Sections 16 E and 17 F, located on the site of the former Red October refrigeration plant, were the subject of the competitive design. This is the last building in front of the Patriarch's Bridge, oriented along the embankment. As conceived by the developers, in its place should be residential buildings, united by a courtyard and a common infrastructure. At the same time, the town-planning concept for the development of the entire territory of the factory (developed in the early 2000s by Mosproekt-2) provides for the transformation of Bolotnaya Embankment into a completely pedestrian zone: a new passage is made parallel to the entrance to the future residential complex. Designed buildings also have strict limitations in terms of height, roof shape and material.
“The situation in which the participants of the competition found themselves was not easy,” says architect Sergei Skuratov. - The work on the project was hampered not so much by the existing restrictions, which are just natural and expected in the historical center, but by the absolute uncertainty about what will be built on the neighboring sites. As you know, many of them have already been assigned to well-known foreign and Russian architects, but not a single approved project exists yet, so in fact we were working “blindly”. For me personally, in this situation, the most natural decision was to start from the style and image of the factory itself."
In terms of the residential complex has the shape of a trapezoid, the narrow "gate" of which is facing the Patriarch Bridge. In front of him, the Bolotnaya Embankment from the carriageway turns into a pedestrian one, so Sergey Skuratov suggested organizing the entrance to the new complex from this side. A double-track ramp leads to the underground parking, and the entrance itself is decorated with a bright scarlet portal. “The butt of a macaque,” the architect jokingly calls him, but he immediately catches himself and gives a less metaphorical, but much more correct definition: “the red entrance to the womb of“Red October”. And he explains: under the influence of a powerful traffic flow, the narrow facade cannot but deform - in the architecture of the building this is reflected in the form of a symbolic dent in the entire height of the house.
On the -1 floor, Sergei Skuratov designs storage rooms for all apartments, as well as an underground two-way street for loading the complex. On floors -2 and -3 there are parking lots, which in the future are supposed to be combined with underground parking lots of neighboring residential complexes. The architect also proposed to hide the transformer substation and the garbage can underground, since the size of the site does not allow them to be placed next to the projected buildings.
As already mentioned, the residential complex consists of two buildings, separated by a square. The one that is located closer to the Patriarshy Bridge, that is, in the narrow part of the trapezium, stretches along the embankment for more than 60 meters, the second one fixes the corner of Bolotnaya and Bersenevsky Lane and has an almost square shape in plan. In addition to the common underground part, the buildings are connected by a pedestrian gallery - on the side of the Projected Passage, to which the entrance groups of both buildings face, it is emphasized by a narrow horizontal slot in a blank brick fence.
Brick, the favorite material of the architect Skuratov, is another link for these two buildings. And, of course, for their facing, the author chose a dark red brick, which is primordially perceived as synonymous with "Red October". An exception was made only for two side facades facing the courtyard: the end of the long building is faced with mirrored glass, and its counterpart - with ordinary glass, but behind a transparent screen is hidden an amber-colored tree. The use of a mirror not only visually expands the boundaries of the square, but also allows you to provide it with additional sunlight, since the reflecting surface is facing south.
One of the points of the technical assignment was the different shape of the roofs of residential buildings. The long one was to be covered with a pitched roof, and the square one - flat, but Skuratov would not have been himself if he had not used this requirement to create a complex and rich plastic, giving the architecture of the complex a bright and recognizable character. The sloping roof of the long building, which has “driven out” in the direction of the Projected Passage, makes this building similar to the famous residential building in Tessinsky Lane. But if there the architect stopped at this, then here the shift of the roof of one building entails a radical rethinking of the shape of the roof of the second. First of all, it maintains the roof slope set by the long house, but since the second building has stricter height restrictions, it is cut at a completely different angle: the slope goes down, but unexpectedly turns and the downward movement continues in reverse. This dynamic "bend" affected the architecture in the most direct way: to the intersection of the embankment and Bersenevsky lane, the complex faces with a rounded inclined facade - a kind of bow of a ship, the role of decks of which is played by additional balconies that appeared due to the inclination of the wall.
On the one hand, this way the formal requirements are met: from the Yakimanskaya embankment, the "short" building seems to be covered with a flat roof, and on the other, Skuratov not only visually unites the two buildings, but interprets them as parts of a whole, artificially separated. The "torn" masonry of the ends unequivocally hints at the gap that has taken place, and the mutual attraction of the "halves" emphasizes the complex rhythm of the pylons, which scatter from the center of the composition and line up emphatically regularly as they approach the side facades. At the same time, the low ground floor, where the entrance lobbies, a cafe and a kindergarten are located, is designed as almost a fortress wall with sparse windows, and five residential floors have a deliberately enlarged scale. Sergei Skuratov explains: he did not split the plane of the facade with horizontal divisions so that the complex would correspond to the scale of the original development of "Red October".
“Today the factory looks like a block with large residential areas. This prompted me to think that modern houses that will be built on the site of the withdrawn production, on the contrary, should look like industrial facilities, have a pronounced aesthetics of lofts,”says the architect. The architecture of the residential complex is really devoid of small details and decorative elements - its image was created by the plasticity and texture of the volumes themselves, as well as by virtuoso work with material, in which Sergei Skuratov has no equal.
