The site allocated for the construction of a residential complex, and the cardboard mill located on it now, are perhaps best familiar to Moscow motorists: on those frequent days when both Sadovoe and Tretye transport are deaf, it is possible to escape from the city center only along the embankments, and then Paveletskaya is inevitable. Like its closest neighbor, Derbenevskaya Embankment, it is curved in a dynamic arc, “washing” with a stormy traffic flow an island of existing buildings, which is rare for this district of Moscow. Rare, because almost immediately behind the embankment is the Paveletskaya railway, which actually isolates it from the city. You can get here only from the side of the river, walk from the Tulskaya metro station (20 minutes at a brisk pace) or the Paveletskaya-Tovarnaya station (15 minutes), but this walk will not be the most picturesque, but at night, alas, may also be unsafe.
Such a geographic paradox - it seems that the city center, and accessibility "on the C grade" - of course, could not but affect the class of future housing. Nothing but a budget "economy" can be built here, so the developer (AFI Development) staked on young people: most of the apartments have a modest area and are intended for students, childless couples and young families with one child. “Naturally, such a residential complex should have a lot of infrastructure - various cafes, clubs, galleries, consumer services and sports centers, and while working on the project, we very closely followed the balance between residential and public areas,” says architect Sergey Skuratov …
The need to place a large number of social and cultural facilities next to residential buildings, in turn, prompted the architects not to demolish all the buildings of the printing plant, but to preserve and redesign some buildings. Thus, industrial buildings of the early 20th century became part of the residential complex, and the brick, so beloved by Skuratov, was woven into its architectural appearance. In particular, it is proposed to pave the central square of the complex with bricks and decorate the basements of residential buildings. It is interesting that in the latter case Sergey Skuratov lays out an openwork pattern out of bricks: the elegant diagonals of the voids not only give the plinths a visual lightness, but also fill the rooms located in them with light. In the event that this is a club or, say, a cafe, the openings, of course, are filled from the inside with glass, but the walls of cold parking lots are left "full of holes".
Newly erected residential areas and preserved factory buildings are grouped around a central pedestrian square with a pond, with one of the historic buildings located right in the center of the reservoir and, quite predictably, turns into a restaurant with a summer terrace by the water. However, the building, which from afar seems to be drifting on a narrow ice floe, has an important urban planning role - it closes the perspective of the green boulevard connecting the central square of the complex with the 3rd Paveletsky passage. On its opposite side, the boulevard goes to the monument of constructivism - the building of the bakery - and the dialogue that arises between the factory buildings of different eras seems to Sergey Skuratov very important. “The territory acquires interesting vantage points and landmarks, and the residential complex is not perceived to have been created from scratch, but organically develops the scale and style of the existing development”.
Residential areas - one tower and two multi-entrance buildings - are located along the boulevard, that is, they are maximally turned away from the noisy embankment and no less noisy railway. Where houses are adjacent to business centers (along the eastern and southwestern borders of the site), the architects "thicken" the basements, releasing up to 3-4 floors for parking lots: on the one hand, the boundaries of the new residential quarter are clearly marked, and on the other the surrounding offices will receive additional parking spaces, which they are sorely lacking today. The authors propose to make the roofs of residential buildings exploitable, on one of them a viewing platform, decorated with a pergola, was even designed. And although at first glance it seems that there is nothing much to admire from Paveletskaya Embankment, the high-rise residential building built here can fundamentally refute this point of view: the site is located exactly in the middle between the Moscow Kremlin and the Kolomenskoye Museum-Reserve and from the upper floors to both famous sights the capital will have a very beautiful view.
The authors of the project were faced with the task of designing houses from economical and pre-fabricated materials. Having decided the lower floors of buildings in brick, the architects carry out the main facades according to the principle of a hinged module. The size of the latter is 0.7x3.30 meters - on the one hand, this is enough, for example, for arranging a balcony door, and on the other, on the scale of the entire facade, such a relatively small element allows you to create a wide variety of combinations. In particular, the external finishing of the modules can be made of minerite, kraspan, heat-treated wood, opaque glass units or silk-screened glass. “Well, then it’s a matter of technology,” and Sergei Skuratov demonstrates on his computer monitor how multi-colored narrow rectangles are combined in different order, forming facades that are democratic in their “dress”, but have an individual and memorable appearance. Even when designing economy-class housing, the architect remains true to himself: public spaces are woven from noble and velvety brick textures, and the modular grid imitates Skuratov's signature flourish of the facade with thin vertical lines (here you can also recall the poetic project of the Perm Opera and Ballet Theater, where the thinnest sheet of copper, and the glass plane of the residential complex on Savvinskaya embankment lined with rectangles, and maybe even the famous Copper house).
The authors of the project did everything in their power to solve transport and pedestrian problems. In particular, the architects propose to widen the carriageways of the Paveletskaya embankment and the 3rd Paveletsky passage perpendicular to it, build a pedestrian crossing over the railway, and lay an automobile tunnel under it. The most radical proposal concerns the creation of a new pedestrian bridge across the Moskva River, which will connect the building block with the opposite bank and the Avtozavodskaya metro station. “This bridge is entirely our initiative,” explains Sergey Skuratov, “however, we found out that it is envisaged in the plans of the Research and Development Institute of the General Plan of Moscow, which means that sooner or later it can be built.” And since while the project of the bridge is conceptual in nature, the architects have made it emphatically futuristic: the supports of bright red color are "recruited" from separate semi-oval plates in plan, and snow-white hemispheres grow out of the water towards them.
