More than a year ago, we talked about the fact that the practice of inviting an architect to work on the object had the most negative effect on the fate of this project only after the territory planning project had been fully approved. In theory, everything sounds very nice: first, for a building site, urban planners identify the main components of the future planning structure and set the parameters for their development, and then the architect embodies the recommended figures in volume. However, in practice, the presence of such a planning project leads to the fact that the architect is shackled hand and foot by this "routine algebra", developed without taking into account the features of the relief and at the same time not providing for any possibilities for adjustments. “Being within such a rigid framework of strictly defined and“highest”approved boundaries of functional zones, heights, areas, coefficients and their ratios, green spaces and asphalt pavements, etc., laid down in SNiPs and MGSNakh and with its logic going back to the middle of the last century,”notes Pavel Andreev bitterly.
For the first time this project was announced back in the summer of 2007, when the mayor of the capital signed an order on the construction of a residential neighborhood at the intersection of Minskaya Street with the Kiev direction of the Moscow Railway. The owner and the investor of the construction was the company-owner of the site “Territorial Directorate“Volynskaya”, and the developer was the company“INTECO”. In total, it is planned to build about 500 thousand square meters of housing on a site with an area of 47.98 hectares. Also, within the framework of this project, it is envisaged to correct the concept of creating a southern backup for Kutuzovsky Prospekt from Minskaya Street to Aminevskoye Highway. Note also that the planned business-class residential complex in this district of Moscow is far from the first: its immediate neighbors are the already built residential complexes Zolotye Klyuchi and Zolotye Klyuchi-2, and on the other side of Minskaya Street - Vorobyovy Gory and "New Setun". The project of the territory planning for the Volynskaya Trading House was developed by the Research and Development Institute of the General Plan of Moscow, and, having received all the numbers in his hands, the customer finally thought about the architectural appearance of his brainchild and announced a competition. In this competition, the leader was the workshop of Pavel Andreev, to whom this victory brought not so much an interesting order as the need to constantly try to squeeze into the Procrustean bed of urban planning regulations and at the same time ensure the high quality of the designed housing required by the investor.
As we said earlier, the authors proposed two versions of the project - one fully corresponded to the approved planning decisions, the second retained technical indicators, changing the geography of the location of objects and functional zones in the name of creating a more comfortable living environment. But changing the places of the terms from the point of view of the Moscow Committee for Architecture and the urban planning and bureaucratic apparatus turned out to be criminal and impossible, and the customer was faced with a simple choice: either a step back a year and a half plus costs, or "what can we do, let's do it somehow …" I don't even need to specify which of the options the investor preferred. Throughout this year, the architects were trying to save the economy of the project, adjusting it to the relief, insolation (which they had simply forgotten about earlier) and to mitigate the negative impact on the future housing of the nearby highway and railroad.“The project is undoubtedly interesting for its complexity,” says Pavel Andreev. - We are dealing with a huge typological variety of apartments, we must thoroughly think over the transport scheme for servicing the area, find a parking solution that will save the territory from car traffic. During the year we have mastered a huge amount of work, and we have generally solved all the fundamental tasks (architectural, structural, engineering), now we can finally move on to direct design."
The new district will include a block of low-rise housing and two high-rise complexes with three towers each. It is interesting that both "troikas" are located each on its own stylobate with a large underground space. They are compositionally identical and are solved in the same style, creating a gradual volumetric transition to the lower housing located in the northern part of the site. Each tower has a clean and austere rectangular silhouette in the spirit of "classic" modernism - this, by the way, looks quite elegant against the background of the fluffy hats of "New Setun". And together, due to their different heights, the towers form a kind of "stone structure", which changes its shape when moving along the double - along the diagonal descending to the north.
On the ground floors of each of the four flanking buildings, in addition to the entrance group, all kinds of public functions will be located - restaurants, shops, household services, as well as parking entrances. The central volumes of each high-rise group are solved in a fundamentally different way. Each of the buildings is located on a two-storey stylobate (also "equipped" with all kinds of public and technical premises), and the entrance to the residential part is located at the level of its roof - on the platform of a common stylobate, directly connected with the highway and public transport stops (a circular service and fire passage).
The work on the facades of buildings (including high-rise ones) has not been completed and will be continued at the stage of development of the development project and projects of individual objects. According to Pavel Andreev, it is already clear that the architecture of the facades will be actively influenced by the planning decisions of apartments (there are more than 1600, 8-10 different areas on each floor). But the designers do not intend to limit themselves to a purely functional approach. “With the general simplicity of the rectangular shapes of the towers, I would like to find for them individual plastic and coloristic characteristics that create their own character of the new residential area,” says Pavel Andreev. Among the tower solutions there are a wide variety of interpretations: multi-color pixel planes, and monochrome ones with a hyperbolized order scheme superimposed on top, and imitating a complex circuit of an electronic "board"; a variety of color combinations are also used (yellow, turquoise, purple, and even scarlet), which either conceal or, on the contrary, emphasize the true height of residential complexes.
“Bringing this project to the end and not letting it fall apart, building a truly comfortable and rationally designed residential complex is the most difficult task that we have not yet solved,” admits Pavel Andreev. "I hope that all the project participants will be able to coordinate their efforts and interests." Let us explain that in addition to the architectural workshop of Pavel Andreev, workshop No. 8 of OAO Mosproekt (he is the general designer of the entire complex) and Evgeny Ass, who is developing a project for landscaping the coastal public zone, are working on the project. And if together all the architects really succeed in bringing their plans to the end, in the floodplain of Ramenka, not only will a convenient and aesthetically attractive residential area arise, but an important precedent will be set. And, perhaps, it is he who will convince the authorities that planning projects should be more "framework" in nature and leave a certain freedom of action for architects.
