Streamers are posted in Moscow: houses for sale in the Marfino area, near Ostankino, at the beginning of Botanicheskaya Street. Not so long ago, there was - you can imagine - a state farm, consisting of vast greenhouses, surrounded by a typical concrete fence. So it was the summer before last. A little more than a year has passed since the crisis - several panel houses have grown on the site of greenhouses, residents of the broken five-story buildings of Maryina Roshcha are relocated to them, and the rest are being sold, according to Moscow Perspective, at a very reasonable price and even finished. It's time to write an editorial about the new horizons of panel housing. However, the panel concept came to this area recently, the developer Vedis Group reoriented to it immediately after the crisis; here we must pay tribute to his speed and flexibility, not everyone did it. But it all started differently, the microdistrict was supposed to be elite - still, in such an advantageous place: not at all on the outskirts, opposite Ostankino Park, a manor-museum, one of the most famous; near the Botanical Garden.
So, for two years, starting from 2005, Vedis has been looking for an architect. In 2006, the master plan of the area was made by the British bureau of John Thompson & Partners - famous decoration designers who designed a total of about a hundred city blocks and suburban settlements. Thompson's plan, I must say, was extremely simple: wide boulevards cut the area into equilateral squares. The houses were supposed to be located along the perimeter of the quarters, forming square courtyards inside, only five full-fledged squares and three "halves", the buildings in which turned out to be U-shaped, respectively.
Then investors began to invite different architects, offering to "come up with architecture" for each block-square separately - at some point it was assumed that "Marfino" would consist of blocks designed by different architects within the framework of the general general plan. In particular, Dmitry Barkhin and Dmitry Alexandrov made concepts for Marfino (we wrote about this project). Dmitry Aleksandrov, in addition, also made his own, based on Thompson's, general plan of "Marfin". A little later, Ilya Utkin was offered to make one of the squares. Then - he was asked to design the four central squares together, and finally - the concept of the entire microdistrict.
While working on the microdistrict, Ilya Utkin generally adhered to Thompson's plan, consisting (recall) of square blocks. And only slightly corrected it. But the changes made, formally minor, radically influenced the layout. In the architect's own words, he turned Thompson's "open modernist" structure into a "closed classical" one. He accentuated the central square more strongly, making it round and closing the inner driveways around it, and also tightened the subordination of the entire composition - peripheral U-shaped houses lined up strictly along the axes, closing them in the most classic way. This technique, when multiplied by the geometry of simple figures, produced a layout that would have rejoiced in any idealistic theorist of the Enlightenment.
The link to the 18th century turns out to be by the way - next to the Ostankino estate with the famous palace and theater. It is not visible, between Marfin and Ostankin there is a wild (former manor) park, but the ensemble points towards the museum with the axis of the main boulevard with a canal. In the middle of the central square, a bridge is thrown across its water - a copy of Palladiev's, or Mramorny, bridge in Tsarskoye Selo. Which, in turn, repeated the bridges of English parks, made according to the famous project from the treatise of Palladio. A bridge with such a set of associations, and even located in the very center of the ensemble, must be a symbolic thing. It becomes a kind of statement, a manifesto of the fundamental belonging of the project to classical architecture. Just like in the modernist quarters, some kind of abstract sculpture is installed, so this bridge stands here. On the other hand, he refers us to the palace parks - if you notice that all Marfino squares are lined like parterres, then this undoubtedly urban area turns out to be likened not so much to a city as to a representative park of classicism.
Generally speaking, the palace is a favorite theme of Ilya Utkin, and here it is definitely the main one. Although ten-storey palaces (the number of storeys in the project varies from 8 to 13), of course, there is no such thing. But the theme manifests itself, and not only in the layout, but also on the facades. The two upper floors at the corners of the houses are decorated with four-column porticoes - as if manor houses-villas were placed on top of multi-storey buildings. A similar effect can be observed in the building of the mayor's office (the house of the governor-general) on Tverskaya: there the palace of the 18th century was erected on a multi-storey foundation during the Stalinist reconstruction of the street. It turns out a kind of "upper city", which corresponds well with the concept of a pent-house - of course, the most expensive apartments were planned on the upper floors, the owners of which would have at their disposal palaces (or villas), elevated above the city. This technique is not new: the Art Deco of the 1930s was familiar with it, which had to solve the same problem of the synthesis of classics and multi-storey buildings; it was also used by Stalinist architecture, however, there has never been such an obvious "palace", business, as a rule, was limited to monumental towers-lanterns or porticoes-loggias.
The second theme, also inspired equally by the proximity of Ostankino and the creative preferences of Ilya Utkin, is theater. She, perhaps, acts even stronger than the palace. An elite residential area - a thing, in general, commonplace for our time - in this project has turned into a gigantic phantasmagoric scenery, an architectural performance in the highest "classical calm" on the theme of a Russian man's dream of a vegetable garden no worse than Versailles.
Another quote becomes the main accent of the theatrical theme: not as scrupulously accurate as the Palladium Bridge, but much more effective. Here Ilya Utkin refers, if I may say so, not himself. In front of the main entrance, the architect placed a gigantic triumphal arch, which resembles the famous 1987 Brodsky-Utkin etching “Mountains with a Hole”; however, it is more orderly, symmetrical and classic porticoes are more noticeable on it. It is a gigantic architectural set, a fragment of Utkin's scenography - rigorous and refined in detail, but exceptionally Piranesian-romantic. For her, the definition of "Gothic classics" - the architecture of the 18th century, which expressed emotions more characteristic of Gothic by means of classical decor, would be the best fit. However, similar emotions of extreme romanticism, mixed with love for classics and history, were characteristic of many things of the "wallets". By the way, the height of the central arch of this portal is 10 floors, and the same width, since the arch is drawn along a compass. And on top is a whole, very similar, palace in the spirit of Russian Palladianism, only "Gothic" (!) Stretched vertically. If this fantastic backstage had really grown up in the middle of the tidy Botanicheskaya Street, it would have been able to find here only two "worthy interlocutors" - the Ostankino Palace and the Ostankino Tower.
In a word, all this theatrical and romantic, palatial and pompous, one does not dare to call it a district. It has a very strong shade of architectural phantasmagoria, “paperness” and theater. Although, looking at the options, one can guess in them the architect's attempts to "ground" the project, to make it closer to our life - but the theatrical-romantic mood turned out to be stronger. Such projects are rarely implemented. In this case, the reason was "unsuccessful" layouts (as it is written on the site of "Vedis-group"), someone on the Internet has already made a reservation - "inconvenient"; in fact, the apartments in this palace area turned out to be not "uncomfortable" at all, but too large. The orthogonal orientation of the buildings was determined by the contours of the master plan (which, nevertheless, remained at the basis of the project), i.e. directed strictly north-south. In order to ensure good illumination of apartments with such an arrangement of houses, - says Ilya Utkin - it was necessary to make the apartments large, for the entire "thickness" of buildings from wall to wall. When, at the end of the design (and the “Project” stage was carried out by Stroyproekt), investors invited managers to calculate the sales prospects, it turned out that such large volumes of “elite” housing in this area are unlikely to be sold. The area is good, and the park is nearby, and the television center, but still not Ostozhenka. Therefore, Vedis went further along the path of optimization and reduction of apartment sizes; at first he ordered a new project to Sergey Kiselev, and soon after the crisis he abandoned architecture altogether, focusing on the development of a new approach to panel housing construction. However, he is not so new, but that's another story.
