The low, extended house is the second stage of the Titanic tower, which we wrote about three years ago and whose construction has already been completed. Recall that the streamlined silhouette of a 24-storey residential building clearly resembles the nose of an ocean liner (judging by its size) - in any case, the effect it produces is about the same as a real liner that appeared with tourists on board somewhere in Venice in the Giardini area. However, unlike the ship, the house is lined with panels in the color of the surrounding mountains and inherits the urban planning dominant laid down in the city plan of Sochi back in the 1970s, which means it takes its right place: it closes (if you look from the beach to the mountains) the perspective of Morskoy Lane. And Morskoy Lane - it just sounds undignified "lane", in fact, it is the axis on which the main square of the city, decorated by Alabyan and Zholtovsky, is strung - a small rectangle where Sochi looks regular and even classic; as a city, and not as a heap of sanatoriums. I must admit that the "nose of the Titanic" organically blended into the landscape of this square, with the eternal monument to Lenin in the middle.
The gallery house of the second stage is placed behind the Titanic and will serve as its background; although the buildings are separated by a narrow Kubanskaya street and a small square, this gap will be completely invisible from afar. The plan of the new house is partly forced: the architects got a ready-made wall in the ground, erected for another object, the parameters of which had to be fitted. The house was designed along this wall and along the road (Alpine street), which bends in this place, which predetermined its slightly concave line. The elevation difference here is large - in fact, the two lower tiers with parking are dug into the mountain slope, and from the sea side the wall of this basement with a deeply extended console and a terrace hanging in the air will be visible from the sea. Above the parking lot there are offices (their windows face the mountains), above there are five floors of apartments (one-room studios), and on the upper tier there are two-level penthouses with large terraces.
The house looks like an open album, a little asymmetrical - two wings, one longer than the other, are connected at a wide angle, forming a characteristic "southern" composition of the building, facing the sea with all the windows of the main facade. This "sea" façade is entirely made up of large French floor-to-ceiling windows so as not to miss the slightest bit of the main value - the sea view. If you look from a distance, you can see that the thin metal frames of the windows are laid in the frames of large white cells, where the horizontals are interfloor ceilings, and the verticals are the walls separating the apartments. Above, there are asymmetrically scattered small metal balconies of the "lonely smoker", a favorite motif of Alexei Bavykin (such balconies are found in almost all of his houses). The sum is the net pattern - as if the house is looking at the sea through a thin lace veil.
The rear facade facing the mountains and Alpine Street is covered with rows of long balconies - galleries from which residents will enter their apartments. Hence the name of the typology - "gallery"; such a layout is often found in seaside hotels. The apartments consist of one room stretched between the entrance (from the balcony side, there is a bathroom at the entrance) and a large window overlooking the sea - like huge boxes for observing the landscape. "Small" rooms, however, are not so small, 60 meters each, and this, in particular, distinguishes an elite house from a resort hotel.
So, the sea facade is filled with a grid of windows, and the opposite one is filled with loggias; this makes the house transparent and airy. For denser matter, there is little room left: one end wall and two stair blocks. Stairs and elevators are placed in oval volumes - that's what I want to call them, by analogy with medieval architecture, “stair towers”. Or by analogy with a liner - ship pipes. One of these towers is located at the southeastern end of the house (and is placed so as to leave space for a fire entrance and a pivot area), the other is adjacent to the rear “balcony” facade. The volumes of the stairs are also responsible for the similarity of the new house to the Titanic - they will be faced with exactly the same panels with a smooth “pixel” transition from sandy to silver color, highlighting the volumes upward and likening them to the surrounding mountains.
As for the rest, the new house is not so much like its “couple” as it is contrasting with it: “Titanic” is a tall tower, the shape of which suggests the idea of aerodynamics, and its “gallery” neighbor is horizontally spread out. The tower is material and looks like it was carved out of stone; in the new house, the emphasis is on windows and loggias. However, the contrast is good for the ensemble, and it serves the development of the plot: if the tower acts as a ship's bow, then the second house looks like the deck of the same ship.
