The quarter, which will be reconstructed in the near future, has serial number 109 in the official city planning documents of Moscow and is located exactly in the middle between two metro stations equidistant from the center - "Volzhskaya" and "Tekstilshchiki". It is bounded by Chistov, Shkuleva, Malyshev streets and 7th Tekstilshchikov street. At the same time, the border of the Lublin PKiO passes along Shkuleva Street, that is, on three sides the quarter is squeezed by a typical building similar to it, and the fourth is facing the park.
A quite natural question arises: why will this particular quarter be reconstructed, and not any of the neighboring ones? The answer lies in the nature of the development that exists here. The fact is that on the territory of the quarter, in addition to the five- and nine-story buildings, there are two-story residential buildings that were built immediately after the Great Patriotic War and until recently belonged to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. It is these buildings, which have long been recognized as emergency, and will be demolished as part of the ongoing reconstruction project, and in their place will be high-rise buildings invented by SKiP.
Since the two-story houses are located exactly in the center of the quarter and are surrounded by later buildings, the architects were faced with the task of building new houses so that they would not disturb the insolation of the existing ones, and also would not interfere with the passage of firefighting equipment to them. Taking into account these two key requirements of SNiPs ultimately prompted a simple and rational solution to the general plan of the new residential core of the quarter. The projected complex "SKiP" closes in the perimeter of new motorways, which will provide absolutely all houses with convenient entrances and will give the necessary indentation of new buildings from the existing ones. Six new residential buildings (14 to 20 storeys high) will be lined up in two neat lines along the longitudinal axis of the block on the common rectangle of the underground parking lot. The buildings are arranged in two rows, but in a checkerboard pattern.
Everyone who has been here at least once knows about the depressive appearance of the sleeping areas of the southeast of Moscow. Before pedestrians and motorists, "Tekstilshchiki" appear as an endless series of dull neighborhoods of the same type, and from a bird's eye view this area is an endless checkered fabric, on which the eye has absolutely nothing to catch on. No one doubts that such dullness needs to be fought. However, this can be done in different ways. Today, for example, it is very customary to blow up a “tip-up” with the brightest colors and super-dynamic forms - they say that this is how the districts acquire the long-awaited architectural dominants that will reorient all visual connections to themselves. And SKiP has such an experience - just remember the Avangard residential building, which blossomed in the New Cheryomushki district with all the colors of the rainbow. However, "Tekstilshchiki" in the urban planning sense, the area is much more homogeneous and proletarianly gloomy, and the architects, having started work on block 109 with another coloristic fireworks, stopped in time, realizing that in the southeast of the capital such objects, if not forever, then still will remain strangers for a very long time. But what can be opposed to poverty if not outright prosperity? This is how painstaking work began in the studio to create an artistic language adequate to the existing situation.
The first floors of all buildings are reserved for public spaces, and the architects visually emphasized this with the help of several techniques at once. Firstly, the entrances to the infrastructure facilities are organized from the courtyard side, while the residential entrances face the street. Secondly, the lower floors of high-rise residential buildings and the facades of the outbuildings, which will house a kindergarten and an elementary school, are faced with multi-colored bricks. And between the "ranks" of houses, an inner courtyard is broken, interpreted because of its length, rather, as a small pedestrian boulevard, along the borders of which trees and shrubs are planted, lawns are arranged. It is not by chance that the latter have a characteristic semi-oval shape of petals; they are green areas of the operated roof of an underground parking lot.
The facades of the living quarters are decorated with the beloved “SKiP” structural lattice, the segments of which are filled with facing plates of various colors. And if public premises, thanks to multi-colored bricks, seem variegated and warm, like a beloved scarf knitted by a mother, then the towers that grow out of them are much more strict and restrained. However, such an impression arises only when you come close to the residential complex, while at a distance the picture changes dramatically: the melange of the foundations of the houses is almost indistinguishable from afar, but they themselves visually instantly break into pairs - two green, two blue, two burgundy. The fact that all six buildings are "from the same family" leaves no doubt about the already mentioned lattice, "wrapping" the houses along the outer perimeter. Such a surface can be compared to a three-dimensional painting: the longer you look, the more clearly something else appears through the geometric pattern.
By itself, this technique is not new - for example, the building of Leonid Pavlov's CEMI immediately comes to mind, the main theme of the facades of which is also a cell, though not rectangular, but square. And it seems that this association is not accidental - striving to integrate new houses into the existing context as organically as possible, the architects deliberately used the artistic language of modernism of the 1960s, complementing it with such "excesses" of modernity as color, high-quality facing materials and comfortable layouts. The project for the reconstruction of block 109 convincingly proves that the environmental approach, repeatedly praised by critics, is appropriate not only when new construction is being carried out in the historical center of the city. It is also suitable for the gradual renewal of the sleeping areas created in the middle of the last century, because the habitat cannot be corrected overnight, but gradual delicate adjustments can bring real results.
