium. The name of the residential towers quarter of Dmitry Alexandrov comes from the stadium - "Amber City". The color of the facades comes from the name - the walls are made of different shades of yellow stone. And in English the name of this quarter sounds - no less than ‘Amber city’ - the city of Amber, although the similarity with the famous fantastic saga is purely verbal. Two towers were completed this spring and two more are under construction.
We have already written about the project of the Amber City complex. He was awarded several diplomas, including at the "Zodchestvo" in 2004. The most original course of this project is the multi-tiered atriums inside two towers (just those that have already been built). The atriums are divided into parts - four floors each. It turns out outside - a tower, and inside - a seemingly low city. Only the cells of this city are not placed side by side along the street, but on top of each other. The houses are located along the line of Tallinn Street, the atriums are oriented almost to the north, and the apartments have wonderful views of different parts of the Stroginskaya floodplain. Many large houses with a variety of atriums and hanging gardens are being designed in Moscow now, but Amber City was one of the first examples of Moscow searches on this topic.
Outside, the towers are also not quite ordinary. Because of the atriums, they are wide, although not squat - such large calm towers. But that's not the point. The main pathos of these houses, as it seems, is in the ennobling, and perhaps even to some extent overcoming the genre of elite towers, which has set a terrible soreness in Moscow. A typical example of the genre is the "Scarlet Sails" complex, located on the opposite side of the river. So, "Amber City" by Dmitry Alexandrov in every possible way denies this genre in its Moscow interpretation.
First, the houses are diligently turning away from the "Scarlet Sails" - the technical rooms are turned in their direction. Secondly, they are almost devoid of decorations, which were replaced by neo-constructivist corner windows. These windows are very appropriate here, they simultaneously destroy the "extra" volume, visually lighten large buildings - and make them more structural, clear, repeatedly drawing corners. Thirdly, the walls are stacked (not lined, but stacked) from blocks of yellow stone. Artificial stone - called a rosser, its external texture imitates, and quite successfully, the rough surface of limestone. And the masonry is a real, full-fledged masonry masonry with insulation instead of backing.
If you take into account that the stone is artificial, then otherwise it is a very traditional wall. Conservative wall. Its stone blocks on mortar (by the way, quite neatly folded) are material that is unexpected in our times, which is why strange things begin to happen in our minds. After all, modern architecture is what? Recently - a panel or party pink brick, now - a thin veil of decorative panels hung on a concrete frame. The stone is now, as a rule, expensive and exists in the form of plates on some fashionable mount. The masonry masonry looks unusual. We are used to the fact that architectural monuments, or at least Stalinist houses, are usually made of such materials. But not residential towers in the Strogino area. The yellow stone brings to these buildings something, if I may say so, Pskov, something from the real fortress towers.
The feeling of materiality continues in the organization of the courtyard, terraced down towards the river and the aforementioned Yantar stadium. Terraces are reinforced with serious, solid and also yellowish walls - this tightly cobbled garden looks just like a challenge to modern airiness and glassiness.
“Amber City” seems to me to be a monument to the germination of new techniques through the peculiar genre of the Moscow tower. Or - an attempt to radically transform this genre. The towers turned out to be solid, crystalline, very material. In many ways, cleaned of excess. True, the genre is a strong thing, and in some places it takes its toll. The bright blue color of the glass battens, the crown-like projections of the three upper floors and the bright blue structures on the roofs seem to translate the attempt at ennobling into a joke. But one way or another, we have before us a rare specimen - there were no such houses before, and hardly will be after.
