Three Colors: White

2024 Author: David Durham | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-09 00:52

Let us remind you that the house in question was built on a stretch of Ostozhenka between Pozharsky and 1st Zachatyevsky lanes. The new building retains the original scale of the street: following the historical parcel, the volume is visually divided into three parts. Different shades of stone and the individual pattern of the windows of each part of the house saturate its facades with such a rich plasticity and texture that the architects wanted to make the interiors of public areas completely different. “Clean and free from complex themes and excessive materiality of the facades,” explains the chief architect of the project, Alexei Medvedev. "The only" external "theme that seemed appropriate to us in this interior is the light wood used to decorate the courtyard facade, but later this idea was abandoned, preferring white."

White really dominates here: white walls and ceilings, white floors from large-sized agglomerate slabs. Thanks to the uniformity of colors, the planes visually flow freely into each other. The space becomes more solid and airy thanks to the large amount of glass - partitions, stair railings, decorative panels with backlighting.

However, this does not mean at all that the public areas of the new residential complex resemble a hospital ward. In the kingdom of purity and sterility, the architects introduced a sufficient number of color and light accents, unmistakably indicating the typology of the interior and emphasizing the status of its inhabitants. The elongated rectangular box of the reception desk is made of dark Spanish marble "emperor dark", whose shade of "coffee with milk" contrasts favorably with the surrounding sugar whiteness. Behind the counter there is a frosted glass panel illuminated from the inside, on which a raster image of enlarged fragments of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel painting is applied. The wall of the corridor connecting all five elevator blocks with each other has been turned into the same panel. “We were looking for a theme that could combine and organize an elongated lobby space with alternating lift groups and recreations located between them,” explains Alexey Medvedev. - The original solution of the wall only with the help of light spots did not seem saturated enough. The desire to give the wall a greater semantic load led to the idea of a more textured, but at the same time not overcomplicated solution. The incredible plastic expressiveness of Michelangelo's works seemed quite appropriate. Exaggeratedly enlarged, translated into a large raster and gray color, his figures did not lose either the richness of texture or amazing lightness, but acquired an abstract sound, in fact, and became those draperies that we have been looking for for so long."

The elevator blocks are finished with dark chocolate corian and are clearly visible in the general structure of the entrance area. There is one curious subtlety in their design: the planes parallel to the light front have a smooth glossy surface, and those that are perpendicular to the windows, on the contrary, have a complex multidimensional structure. So, book shelves and niches for TVs are facing the recreation areas, and a volumetric composition a la puzzle to the exit to the alley. In the recreational setting, conceived as some kind of public rooms for children and adults, white furniture dominates, but here the snow-white surfaces are "diluted" with bright color accents - orange poufs and scarlet pillows.

The interior of the art gallery located on the first floor of the residential complex is revived with similar bright "inserts". It does not have a separate entrance from the street, and is separated from the reception area by sliding glass doors. This stylish double-height space is intended primarily for residents of the building, who can hold exhibitions, presentations or just informal meetings here.