The site for which this project is intended is located outside the Moscow Ring Road, on the left side of the Skolkovskoye Highway. Three hundred meters diagonally to the north-west of it, the David Adjaye building for the Skolkovo business school is under construction. Even closer, along the western border of the territory, across the road - the elite village "Grunwald" has almost been built, the houses in which, according to the general plan of Sergei Tchoban and Alexander Skokan, were designed by the bureau "Choban Foss", "Meganom", "Ostozhenka" and "Ashmann and Salomon" … It is advertised as a "fashion house from the stars of world architecture", reminiscent of Moscow's "golden mile" Ostozhenka. It is planned to build a new business park along the eastern border of the future residential complex of Vladimir Plotkin, right at the Moscow Ring Road. Finally, it was recently announced that an innovation center, already dubbed the Russian Silicon Valley, will be built in the same area, but north of the Skolkovskoye Highway. So the outskirts of the village of Zarechye will soon turn from a dacha-sanatorium area into an enclave of progressive (let's hope so) business and no less elite housing. Grunwald consists of seven-storey houses of round, square and triangular shape, set in two lines along the internal road. The business park will be arranged in a similar way: it is also made up of separate buildings grouped in two parallel lines. Vladimir Plotkin did not repeat the fractional structure of neighboring ensembles, but curved the volume of the residential complex, turning it into an elegant, almost calligraphic stroke. I would like to compare the resulting figure to some letter or sign, but there are no close analogies - most of all, the plan of the house looks like the outline of a flower petal. And in meaning (but not in form) it resembles the English icon &, which, relatively speaking, connects - or separates - the future business park and the Grunwald under construction. Now curved houses are, as they say, the current trend. If one of the ideas of classical modernism was a long house-wall, if desired, capable of accommodating a rolling mill, then the answer of neo-modernism was, let's say, a house-loop: more often the bend is weak, approximately like that of a stretched bow, less often it is significant - the house can be S-shaped, wavy (then it is probably a "house-snake"). But in the performance of Vladimir Plotkin, an architect who, as is commonly believed, prefers straight lines, and even angles are also rather straight, the loop house turned out to be strictly geometric. Moreover, the geometry used is simple, circular. The "petal" of the plan is drawn with two large arcs with one, circular, conjugation in the place where the arcs meet. So the source of inspiration is not strips of paper thrown on the table in random order, not a crawling reptile or even a mountain ridge, but a very simple geometric construction. Taking a closer look, on the plan, you can even find the places where the compasses are installed for at least two main arcs. There are round ponds in these places. In addition to arcs, rays radiate from the ponds, cutting through the volume of the "loop" in the place of the small arc-conjugation, dividing the residential complex into separate houses and forming exits towards Setun. Looking at the project more closely, it is easy to come to the conclusion that the main shape in it is not a loop or a petal, but circles and their conjugation. Four round ponds, surrounded by grassy amphitheaters, are echoed by equally round courts, illuminated by round faceted lanterns, large and very unusual, reminiscent of stadiums; the roof over the hanging garden is cut like Swiss cheese with many circular holes of different sizes. In the project "District" Vladimir Plotkin seemed to set himself the goal of checking what would happen if, while drawing a house, he used not a ruler, but a compass. There is in this something akin to the idea of the famous house of Konstantin Melnikov; By the way, the eight-sided circles of the sports grounds in the Zarechye courtyard are very similar to the plan of Melnikov's house, which, as you know, consists of two intersecting cylinders. And just like Melnikov's, the round house required special facades. Here, the curved walls of the hinge house have been transformed into a glass-stone accordion. As if the windows, not wanting to bend to match the curved surface of the walls, turned at an angle and turned into triangular projections-bay windows. Each of which is composed of two planes meeting at an angle: one is glass, the other is stone. From time to time, the transparent and deaf halves change places, forming an alternation of large, different-textured spots on the facades. Thus, firstly, it is possible to catch the maximum light and provide the apartments with decent insolation. Secondly, the resulting "accordion" allowed Vladimir Plotkin to avoid the widespread use of curved glass that distorts reflection, as in a room of laughter (in apartments this is really inappropriate, but curved glass is found in public spaces of this project). In addition, the alternation of bay windows knocks down the floors and gives the surface a special texture, turning the house into a ribbed sculpture, a bit reminiscent of a mechanism frozen in the process of transformation (this motif can be compared with a similar technique used in the building of the Vremena Goda shopping center on Kutuzovsky prospectus). The rotation fills the house with some kind of special life, internal energy - one might think that the canopies have taken off and levitate over the main volume, and the facades have begun to move, opening up to the light with their entire surface; as if the space object had landed, spun and began to deploy its mechanisms. Here it is necessary to make a reservation that Vladimir Plotkin's adherence to straight lines and angles, which was mentioned above, is in fact a rough generalization based on memories of a giant house - "Airbus", Chertan's "Avenue 77" or, for example, the project of the St. Petersburg Sea railway station in the form of a giant parallelepiped - "a window to Europe". The author of these projects really rarely softens the corners, but he, as you know, received the "Golden Section" for one of the first round houses in Moscow - a house with a completely circular plan. In Zarechye, the theme of the circle multiplied, expanded - it was as if it had been comprehensively studied, applied to a pond, a park, a house, and finally to a perforated roof. It is interesting that this happened in the District - near the village of Grunewald, in which there are several round houses typologically similar to the old house of Plotkin, and next to the Skolkovo business school of David Adjaye, the stylobate of which, as you know, perfectly round. Vladimir Plotkin, in response to a question that arises of itself about contextual roll-overs, replies that, yes, he was guided by the project of the neighboring Grunewald, but Skolkovo had not yet seen the design of Zarechye. So, in the area of Zarechye and Skolkovo, an enclave of "architecture along the compass" is formed, and the three mentioned projects demonstrate an amazing variety of solutions. A comparison suggests itself, if not a meticulous comparison, then at least a few remarks. So, it is obvious that in "Grunwald" and "Skolkovo" the buildings turn out to be round, in "Zarechye" the ponds are round, and the house is more complicated, its shape is not looped, but open, slightly open, like the shell of a curious oyster. Or: the plans of all three complexes resemble abstract painting. This does not happen so often with plans, even modern ones, but here: the Grunwald plan is a set of basic geometric shapes, circles, triangles and squares; and the plan of the Skolkovo business school is declaratively focused on Malevich's Suprematist painting. In Adjaye, Malevich's constructions determine the plan and volumetric composition of the entire building, being transferred from painting to architecture with direct literalism. In Plotkin's work, abstract figures become the basis not so much of the building, but rather of what is called “landscaping”; this is how the park of some estate near Moscow could look like if the avant-garde artist of the 1920s suddenly decided to design it. The park here, of course, is not enough for a manor, but in Zarechye it plays an important role, and is organized in a complicated manner, in five “steps”: the wild Setun river, to which the house faces many passages; a park with ponds, protected from the Moscow Ring Road by two arches of the Zarechya houses; the square between these arcs, it looks more like a front square; and finally, allotments-front gardens for residents of the first floors and a hanging garden on the fourth floor above the fitness center - the latter two serve as a kind of "resonators" between home and nature. How not to remember about the garden city. If about the park surrounding the house, we can say that it resembles an abstract picture from above, then the drawing of the plan of the loop-house "District" cannot in any way go back to the painting of the avant-garde - such forms are not peculiar to it. But the prototype of the building, although not direct, is found in the tradition of mature modernism of the 1970s. More precisely, two prototypes. Modernism did not know serpent houses; it was well aware of the quieter horseshoe-shaped plans. One can imagine, for example, the volume of the Moscow hotel "Kosmos", which would become longer, lower, lighter and stratified into two strips. Between these projects for 40 years, but despite all the transformations, they are connected by something like an internal community that allows them to be read as branches of the same trunk. Whereas the Adjaye building on this trunk looks like a graft. In other words, the leitmotif of Skolkovo architecture is the revival of forms of early modernism, moreover, through an appeal to painting, or more precisely to the ideology of Suprematism. And in the building of the neighboring residential complex "Zarechye" we are dealing with the continuation and development of the paradigm of mature modernism, moreover, architectural one. It seems to me that this is where the overall emotional mood of the project comes from. Even if we take into account the fact that now it has become the norm for high-quality housing to hide parking lots under the ground, and to break squares on the roof, plant everything that is possible, and populate renders with joyful staffing of cheerful children - all the same, in the Zarechya project all these features as if reinforced. The pathos of constructing a better life, inherited by mature modernism from the early avant-garde, in this project acquires freshness and strength, unexpected sincerity, and therefore a new life. So - let's look at the plan graph again - the rays radiating from the round main pond can be understood as sunny, and the arched houses - as a rainbow above it. And it turns out that it is not so far from a "business and premium class residential complex" to the utopian city of the Sun.
2024 Author: David Durham | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-09 00:53
