Recall that Konstantinovo is a large-scale investment project, which involved the construction of a new satellite city of Moscow with an area of more than 3 thousand hectares. On its territory it was planned to place housing and a highly developed social infrastructure, a business and technology park, an MBA center, Akademgorodok with a branch of the university. In other words, Konstantinovo was conceived as a Russian analogue of Silicon Valley, and before the crisis the implementation of such an ambitious urban development project seemed quite real. The general plan of the new city was developed by American urban planners, but the layout of its central part with an area of 230 hectares, intended for residential development, was completed by A. Asadov's workshop together with the "Grand Project City" a little over a year ago.
Then, at the end of 2008, it was assumed that the workshop would continue working on the project throughout 2009. However, already in January last year, it became clear that the economic crisis had reigned in earnest and for a long time, so that a large-scale project would inevitably be frozen indefinitely. The only thing that the developer - the company "Eurasia City" - decided to implement, despite the crisis, is five blocks of low-rise buildings located closest to the federal highway "Moscow - Don", the so-called first stage. In 2009, the workshop team, headed by Evgeny Vdovin, focused on working on these five quarters. Last year, the studio, like most of the country's architectural firms, faced the economic crisis face to face: at some point it turned out that Konstantinovo was the only “living” order. And since it was very important for the Asadovs to preserve the backbone of their unique creative team and provide all architects with interesting work, the idea arose to hold a real internal competition between the employees - with a jury, an exhibition of works and a discussion of the results. This idea turned out to be almost life-saving for the workshop.
The winner of the creative competition was the project "Palette" by Alexander and Natalia Poroshkin, who proposed the simplest and most rational structure of residential areas. In this project, the quarters were “cut out” according to the same very rigid pattern: they were turned to the road by deaf extended facades, a kind of “fortress wall”, behind which small enclaves of development were scattered, gradually lowering their number of storeys from the road. before the transition from large multi-storey buildings to private cottages with personal plots. In order to add individuality to each quarter, the authors painted in bright colors - purple, red, yellow, green and blue.
The "Palette" project was taken as the basis for the final version, supplementing it with the best findings of other contestants. From the project A. and N. Poroshkin retained a rigid structure, the principle of a fortress wall, the internal system of quarters. The division of the quarters by color was also preserved, but the brightness of the tones was noticeably muted. However, the structure of the building was changed radically - in order to comply with the insolation standards, it had to be made more compact, and private one-story houses were completely abandoned. It is curious that the household plots were preserved at the same time - they were assigned to the apartments on the first floors. The residents of the upper floors will also receive their own patios - in the form of landscaped terraces on the roofs.
Despite the rigid structure of the quarters, the architects tried to make the improvement within them as flexible as possible. Here and there, courtyards appear, the adjoining territories receive a picturesque relief, and even the paving of fire entrances is gradually thinned out so that grass can sprout between the tiles. Motorways have been moved outside the perimeter of blocks or removed to the underground level, so that all courtyards are given exclusively to pedestrians.
As it was said, the final project has accumulated all the most interesting of the other competitive options. So Anna Zarubina proposed the image of the amoeba quarters located around the park and opened to it. This game of isolation and openness can be seen in the final version: the quarters are located between the highway and the green area and, of course, face the greenery. The park becomes the central public area for all five districts: it houses a school and a kindergarten, also designed by A. Asadov's workshop and "Grand Project City".
The school will be located in the very center of the park and looks like a boomerang. In the central core of the school building, all the social functions of the educational institution are grouped, and the primary and senior classes are located in two elongated wings. A similar scheme formed the basis for the layout of a nearby kindergarten. The center of his composition is also the assembly hall, which is adjoined on both sides by "combs" of volumes for groups of different ages.
In the process of working on the project, another mini-competition was held in the workshop - for the design of the “fortress wall” facing the road. Initially, the architects developed the idea of continuous greening of the facade, but the too high cost of such technologies stopped them. Then the idea of Oleksandr Shtanyuk was taken as a basis: he proposed to cover the facades facing the motorway with blue and green panels, which would dissolve the houses in the surrounding landscape. However, in the end, the concept of the "fortress wall" itself - dense and strong, faced with dark brown glazed bricks - was accepted as the most suitable for Russian realities.
The idea of another author of the team, Dmitry Zrazhevsky, called the "hairy tower", was a pioneer of future promising development. It was planned to make this quaint residential building with "hair" of wooden structures on the roof a kind of a lighthouse, a landmark for future quarters.
The Konstantinovo project became experimental in many ways for A. Asadov's workshop and Grand Project City. The architects tested a new creative method, in which each workshop employee can not only talk about his vision of the future object, but also provide a full-fledged conceptual project. As a result, the project was assembled like a jigsaw puzzle from the best ideas proposed at the competition, and the workshop staff liked the practice of holding such internal competitions so much that now such clauses are held regularly.
