Strogino is one of the most remote residential areas of the capital, where dense buildings are happily combined with green spaces and a breathtaking panorama of the Moskva River. The area is washed on three sides by the Moscow River, and on the west it borders on the Moscow Ring Road. Strogino was built up in the late 1970s according to a single plan, and today it is completely dotted with residential multi-entrance towers in white-blue or white-green colors - the architects tried to emphasize the proximity to green areas and water, but they overdid it a bit, so in the anthem of the Strogino district referred to as the "white island of Moscow". This is not to say that modern piece housing construction has completely bypassed this area. It is in Strogino, for example, that the "Amber City" designed by Dmitry Alexandrov and the once widely advertised "Olympia" of the "Krost" concern are being built. True, both objects are being built closer to Marshal Katukov Avenue, that is, to the entrance to the district, while its outskirts are still an untouched reserve of residential architecture of the 1970-1980s. Architect Alexei Bavykin will have to change this situation with a project for a 24-storey residential building on Isakovskiy Street - a route that goes around the peninsula of the Strogino district and serves as a border separating residential buildings from the coastal greenery.
According to Alexei Bavykin, he decided from the very beginning that the house should be noticeable. "There is nowhere to mimic!" - explains the architect, vividly recalling his first acquaintance with the monotonous panorama of white parallelepipeds. The investor originally planned to confine himself to 14-16 floors, but the architect managed to convince him, proving that the new house must be made significantly higher than the surroundings so that it becomes a plastic accent of the panel area, a “high-rise dominant”. By the way, this is one of Aleksey Bavykin's favorite urban planning techniques - in the center of the city the architect strives to neatly stitch the holes of historical buildings, and closer to the outskirts, where, strictly speaking, there is nothing to sew, where the whole context consists of, relatively speaking, holes, he constructs dominant towers, attracting views from a distance and marking the area with their presence.
The increase in the number of storeys entailed predictable technical and economic difficulties, in particular, the question arose of how and where to place all the parking spaces necessary for such a large number of apartments. To do this, the architects designed a three-level automated parking of a cassette type - "unscrewed", as they say, meaning the long and painful calculations that had to be done.
Visually, the house is made up of three parts with fundamentally different plasticity and texture. It faces the city center with a volume lined with matte ivory panels. At first glance, it may seem that they reflect and develop the theme of the surrounding buildings, as if the tower were an element of industrial housing construction, only of an unusually large scale. Taking a closer look, you see three sharp ledges and a rounding - it's like a vertical staircase of three steps. The plasticity of the facade seems to manifest itself in the process of looking, it turns out to be complex and sculptural, three-dimensional. And it becomes obvious that the Bavykin house only subtly hints at the houses of the environment, while at the same time showing an order of magnitude better quality, including the quality of the form. The stucco, pointed, "stratifying" facade (the layers will be especially effective when driving past in a car) - probably contains another contextual hint - the limestone deposits in this area, which still protrude in layers on the banks of the Moskva River in Strogino … And finally, gray stripes are asymmetrically traced against the white background: at the bottom they thicken, and at the top they become more sparse - like a geometrically abstracted image of black marks on the birch bark. The facade, therefore, looks like both the steps of coastal limestone deposits, and at the same time - like a small birch grove; all these pictorial allusions are not literal, of course, but they are easy to read while looking at the building. But Alexey Bavykin himself, commenting on the complex stepped shape of the facade, says that it is needed not only for visual diversity, but, above all, for the sake of observing insolation standards, and also in order to design apartments with the most convenient layout.
The facade facing the Moscow Ring Road is the complete opposite of the light volume: it is a giant sheet of shiny yellow metal: concrete covered with gilded aluminum and sharpened to imitate the shape of a metal plate. At about two-thirds of the height of the house, the plate gradually deviates from the vertical, expanding the volume of the house, and at the top it turns into an inclined visor covering the tower with a graceful keeled outline - a kind of gigantic yellow leaf that has landed on the roof; or it is a yellow crown - a crown for "birch trunks" of white volume. Hence the name of the house - "Golden Autumn": a leaf-shaped visor, a golden wall that glows bright yellow in any weather.
The distance between the white and yellow facades is filled with glass. There are loggias of apartments here, half facing the Moscow River, the other half facing the residential area; but the penthouses at the top have a three-sided view - apparently, the whole city will be visible from there, even in the direction of the Moscow region large windows have been cut through the yellow facade. The glass mass lined with aluminum is perceived from the outside as a third type of matter, gluing together a relief light "stone" volume with a thin graceful "metal" sheet, growing from all sides with stains of windows and stripes of loggias. Stone, glass, metal - the three main elements of architecture in this house have become isolated, creating three layers that are firmly connected to each other.
This combination of multi-colored and multi-textured masses, somewhere growing through, somewhere superimposed on each other, is one of the favorite techniques of Alexei Bavykin, dating back to the search for the ASNOVA group. Another favorite theme of the architect is the trees that appeared in Bryusov Lane in the form of poplar trunks covered with a stone fur coat: here they climbed to the very top and turned into bundles of metal supports that support the golden roof that protects the penthouse terraces from rain. And if in Bryusovoy stone trees branched directly along the facade, and live trees grew in tubs above them (later they were replaced with plastic ones), then instead of stone “poplars” there is a giant white “birch”, instead of living trees above there are metal ones, and above them - a lonely, but very large yellow autumn leaf.
The "sheet" must be mentioned separately. He, as it were, covers the house from the Moscow Ring Road, on the one hand, as if protecting its future residents from the child and the hustle and bustle of the district highway, and on the other, proudly presents to everyone who finds themselves on the border of the city and the region: Moscow is golden-domed. If you look from the Moskva River at the sharp-nosed leaf hanging over the light stone tower, it becomes clear that it does not originate from oak trees and maples - it is a golden dome, only flat. Not the dome, of course, but its metaphor, the projection, which nevertheless, like a large golden arrow, points exactly to the Kremlin, unambiguously indicating that the “white island” of Strogino is also Moscow.
