ADM bureau has extensive experience in cooperation with foreign architects: Andrey Romanov and his colleagues have worked with Frank Gehry and with workshops from London - SHCA, KPF, NBBJ and John MacAslan + Partners. With the latter, ADM bureau completed the project of a residential building on Stanislavsky Street, work on which went through several stages: from project support to active creative exchange of ideas and concepts, and subsequently to full-fledged co-authorship. According to Andrey Romanov, now it is difficult to say which of the architects made the greatest contribution to the project - this is a truly joint work, in which the ideas of the two workshops were organically intertwined, and were developed and refined by joint efforts.
The plot on which the residential complex is built is located in the Taganka area. On three sides, it is bounded by quiet streets - Martynovsky and Pestovsky lanes and Stanislavsky Street, and on the fourth side it adjoins the ensembles of the Konshin and Rubtsov-Morgunov town estates, built in the 19th - early 20th centuries. The historical surroundings and the relief of the site with a height difference of five meters completely and completely determined the compositional solution of the new complex, consisting of five residential buildings and two small multifunctional pavilions.
One of the most important urban planning tasks, the designers considered the creation of a transitional scale between low-rise buildings (no more than 3 floors) of Stanislavsky Street and 5-6-storey buildings along Martynovsky and Pestovsky lanes. As for the actual architectural appearance of the future residential complex, its artistic concept from the very beginning was based on the idea of simple laconic volumes gradually descending down the hill. It was possible to give them variety and expressiveness with the help of the drawing of the windows and the combination of materials of different colors and textures.
The most effective solution for a residential building on the street. Stanislavsky's architects used the technique of combining emphatically contrasting materials. Dark brown brick, light stone and wood are used in the facing of the facades. At the same time, the brick, with which two out of five residential sections are faced, was made to order in Germany, and the stone (limestone) was brought from Bulgaria. The brick has a very textured relief surface and several shades of dark brown, and with a stone - light, monochromatic and almost smooth - it enters into an active dialogue at several levels at once.
The third material that is used fragmentarily in the decoration is wood. Wooden decorative pylons are inserted into the windows of the main volumes, the entrance to the underground parking is lined with wood, as well as a small pavilion at the corner of Stanislavsky Street and Martynovsky Pereulok. The one-storey volume stands out sharply against the background of the entire five-storey complex, but at the corner of two old narrow streets it looks more than organic: it seems that the new construction bows in respectful obeisance in front of the architectural monuments (in particular, in front of the Church of St. Martin the Confessor located directly opposite). And you don't need to thoroughly know the history of the site in order to guess that once there was a small house at the corner of Stanislavsky and Martynovsky, and the architects only pay tribute to the lost heritage object - the authors hit the scale of the street so accurately that the memory of the place is instantly read even on an intuitive level. Of particular interest is the structure of the roof of this small volume: the wooden hipped roof is actually a decorative lattice holding the skylight and masking the flat concrete floor. Outwardly, the new pavilion most of all resembles a gallery - wide windows from floor to ceiling, free interior space without columns and partitions and a skylight in the roof - but how exactly it will be used, the final decision has not yet been made.
The architects initially planned to organize the main entrance to the residential complex from the side of a corner wooden pavilion, but this excluded the possibility of creating a ceremonial lobby. That is why the entrance to the complex "moved" to the central building, facing Martynovsky lane. The lobby cuts right through the building and leads to the courtyard, from where you can get to any of the five buildings of the residential complex. They managed to make it green and completely pedestrian thanks to the fact that all the parking spaces necessary for residents are located underground. The architects have designed a two-level parking lot - one floor is intended for future residents of the residential complex, the second - for employees of the Stanislavsky business center located nearby. As Andrei Romanov explains, such a compositional solution has an important psychological function: a walk through a landscaped courtyard (by British landscape architects) will serve as a daily reminder for residents of what a beautiful house they live in. At the same time, due to the strong difference in the relief, the courtyard turned out to be terraced, and in order to visually expand its boundaries, the architects made the interior facades of the residential buildings as glass as possible - behind the large-scale stained-glass windows there are zigzags of stairs.
The new residential complex on Stanislavskogo Street, although it was designed without pretensions to be significant, has become such. First of all, due to its extremely organic entry into the prevailing environment of Taganskiy lanes. The mastery of scale allowed the authors of the project to make emphatically modern architecture an integral part of the historical development. The English severity and even some stiffness of the lines are here more than compensated by the play of heights and volumes, colors and textures. This complex is instantly recognized as European, as by some miracle transferred to Moscow a sample of high-quality and comfortable housing typical for the same Britain or Holland. And it is all the more pleasant that such a purity of style in the conditions of Moscow was maintained by the joint efforts of Russian and English architects.
