We recently wrote about the history of the design of the Marfino district, located at the beginning of Botanicheskaya Street, on the site of the greenhouses of the former state farm, not far from Ostankino. At first, the town-planning concept of the district was developed by the famous English urbanists “John Tompson & Partners”, then it was revised by Dmitry Alexandrov, and a little later - by Ilya Utkin. Utkin's classic and theatrical architecture turned out to be too expensive, more precisely, according to the managers, who for some reason were invited to consider an already finished project, "not for sale" in this place. After such a sad conclusion of the sales specialists, the investors decided to radically change the project and invited the company "Sergey Kiselev & Partners". Initially, SK&P architects were asked to design the development of the outskirts of the new district, where from the very beginning it was planned not classical, but modernist architecture, and a little later they received an offer to deal with the entire district as a whole. But if Ilya Utkin at one time was given complete freedom of action, then SKiP, on the contrary, was given a very difficult "architectural and mathematical task" - to design almost 3 thousand apartments on 14 hectares, observing the norms and not neglecting the comfort of the living environment and their own credo: despite the compaction, the architecture had to be modern and memorable.
The previous general plan, developed by the British and modified by I. Utkin, provided for the presence of a central axis that divided the area in half and overlooked the Botanical Garden and the Ostankino estate. In order to provide it with a visual connection with the main attraction of the area, it was planned to demolish several residential buildings on Botanicheskaya Street. However, later the customer decided to keep these buildings - thus it turned out that the main street of the new district turned out to be directed not towards the green massif, but towards the usual five-story building. Therefore, SK&P shifted the central boulevard lower, dividing the site in a ratio of about 2 to 1. Its axis began to point to a vacant lot, where a large new school of original (not typical) architecture was to be built. The architects turned the new axis into a pedestrian boulevard, supporting it with several transverse pedestrian streets, each of which was directed towards public complexes located in neighboring areas. One of the key ideas of the general plan developed by SK&P is the diversity and strict hierarchy of pedestrian spaces: public areas (boulevard and streets) are transformed into adjoining territories, and those, in turn, are further developed in courtyards. And if special vehicles or taxis can drive up the boulevards and houses, in principle, the courtyards are 100% protected from cars (fire engines, if necessary, must hit them along the pedestrian paths) and promised to become islands of quiet and safe life.
Transferring the project to the economy class segment, the developer and his marketers, naturally, developed a new technical task, according to which the residential complex was to consist of a large number of small and medium-sized apartments. And in many respects it was the “housing issue” that determined the meridian (from north to south) orientation of the residential buildings: the houses were placed mainly parallel to each other, since the architects tried to provide all apartments with sunlight and, if possible, exclude the so-called “corner junctions”, connections of volumes at significant angles, since they inevitably appear illiquid for the present time apartments of too large an area. Thompson-Utkin's plan was rich in such angles, in which houses were located along the perimeter of rectangular courtyards.
And although some houses in the SK&P project nevertheless received a U-shaped composition or were designed in the form of a closed square, the "bundles" between the main residential plates - these are low public blocks - do not block the sun from neighboring windows. Public functions are located on the first floors of those buildings that face the outer streets, while the first floors of the quiet inner blocks are occupied by apartments. Their residents would not have heard the noise of the car - after all, the microdistrict was designed for pedestrian purposes, and the space between the buildings was occupied by lawns and green hills. The latter would not only diversify the landscape of Marfin, but also make it possible to hide the volumes of transformer substations, as well as the air intakes of the giant underground parking located under the entire territory of the district.
The monotony of parallel lines had to be diversified somehow. This was done due to the difference in the plastic and composition of the houses: out of 17 buildings, only two were completely repeated. The architects modified the silhouettes of the plates and towers, either completing them in the form of a "pedestal of honor", then shifting parts of the house relative to each other like a slider phone. In fact, the composition of the quarter was calculated by means of mathematical analysis, and the authors joke that while working on this project, they spent more time reading tables with calculations of the ratio of residential and non-residential areas than the actual drawings. By the way, a distant resemblance to tables can be seen in the final drawing of the facades - at least, the source of inspiration is obvious.
What most influenced the design of the facades was the very strict requirements for insolation and illumination. In fact, with the building density declared by the customer, the facades could only be white, otherwise the KEO could not be respected. The architects either left most of the facades as such, or filled them with panels of light pulsating shades (they remind the lined graphs of tables). Only the facades facing the main pedestrian street and neighboring quarters could become colored, and, as the chief architect of the project, Alexei Medvedev, says, they were immediately filled with dark bricks in order to somehow dilute the abundance of light planes. The highest single-entry towers in the area, located at different ends of the site and forming a kind of triangle of brightness and contrast, have also become dominant colors.
For SK&P, Marfin's project became a testing ground where the workshop was able to apply its developed ideas and techniques of business, rational architecture, for which it is so famous. And although it is believed that the most difficult task is a task with many unknowns, Sergey Kiselev and his team can now safely argue with this. It is really difficult to work in conditions of obscurity, but to design with the maximum number of predetermined parameters is, at first glance, an enterprise that is generally impracticable. But Sergey Kiselev and Partners passed the exam in this higher mathematics. True, even the abundance of subtle and complex solutions proposed by SK&P did not help the Marfino district to stay within the architectural framework. As you know, since 2009, it has been built up with panel houses.
