The plot on which a residential quarter with a total area of about 500 thousand square meters is to be built. meters, located between the Ramenka River and the Kiev railway. Generally speaking, this area - in Moscow one of the most delicious and all sorts of "elite" housing has been mastering it since the mid-nineties. The place itself is good, although there is a railway nearby, and along it, according to the city's development plan, a busy highway will pass - a backup of Kutuzovsky Prospekt. This new highway should, in particular, become the main road for entry and exit from the planned block: if it had not been conceived, perhaps the block would not have happened at this place. So the conditions are contrasting - on the one hand, there are two noisy tracks, on the other, an idyllic landscape. However, right behind the winding river - "Golden Keys", "elite" of the nineties. In a word, Moscow. Although not the worst place in it.
Then the Moscow story begins: in Moscow it is even worse, and better places to master is not easy even for Inteko, the customer of this quarter. By the way, now this company is actively exploring the outskirts of Setun and Ramenki - a quarter of "flying saucers" will be built next to the side opposite to the railway according to the project of BRT Rus (Hadi Tehrani and others). But back to the plot. Inteko has ordered a project for the quarter of the Research and Development Institute of the General Plan. There they made a sketch of the development and a planning project - and thus approved the standards for the entire site, since the institute was made to approve such documents. After that, the customer thought about it and decided to organize a custom competition in the hope of getting some other architectural proposals. One of the conditions of the competition was to take into account the already approved regulations, but to the extent of reason.
Some of the participants in the competition followed the calculations of the regulations meticulously, some did not follow them at all. Pavel Andreev's workshop developed two proposals - one completely agreed with the approved standards, the other - planned a little more freely in an attempt to make the project better.
So, in option number one, in all agreement with the regulations of the site - let's call it "official" - the quarter is divided into two zones. To the south, further from Kutuzovka, there are four residential towers, which stand next to the backup highway and are not protected from it by anything. To the north - closer to the Golden Keys - houses are more expensive and shorter, they are fenced off from the highway by garages. The quarter is clearly divided into two - there are cheaper and more expensive.
The architects proposed to smooth out this difference - to make the towers larger and their height smaller, and to place the towers on both sides of the block. In version number two, the block from the “Golden Keys” sloping towards the direction turned into the antipode of the centrally symmetrical composition - the center is sparse, the edges rise like mountains over the valley.
The second, probably the most benevolent proposal of "option number two" - the architects placed garages along the entire block, thus fencing all houses without exception from the road noise, and not just a select few.
Further - behind a string of garages in the second variant it is proposed to build one more road - a boulevard, "understudy". The cars of the residents of the quarter could drive down this road in several places, using round squares, and then disperse around the area. Buildings "shielding" the entire area to the main highway go out with garages, and to the boulevard with shops - the boulevard thus becomes a kind of center of public life, a full-fledged city street.
In addition to these - very significant - town-planning adjustments, the architects developed in more detail the solution for the central part of the quarter. The buildings are lined up in chains, with one end "adhered" to the shops overlooking the boulevard, and the other - falling towards the river. Thus, a maximum of views towards the river opens, and panoramic stained-glass windows are arranged on the end walls of the outer houses.
The terraced composition, however, is not absolute - the volumes running down to the river now and then intersect the transverse inserts of "penthouses" with large panoramic windows and long loggias. The facades of the longitudinal volumes were supposed to be finished with corrugated aluminum (this is an old idea of Pavel Andreev - to make a facade from such a traditionally roofing material). So the "base" of the buildings is silvery-gray, and the penthouses are brownish-orange - the color contrast emphasizes the play of volumes.
On all the roofs, squares were conceived - a grassy "carpet" and round concrete recesses with trees in some of them. For penthouses, these roof gardens were downright personal gardens - you can go to them like to a terrace.
All houses are placed on round constructivist "legs", forming like colonnades along the perimeter. Behind the rows of supports are glass walls of the first floors, and in some places even through passages. Houses hang over the first floor and "stomp" on their round supports towards the river. Everything turned out very somehow in the constructivist traditions and at the same time modern.
It is a pity that all these ideas - both the solution of townhouses and the general urban planning proposals of Pavel Andreev's workshop - will hardly be implemented in this case, although the customer liked the project (option “two”, with improvements) and the workshop won the competition. The fact is that the standards approved for the planning project are a very, very strict document. Practicing architects know this, but other people hardly know. The document has two important features. First, he defines literally everything on the site except for the facades. If the standards are agreed - then the volumes, heights, functions, location of buildings and roads - almost everything has already been decided. As they say, a step to the right, a step to the left - and you need to reaffirm. And secondly, changing the standards for the site, if the regulations have already been passed, is very difficult, almost impossible. That is, it is possible, but it will take, with a high degree of probability, several years, and during this time the developer will suffer too large losses. It turns out that once it was possible to approve the standards for the site once, then tenders after that can no longer be arranged - except for the facades. So, apparently, this Inteko quarter will remain within the already approved version.
This story with regulations, great and terrible, is a special case in the practice of both the client and the architect. There are many more restrictions. So - says Pavel Andreev, urban planning norms that exist in Moscow as a law common to all allow a very small number of roads. This was done, probably, so that there was more greenery, and maybe for something else, but it is from here that the outskirts, which are so unloved by most people, are lined with giant squares of streets and lined with no less giant houses. A person is scared and uncomfortable there, and at the same time, there are a lot of people living there. But it turns out that we cannot get other quarters, having such norms.
The second problem is communication. There are a lot of vacant areas in Moscow, but it only seems that they are vacant. Various communications are laid under them - and each, if something is needed, needs to be excavated separately. What is the process - digging, burying, and then digging trenches again - the city dwellers observe every single day. If we collect communications into a collector, says Pavel Andreev, it would be possible to free up a lot of space and, most importantly, access to them would be easier. But - who will take the collector on the balance sheet? Nobody wants. There is no such responsible organization that would take the entire collector on its balance sheet. So we bury … - and so on.
Of course, it is curious to know where, in particular, the ugliness of the hated panel quarters comes from. But this is not the only issue. The point is, rather, that now - a year and a half or two years ago - Moscow customers and architects have begun to think not in buildings, but in neighborhoods. And what can even brilliant architects design with such restrictions? Maybe, before building new cities, it is worth revising some Soviet norms? No answer…
