Over the past five or six years, elite settlements based on the stylization of a certain era or country - settlements in the Italian, or, say, in the English style - have become relatively relevant in the Moscow region. In addition to monocultural settlements, at about the same time, the idea of multicultural settlements sounded - this was the idea of the City of Millionaires, projected somewhere near Pyatnitskoe highway: an elite microdistrict, each quarter of which was supposed to depict a country and an era. The idea was pledged and abandoned about a year ago. But ideas do not give up so easily - this summer the 'SPeeCH' workshop formulated its solution to a similar problem, for a site located nearby and also on Pyatnitskoye Highway. In the project with the telling name ‘Gardens of cultures’. Which, it should be noted, is currently alive and well, although its scale after the autumn fever seems to be simply gigantic - it is, in fact, a whole city, on 67 hectares it is planned to settle 20 thousand people.
So, a self-explanatory name. Let's start with the second word - cultures. The town is divided into quarters, the architectural design of which, according to the authors, should remind of different European countries: Germany, Spain, Holland, France. That is, it is a multicultural complex. I bought an apartment in a strict German quarter - in the evenings you walk to temperamental Spain, and vice versa. Small, compressed on its own hectares Europe. What, in fact, was the concept of developers known in narrow circles for five years (or even more).
What is so special about the ‘SPeeCH’ project? Perhaps in a high degree of generalization, or in other words - in the absence of literalism. The task - to find and show the plastic differences between the architectural image of different countries - is solved, on the one hand, unobtrusively, relatively speaking, with "broad strokes", and on the other hand - obviously, using characteristic motives that can be recognized not only by a specialist. But even more important is the absence of attempts to deceive the audience and deliberate copyism. The authors are not trying to create the illusion of being in England or Holland, but doing something different - they find an image of each country.
So, the main type of development in the Spanish quarter is twelve- and sixteen-story towers, surrounded by balconies with ribbons, using inserts made of colored plastic panels. Clear horizontal lines of solid recessed balconies evoke a lot of associations. Take, for example, the area of Madrid between Calle de Costa Rica and Alberto Alcocer, or Campo Volantin in Bilbao with its colorful balconies of a hotel opposite the Guggenheim Museum.
For the Dutch Quarter, the architects proposed simple seven-story volumes, clad in warm brownish red (real brick) bricks. Which makes the quarter look like all small Dutch cities at once and not one in particular. In German - a characteristic combination of glass with a polished fawn stone.
All this, let me say, is done without going beyond the modernist paradigm, with texture, color, form. Bau House teachers would probably be pleased to find such a study in the classroom on the topic of "authenticity without copying".
The second word in the name of the residential complex - gardens, is also not arbitrary, but perhaps even more important. It is responsible for both the general and the particular, for differences and for the integrity of the mini-city. The complex on Pyatnitskoe highway resembles a garden in every sense. Firstly, the architects turned it into a real green city: on one of the two main axes there should be a park, ending with a reservoir where you can go boating in summer and ice skating in winter. In addition, each quarter, depending on its style, will have its own type of trees. It is even planned to set up small private gardens on the ground floors of apartment buildings. Thus, the architects developed the popular today idea of living in the bosom of nature, without, however, going beyond the usual urban rhythm. In this sense, an autonomous garden city is a less expensive alternative to a private home in an elite village.
In addition to greenery, the complex is united by the general principles of planning. She's pretty strict. Two main axes intersect at right angles: one of them is the already mentioned "park" one, with a river, a pond and a free layout. There is a school, a kindergarten, a sports complex. The second is a ceremonial city promenade, a square framed by shops and offices. Its architecture, by the way, could (very conditionally) be called "Moscow", on the grounds that it contains the most recognizable features of the capital projects 'SPeeCH' - striped stone "blinds", reminiscent of Art Deco vertical lines … and "Byzantine House", and "Morskoy", and an office building on Leninsky Prospekt. This part of the project has absorbed all the solidity and respectability of the residential complex.
"National" quarters stretch along the front "city center", perpendicular to the garden. The layouts of houses are different, but the prevailing ones are those in which residential buildings are fenced off by courtyards. Most of all, this layout resembles the "Stalinist" quarters of Moscow, and therefore it uses a more classic than a modernist approach to urban planning. Its logic is simple - lining up along the perimeter, buildings create a comfortable space for courtyards, and outside they form a semblance of red lines and slender streets.
In addition to the centerline, stone and front main street, ‘Gargens of cultures’ has another part of the development devoid of "national identity." This is an island. Quarter, arranged in the middle of a pond on a round island and consisting of small (3-4 floors) colorful houses, set tightly around the outer circumference. Inside there are the rings of the square, similar to a park labyrinth (in French parks they made such, often round, from flowers or bushes). Here, however, you cannot get lost, the bushes are not high. But in the "labyrinth" it is planned to plant pyramidal trees, reminiscent of the south. And in the very center, to complete the effect, there is a round pond with a fountain, which turns out to be the axis of this boring quarter. Isn't it Venice? But here there are no direct analogies, and the role of the island, apparently, is different - it serves either as a filter or as a catalyst. The images of different countries pressed together inevitably create a kind of variegation, an excess of diversity. The island absorbs this diversity and enhances it - after looking at its multi-colored whirling, everything else will seem more than strict. Thus, it becomes a kind of "plastic hinge" of the complex. And at the same time, the island, the funniest "idea" of the park complex, is the pole opposite to the severity of the main street.
It is worth noting that Sergei Tchoban is not the first to turn to an international theme and an attempt to compare different architecture inside in one space. In the summer of 2008, at the Moscow Architectural Biennale, a project was presented for the Kudrovo residential area near St. Petersburg, created by the studio jointly with the Evgeny Gerasimov & Partners architectural studio. The architects proposed a project for a city, the quarters of which resembled the structure of European cities, for example, Paris, Berlin, London.
Comparing the two projects, it can be seen that the Kudrovo area is more closely connected with the historical appearance of European capitals and "depicts" them more accurately. And the residential complex on Pyatnitskoe highway is more generalized and modern. It is extremely functional, and at the same time, its space is open and friendly, adapted to social life. The distance from block to block is thirty meters, that is, virtually any place of public interest can be reached on foot. The landscaping of courtyards and squares, the proximity of public areas remove the isolation characteristic of large residential areas of multi-storey districts. The environment ceases to be hostile, not only the space of the apartment and the staircase becomes a home, but also the courtyard, the street, the whole city.
Attempts to "reconcile" man, city and nature have been made by architects more than once. About a hundred years ago, the idea of a garden city emerged in Great Britain - an alternative to the cramped and stony early capitalist cities. The garden city sought to combine the idyll of rural life with the comfort and possibilities of urban existence - as a topic, it is still relevant today, but it already has a long history. In "Gardens of Cultures" a third is added to the two well-known components - namely, culture. Which, as it became clear throughout the 20th century, cannot be thrown off the ship, because without it a person gets sick no less than without nature. So the task has become more complicated - it is necessary to combine not two things, but three. Both checks and balances are needed here. And together they turned out to be a city that somewhat remotely resembles a palace park of the 18th century - then people knew that for a harmonious existence you need nature, a roof over your head, and something like that for thought. And they built pavilions in different styles, then in the Moorish, then in the Gothic, then in the birch-hut. So the idea of 'Gardens of cultures' is not a new thing, but rather well forgotten and brought back from the past. Which, however, is not at all a reproach.
