Ulyankovo is a small village located approximately in the middle between two reservoirs - Pirogovsky and Pyalovsky, and surrounded by the Uchinsky forest park. It is connected with the nearby Zhostovo and Yudino by a two-lane road, along which you can quickly get out to the Pirogovskoye or Ostashkovskoye highways and already rush along them to Moscow. Thus, a happy combination of excellent ecology and good transport accessibility is evident, and the construction of a new village in this place is not surprising at all. True, this site, located opposite Ulyankovo (across the road, on the site of the Timiryazev state farm), has one significant limitation: a power transmission line runs close to it, forcing the developer to sacrifice part of the territory. This is what explains the very intricate contours of the general plan of the new development: the winding road sets the "slight unevenness" of the northern border of the site, and its entire eastern side seems to be lined with expressive zigzags.
As you know, it is impossible to build under the power transmission line and in the immediate vicinity of it, however, the restriction does not apply to land plots, so the investor made a compromise: as they approached the power line, the area of personal plots gradually increases, providing future cottages with the necessary indent. One can argue about how justified such a move is, but the fact remains: together the investor and the architects have found a Solomon solution.
The chief architect of the project, Alexei Medvedev, does not hide the fact that the Customer has designated the maximum area output as a priority task, so the authors tried to use every meter of land as efficiently as possible. The entire territory of the future residential area is divided by "meridians" and "parallels" (the latter repeat the smooth bend of the road) of intra-block driveways, and the trapezoidal segments formed by them are drawn into rectangles of the IZhS.
A feature of this section is that with its almost longest side, it faces the roadway. Of course, the new settlement should have been somehow protected from the road, but the architects immediately rejected the idea of a blank fence (even if it was artistically designed). Firstly, this in itself is not very attractive, and secondly, it did not correspond to the class of the village, in which the investor intends to combine individual cottages of a small area and economy-class housing. It was the latter that prompted the architects to have the right idea: apartment buildings with a height of 3-4 floors can themselves "work" as a building envelope - you just need to arrange them correctly. “We considered several variants of the composition,” says Alexei Medvedev. - In one of them, for example, a kind of fence was nevertheless built along the road, in which square portals were then cut out, and houses were built in between them on the reverse side. In another version, the houses faced the road with blind ends, and the courtyard spaces between them could be closed with low fences, which together created a very dynamic silhouette."
It's hard to disagree with Alexei Medvedev: the sketches show how elements of different heights, lining up along the road, form a clear, rhythmic "cardiogram", and for a new village with such an even, confident pulse, it somehow immediately becomes very calm. However, the location of the houses perpendicular to the highway unwittingly “ate up” a lot of valuable square meters, so the investor asked to build residential buildings along the road. The architects racked their brains for a long time over how not to turn such a long volume into a monotonous "wall", and in the end decided to rely on color.
Houses form a solid line with gaps only for driveways and power lines. Thus, the hulls can be of different lengths, but architecturally they are all solved in the same way, and their shape is completely subordinated to the bends of the road. The unity of the composition is also emphasized by the horizontal line of the cornice. In fact, this is a ribbon that winds parallel to the track, and the ribbon is very colorful, since the facades are "made up" of large horizontal rectangles of different colors in a warm red-yellow range. There are windows in the residential sections between them (however, all apartments are designed in such a way that either living rooms or public galleries open onto the road), and on the blank wall of the administrative and commercial building, the architects suggest giving the name of the village in large volumetric letters.
Blocked houses located in the depths of the territory along one of the sections of the power transmission line have been solved in a completely different way. There is no longer any unity here: the "lines" of townhouses are emphatically fragmented into separate residential cells, and the protruding edges of the walls are painted in various shades of a cold blue-green scale. For the "long" house, this part of the complex serves as a kind of background - both structurally and in terms of color solutions - complementing and enriching the overall composition of the external building line.
