Perhaps, a residential building in Novosibirsk is a direct descendant of the Moscow "Avangard", which at one time won many admiration and professional awards. And at the same time, this house is proof that there can be no universal recipes in architecture, and the essence of the so-called "signature techniques" is not reduced to the use of color and plastics, but to the ability to surgically accurately dose them in accordance with the pressing needs of the environment. …
Kiselev's Novosibirsk project has in common with Avangard, first of all, the urban planning context. The Studencheskaya metro station is Novosibirsk Cheryomushki: the middle belt of the city with typical typical buildings predominantly of the Khrushchev era. Especially there is nothing to catch the eye, and the facelessness of the area has become the number one challenge for architects.
Challenge number two can be called a residential complex recently erected on a neighboring plot - a high-rise square, which unambiguously indicates the desire of the developer to squeeze a maximum of square meters out of the building. In the urban and architectural sense, this “neighbor” is the embodied absence of any ambitions, but it is located very close (only a narrow passage separates this residential complex from the Kiselev site), which obliged the authors to reckon with its cyclopean scale. Architects could have acted simply - it is banal to fence themselves off from the giant, maintaining the number of storeys in such a way that the skyscraper would become less noticeable from Karl Blucher and Geodesicheskaya streets. But Sergei Kiselev in this case was much more worried, apparently, not generalized urban planning, but specific social aspects. If his house were “opened” to the aforementioned intersection, the tenants would have lost their own courtyard - therefore, SKiP architects considered it necessary to support the perimeter of the development set by the neighboring house - in favor of future residents. In response, an inner square was formed between the two houses, reliably protected from the bustle of the metropolis.
It would seem that the location of the house along the perimeter of the courtyard obliges the architect to rigor, straight lines and no less right angles. However, Sergei Kiselev, supporting the main theme of the square, otherwise made his house the opposite of the neighboring one. Its plastic volume embraces the courtyard in a wave-like arc - not emphasizing its location at the intersection, but, on the contrary, as if denying it. The coloristic solution of the facades contrasts with the surroundings. They are faced with slabs of minerite, painted in a massif in lemon, light green, beige and light gray tones, which, combined with the relaxed plasticity of the volume, makes the house look like a freely wriggling multi-colored ribbon. It can be compared to a snake coiled comfortably in the sun, or a baby kite that is about to be picked up by a gust of wind. And, I think, this range of associations speaks volumes about the extravaganza of spatial and sensory experiences that the residential complex brings to the existing development.
The developer, of course, had his own considerations on this score: the symbolism is symbolic, but the extravagance of the forms should not have affected the final output of the squares. And the architects coped with this task perfectly: the curved walls are designed on a monolithic grid, so that the play with the plasticity of the forms did not in any way affect the layouts of the apartments. Everything there is as simple, rational and convenient as possible. 35 percent of all apartments in this residential complex are one-room, 25 percent are two-room. On the upper floors with panoramic windows, there are comfortable 3-4-room apartments with an area of 150-200 square meters. From there, a spectacular view of the Ob opens, which, by the way, already in the process of active design prompted the customer to upgrade the category of his object from economy to business class. The courtyard of the complex is designed as a recreation area for the residents of the building: a public garden and a playground are planned here. The latter is raised on a small podium and in the plan is a neat oval: the rise is dictated by the need to "get" insolation, and the shape is dictated by the desire to once again beat the plastic of the main facade.
A well-developed service unit - one of the mandatory requirements of the customer - is, as expected, located in the stylobate part of the complex. It is turned into a horizontal parallelepiped, laid exactly at the intersection of two streets. The house looks like a large abstract sculpture on a strict pedestal.
On the long side of the stylobate there are trade pavilions, and this facade is a concrete "pergola" with a pedestrian gallery inside. The architects offered to glaze it, but the customer, despite the rather harsh Siberian climate, insisted on an open version: the considerations of marketers turned out to be more important than weather conditions.
However, it seems that the main architectural bait for buyers here will not be the open gallery as such, but the deliberately beaten rhythm of its columns, utterly intriguing. One would like to ask: how many stores are there actually? - and, of course, check it yourself. I must say that Sergei Kiselev often plays with rhythm, and in the Novosibirsk project it is interesting to watch how his favorite technique is unexpectedly used in a completely new capacity. However, later it is planned to build a small office complex on the same site, which will be stylistically combined with the stylobate part of the residential building. So, walking from the metro along Geodesicheskaya Street it will seem that the discordant step of the columns of the shopping gallery effortlessly runs across the facade and crumbles across its entire plane into many unequal-width windows.
