“This is my second press conference, the first I held this morning,” - this is how the head of RGI International, Boris Kuzinets, began his speech to journalists. The developer, who has implemented, perhaps, the highest quality and high-profile projects in the segment of Moscow elite real estate (which is worth at least the development of Butikovsky and Molochny side streets), was still considered a completely non-public person. He rarely gave interviews and almost never appeared at social events - the businessman decided to change, if not his lifestyle, then his PR strategy in connection with entering a new market. “Elite real estate brings big, but not constant profit, therefore, having made our company public, we decided to try ourselves in other segments,” Kuzinets explained to reporters. - At the end of last year on Tsvetnoy Boulevard, the construction of the Tsvetnoy Central Market department store (designed by the Meganom bureau - AM) was completed, and now the construction of a premium economy class residential complex is underway.
The complex, which became the main character of the last event, was at one time known under the name "Kingston" - Archi.ru has already told about its first stage. Now, when the developer bought several neighboring plots and increased the total area of the settlement to 100 hectares, he received a new name, which clearly indicates its location and main advantage, namely, excellent ecology. “In the forest” is not an exaggeration: the windows of most residential buildings will indeed face the forest that separates the new microtown from the Mitino metropolitan area. With the latter, namely the Mitino metro station, it will be connected by a fixed-route taxi, and by 2015, when the microtown will be completed, its own station, Pyatnitskaya, promises to appear next to it.
Boris Kuzinets explains the main idea of the invented microtown format simply: “We want to create a project on the housing market about which it will be possible to say without a doubt:“Like in Europe”. Perhaps that is why the most European of all Moscow bureaus, SPEECH Choban / Kuznetsov, was invited as the general designer of the complex.
“When developing the microtown project, we tried to completely rid it of the printing of a typical“post-Soviet”development,” says architect Sergei Choban. “The key quality of its streets, squares, houses is individuality, and the main principle laid down in the master plan is the hierarchy of spaces.” The streets, on which residential quarters, social objects and squares are strung, are interpreted by the authors not as transport or pedestrian chords, but rather as enfilades of spaces that saturate the environment with visual diversity.
The emphasis on diversity is truly a distinctive feature of this project, and if you compare it with what is being built today in the segment of economy housing, it might even seem that the authors have overdone it. In fact, for every house, every entrance, every hall and even every block of apartments, the architects have developed their own design project. This became possible thanks to the invitation of an international design team. In particular, the facades of the first stage of construction (three residential buildings with a height of 12-14 floors) were developed by the workshops AssmannSalomon and LANGHOF (Germany), TPO Reserve LLC and SPEECH Choban / Kuznetsov. Answering a question to Archi.ru, Sergei Tchoban said that “prefabricated” teams of architects would also work on the appearance of all subsequent stages of “In the Forest”. In total, it is planned to attract about 20 bureaus from Russia and Europe to participate in the project. In particular, among the designers with whom negotiations on cooperation are already underway, Sergei Tchoban named the Russian Anton Mosin and the British William Alsop.
And if the residential quarters of a microtown are inscribed in the orthogonal grid of the general plan, then all public complexes, including kindergartens and schools, were given a completely different geometry by the architects. These buildings are emphatically free, streamlined forms, organically interacting with their natural surroundings. For example, a school for 1100 students is designed as a wide winding ribbon, to which on one side are attached blocks of the gymnasium, dining room and assembly hall, and on the other is adjoining the stadium, and kindergartens are separate small houses with very picturesque facades, "soldered" into an oval the volume of the central atrium.
“We aimed to create an architecture that would facilitate communication and develop good taste,” admits Sergei Tchoban. Judging by the ready-made design materials, the SPEECH Choban / Kuznetsov bureau quite succeeded in creating a city with a human face, in which residents will not feel like a part of a large anthill. It will be possible to assess whether this is so in reality already in 2013, by which the RGI International company promises to complete the construction of the first stage of the micro-town "In the Forest".
