The concept of "regeneration of historical buildings" in modern Moscow with its chaotic context of different times sounds more and more strange every year. Nevertheless, it is precisely it that is often prescribed by the relevant authorities when designing new buildings near cultural heritage sites or simply in a historical environment. So it happened with the office project of the company "Sergei Kiselev and Partners" for the Pimenovsky deadlock, next to which was the temple of St. Pimen the Great in New Collar (1697-1702).
There is no doubt that the architectural monument, the 350th anniversary of which this year, with a little haste, was celebrated by the Russian Orthodox Church (they took the date of the formation of the Vorotnikovskaya settlement as a countdown) deserves respect. The octagon of the temple dates back to the turn of the 17th-18th centuries, the bell tower was built in the 19th century. One of the new side-chapels was designed by Konstantin Bykovsky, the interiors were designed by Fyodor Shekhtel at the beginning of the 20th century. And it doesn't matter that in the Soviet years a garage appeared in the vicinity, a multi-entrance residential 12-storey building, factory buildings, and the dead end was left without houses at all - only trees.
Actually, a new office complex is being designed in their place. The disappeared Pimenovsky dead end is being rebuilt, and at the same time a piece of the red line of Krasnoproletarskaya (formerly Pimenovskaya) street is being restored. At the same time, a parking lot with an area of the entire plot is buried under the ground (in addition, the dining room is placed at the minus first level). A common underground "stylobate" appears, along the top of which the street - the heir to the Pimenovsky deadlock - will pass. And above, five concrete volumes repeat the dimensions of the houses that existed on this site before they were demolished in the 1930s. It turns out a village with a road to the temple. More precisely, to the temple gates, which looks very symbolic for the area where the guards of the Moscow gates used to live. So you can imagine how smoking white collars are standing at the entrances, and an old woman in a handkerchief is walking past them to prayer.
In addition to the requirements of the difficult concept of "regeneration", the architecture of the future complex was also influenced by its customer - the well-known development company Forum Properties, which plans to locate its headquarters here. The client wanted his future office to be not just a practical and high-quality box, but also to become an expressive architectural object, a business card of the company (you don't have to go far for examples - this is how the iconic penguin house in the Capital Group office became). That, admittedly, is quite logical for a development company.
And yet, in the task set before the architects, a paradox is read: on the one hand, the concept of regeneration and the neighborhood of a monument presuppose the maximum "modesty" of the new building. On the other hand, it should present its owners as people who are not alien to the art of architecture. That is, to be both inconspicuous and expressive. True, it is known that SKiP, which works a lot in the center of Moscow, is used to such paradoxes. Used here: play of volumes, glass, texture.
In order to turn 5 lost houses into at least two, one on each side of the dead end, the authors of the project immerse their suburb in a glass fog - its transparent "caps" act as a kind of connective tissue. Moreover, such a division into two parts also corresponds to the structure of the customer company, which consists of two divisions. They allow you to create a single space inside, which is then easily divided into corridors and offices. At the same time, there are no special multi-colored spaces and other delights - nevertheless, the volume is very small, and one of the large development companies has gathered to occupy it. By the way, the same one for which SKiP built the Hermitage Plaza office center, which has become famous in recent years, is located at the opposite end of the same Krasnoproletarskaya (formerly Pimenovskaya) street.
However, glass is not just functional here. It is (finally!) Used not to hide a building, but as an inherently valuable artistic element. It really looks like a living substance. The glass volume shrinks to the right, where the neighboring house changes height from 2 to 4 floors, crawls over the concrete blocks and breaks down from the side of the 12-story building, just where the driveway curves around the corner. As if a car passed by and stirred up this "cloud".
The image of a "village in the fog" did not appear immediately. They started the project back in 2003 and at first painted houses higher, but with sloping roofs, but this decision was opposed by specialists of landscape-visual analysis. There was also an idea to make the facades copper or bronze: “Then it would be a monument to the former building,” explains the chief architect of the project, Vladimir Labutin. During my work in the workshop, a lot of sketches with facades in almost all materials have accumulated. But the wooden one, which would correspond to the concept of regeneration, was not missed by firefighters, with bulk ceramics it did not work either, but the customer's attention was attracted by the concrete version.
The material is good and modern, but in its pure form it seems very brutal for the neighborhood with a classicist bell tower. Therefore, it was decided to artistically rethink the texture. In the sketches that existed at that time, there was an idea with prints of trees on glass - it was transferred to a new material, having found a partner company dealing with artistic concrete.
This has never happened in Moscow before; in fact, in this project, the capital's architecture gets another new method of working with a well-known but underestimated material. As you know, the texture of concrete was mastered by the Brutalist architecture of the 1970s - but there were preserved roughness, bubbles, traces of formwork. At that time, attention was focused on, let's say, natural, "harsh" features of the material - in an attempt to give the facade a shade of hand-made, as opposed to the mechanization of stamped production. Here it is different, the concrete surface will not be deliberately unfinished - on the contrary, it is turned into a sculpture-pattern in full accordance with the current worldwide tendency to use ornamental facades.
As a result, the “village” looks like a concrete forest made of protruding inter-window piers, textured using a special technology. It's like a memory of both houses and trees that replaced buildings when they were demolished. Layering of reminiscences. It turns out that the concept of "regeneration" is applied in the project at the same time for houses and for trees, although in the end we get something else. Against the background of the pink Brezhnev houses - an unexpectedly small, modernly ornamented, with grass on flat roofs.
However, it is difficult to say what exactly the same old woman will see in the environment of the modern stone jungle.
In our time, this is already becoming an obsessive reservation, but - a crisis, a crisis … Now no one knows when the project is being implemented and whether it is being implemented. However, this can be said about most of the architectural work begun earlier than last autumn. Alas.