In the 20th century, when cities became very large, it became popular to view them as a kind of living organism - a tree, or something similar. Wright's theory of organic architecture played a significant role here. This view is still relevant today: areas of its organs, neighborhoods - cells, each of which performs its function, and together they form a single whole - the urban space.
In one of its latest projects, A. Asadov's workshop presented the layout of the district in Kazan just like this - a living urban fabric consisting of amoeba-like formations strung on a semicircular green boulevard, like beads on a necklace line. We are talking about a competitive project for the layout of the area on the site of the former city airfield of Kazan, which the customers gave the name "Seventh Heaven", thus paying tribute to the "heavenly" spirit of the place.
Several years ago, a sports complex with a hippodrome was built on the field of the airfield, around which a park was laid out. The future area was supposed to be located around the racetrack in the form of autonomous quarters (residential and office), located at a considerable distance from each other. Following the given conditions, the architects of A. Asadov's studio came to the following planning solution: on three sides along the hippodrome it was supposed to break up a green boulevard, which would be joined by quarters, which would bring together the buildings scattered in the park into a single urban planning solution.
The final concept of the layout of the quarters was not born immediately. The architects were faced with the task of forming the urban environment of a new generation, and, according to the head of the studio, Andrey Asadov, “it was important to get away from straight-line buildings, rigid geometric quarters”. In the beginning, there was the idea of solving blocks in the form of "clusters", fragments of dense urban development. Then the architects proposed a radial layout that would “fly away” in different directions from the central park. There was an option to build the quarters on a ridge along the central boulevard, and also - the idea of creating to imitate the curved streets of the old city was considered. But all these ideas were rejected by architects because of their linearity - as having nothing to do with the idea of a modern city.
The final version appeared unexpectedly - one of the co-authors of the project dreamed in a dream as the periodic table of chemical elements of D. I. Mendeleev. The idea was represented by “cells”, free-floating in the urban space - quarter formations “adhered” on both sides to the arc of the central boulevard. Each of these "cells" has a shell - a curved house that outlines a quarter along the perimeter, inside which other houses are centripetally located. In the "core" of the block-cell, there is its social center - the school, and the building height decreases when approaching the nucleus and at the same time to the boulevard, thereby visually attracting the block buildings to the central axis.
The "cellular" character of the layout was chosen by the architects only for residential areas. The solution of plots for offices is simpler, but no less flexible. For him, the authors resorted to the typology of the garden city of Le Corbusier, placing office towers of streamlined shapes and different sizes and diameters in a chaotic manner. They also descend towards the central green boulevard, participating in the creation of a single architectural composition.
In general, the competition project "Seventh Heaven" is a synthesis of the previous architectural developments of A. Asadov's workshop - the projects "Circles on the Water" for the city of Domodedovo and the suburban village "Zhemchuzhina" on Novorizhskoye highway. Compared to these works in the new project, the circles are transformed into more complex, curved and fluid forms with a complex internal structure, similar to the layout of the "Pearl", but on a different scale - on the scale of the city. Here the architects made an attempt to apply their urban planning developments to a larger area - by designing a kind of urban environment, similar to a fragment of a living organism. The consequence was to be the ability of this environment for future self-development.
P. S. The results of the "Seventh Heaven" competition for the development of the airfield in Kazan were never announced, and the competition is considered invalid.
