In the 20th century, Bolotny Island acquired the strange image of the Kremlin's backyard. There are many industrial buildings here, and the ancient buildings that were once magnificent have gradually fallen into disrepair. An example of this is Sadovnicheskaya Embankment, facing the opposite direction from the Kremlin citadel and surprising any visitor with its abandonment - and this despite its proximity to the city center and the country. What can we say about the fact that the name of the embankment draws completely different pictures in the imagination.
Although over the past 15 years, developers have repeatedly turned their attention to this site - however, despite this, not a single urban development project has yet been implemented. Another question is point injections, there are quite a few of them here. One of them will be the project of the architectural bureau "Sergey Kiselev and Partners". This residential building with a parking lot and small sprinkles of offices will replace two dilapidated buildings (at 11 Sadovnicheskaya embankment and at 16, building 2. hidden in the courtyard).
SKiP worked with this site for a long time, since the plans for its development changed during the design process. At first, the customer hoped to convince the authorities to change the purpose of the territory from residential to administrative, since there are already office new buildings from Mosproekt-2 and Sergei Tkachenko nearby. However, the authorities were adamant. Nevertheless, during the work on the initial project, the architects managed to understand all the features of the place. So, starting to come up with a residential building, they already had a good idea of the main visual landscape restrictions and the nature of the site. “We decided that our house should be a kind of intellectual,” says the chief architect of the project, Alexei Medvedev. "It should not become the main event in the district, but at the same time it must strictly maintain the red line of the embankment, correctly combine with the view of the Kremlin cathedrals, against which the building appears when viewed from certain points, to respond to the surroundings."
The environment is complex. Here is the embankment, on which it was necessary to stand on a par with the existing buildings, calculating the effect of the facade for the drivers of passing cars. The side facade turned out to be no less important due to the fact that the open courtyard of the kindergarten is located nearby - accordingly, the facade is visible from afar. The rear part of the house was intended to complete the formation of the old inner-quarter residential courtyard.
All this prompted the authors to create three intertwining buildings located along the perimeter around the courtyard. The height of the buildings, with terraced terraces, rises into the quarter. Generally speaking, weave is a very important word for this project. We had to weave not only the buildings, but also the functional areas: housing, offices, recreational indoor and outdoor spaces. In accordance with the given way, the authors play with nuances: somewhere glass prevails, and somewhere - stone; a smoother texture is used on one side, corrugated on the other; one glass is milky, the other is transparent; etc. As a result, the facades cannot be denied intricacy, although in reality everything turns out to be as simple as possible.
According to the architects, stone as the main finishing material was chosen for the sake of the building's scale to the modern city. However, this did not prevent the creation of a very romantic image, as it should be on the embankment with the “garden” name.
Working with the texture of the material, the authors paid special attention to the orientation of the facades to the cardinal directions, and, consequently, to how they will be illuminated by the sun. Therefore, on the southern facade facing the embankment, it is proposed to use a rough stone that gives rich chiaroscuro, and on the side wall - a smooth polished cladding. The half-height southern façade is occupied by loggias that protect residents from direct sunlight. Despite the relatively small size of the house, there is a lot of play with texture, surface pattern, glass transparency. And all this is within the framework of the strict geometry of vertical-horizontal lines; however, again for the sake of revitalizing the facades in some places, the authors allowed themselves the actual beat-down of the rhythm of the window openings.
The horizontal layout of elongated stone slabs of a warm ocher hue is associated with wooden architecture, and the matte overhead elements create a wavering veil, as if the house is immersed in a cloud of dreams. Maybe he was thinking about gardens? Or how beautiful the surrounding buildings could be?
A certain amount of romance can be traced here even in the composition of functional areas. For office workers on the 1st and 2nd floors, a narrow street (2 m) is provided between the new building and the neighboring house. For some reason, its space is associated with the alleys of medieval cities, where you can go through an arch, see a strip of sky above, an arched "link" between houses and suddenly find yourself in an unexpectedly spacious courtyard. True, in this case, the courtyard of the first floor is blocked by the second level and rather serves as a service function (from it you can enter the residential part or drive into the garage). But if you climb the stairs leading to the street, you will find a whole oasis. The internal facades are almost entirely finished with the same milky glass, which makes the space seem a little shaky, it feels like “interior” and wider than it really is.
The courtyard is continued inside the buildings - in the form of a playroom and a winter garden, which seems very practical in the Moscow climate and at the same time looks like an amazing and pleasant excess, not necessary for housing of the declared class. However, in the two upper floors there are penthouses - on the fifth tier there are two apartments, and on the sixth tier there are one "very large", both of which - with terraces for contemplating the city. Even white collars get the opportunity to enjoy the surrounding space - a huge stained glass window, almost the width of the side office, provides wonderful views of the Vodootvodny Canal with its bridges. For residents, in addition to loggias and French balconies, small bay windows of frosted glass are also conceived to better illuminate the interior and expand the panoramic views.
This house is of a medium scale, many of its brothers have already been built in Moscow, including dozens of houses in the center of Sergey Kiselev's company portfolio. It can even be said that their design has become one of the areas of specialization for SK&P for ten years already. And at the same time, the house is different from many other similar projects. First, there is an acute sense of the characteristic delicacy, intelligence, so aptly mentioned by Alexei Medvedev - however, the subtle approach to the construction of modernist buildings in the historical context is characteristic of the workshop of Sergei Kiselev. But now - as can be seen from the example of this project - the approach is acquiring new features, enriched in texture, graphically and compositionally. This is a rather subtle matter, a nuance in the development of the genre, but for Moscow it is a rather important nuance.
