Today "ROT FRONT" is a whole block in the very center of Zamoskvorechye, around which life rages around the clock. Some trucks are unloaded, others, on the contrary, take the finished product, and the narrow 3rd and 4th Monetchikovskie lanes are almost always filled with cars and people, noise and not at all appetizing smells. The factory buildings themselves are of no particular value - the territory of "ROT FRONT" is densely built up around the perimeter with repeatedly reconstructed production buildings. Of the numerous buildings, only two are to be preserved - a 2-storey brick building at the corner of the 3rd and 4th Monetchikovsky lanes, which once housed a confectionery club, and a 9-storey building of the plant management. And if the facades of the first are recommended to be preserved for aesthetic reasons, then the plant management owes its survival entirely to a sober commercial calculation: nine floors of absolutely usable offices in the very center of Moscow are not something that is customary to sacrifice or throw away today. In the structure of the projected residential complex, this purely typical building could become a serious problem for architects, but, fortunately, the terms of reference provided for the restoration of the historical pedestrian connection between the 2nd Novokuznetsk and 4th Monetchikovsky lanes, so that the new residential perimeter and the office tower were separated square.
Apart from this comfortable pedestrian island, the layout of the quarter remains unchanged. The residential complex reproduces the historically established perimeter buildings. True, if now the "gap" in it is located near the plant management building, then the authors of the projects move it to the opposite corner of the site, namely to the beginning of the 4th Monetchikovsky lane. The courtyard space, which is now very densely "crammed" with various outbuildings, is interpreted by the authors of the project as exclusively pedestrian, landscaping it and lovingly landscaping. It is interesting that this cozy green courtyard will play an important role in the architectural appearance of the house itself: the entrance lobbies of all entrances are made transparent, so that the greenery, paths and benches will be clearly visible from the street. To the house itself, such permeable inserts add visual lightness and fragmentation, in addition, due to stained glass windows, the northern facade also gains its chance in the sun.
“In working on this project, our main efforts were aimed at giving the apartment building, which also consists of several sections, an individual image,” says the chief architect of the project, Viktor Barmin. - We wanted not only to get away from the almost inevitable repetitions, but also to delicately match the surroundings of the confectionery factory - all these side streets, squares, courtyards, involuntarily setting the chamber scale. The customer also helped a lot in this work, who immediately said that he understands what responsibility the construction in the historical center imposes on him, and therefore does not seek to "squeeze" the maximum square meters out of the object. " Barmin recalls that the scale of the new house was "adjusted" for a very long time and carefully: first, the architects designed several long buildings and tried different versions of their layout, then each of the parallelepipeds was divided into several sections. And in this sense, they were greatly helped by the two-story volume of the former factory club - the architects not only preserve its street facades, but recreate the attic floor and the roof from the drawings. So, as part of a rather large complex, an individual residential building appears, and for the entire composition as a whole, it sets the boring tone of its variable number of storeys. And then the buildings follow: they go down to 5 floors, then they go up to 7-8. At first glance, there is no system in these constant drops in the roof line, but it was precisely for a similar effect of diversity and ease that the authors of the project were striving - the surrounding quarters have always developed in the same way. Historical continuity is also ensured by scrupulous adherence to the red lines of the Zamoskvoretsky lanes: the living quarters are not completely parallel to each other and meet not at right angles, somewhere continuing each other, but somewhere, on the contrary, noticeably deviating to the side.
The project of a residential complex on the site of the ROT FRONT Moscow confectionery factory being withdrawn is a kind of encyclopedia of the arsenal of means by which architects endow the most common volume of “faces with an uncommon expression”. This is the beat down rhythm of balconies and windows, and the use of various materials in the facing of facades (in this case, facing brick and natural stone), and the creation of consoles that allow partially surrounding the house with pedestrian galleries at the ground floor level. By the way, the first floors of absolutely all buildings are occupied by public spaces - small shops, consumer services, a sports club and an exhibition center. Having found the architectural image of a residential building adequate to the place, the architects of the studio "Sergey Kiselev & Partners" solved not only the most difficult aesthetic problem, but also created a new, much more optimistic scenario for the development of one of the most depressed quarters of Zamoskvorechye.
