A closed architectural competition for the project of a residential complex on Bolotnaya Embankment at the beginning of this year was held by GUTA-Development, the main developer of the territory of the Krasny Oktyabr factory. Six architectural bureaus were invited to participate in it: workshop No. 8 "Mosproekt-2", SPEECH Choban / Kuznetsov, "Sergey Skuratov Architects" (whose project we have already talked about), "Project Meganom", TPO "Reserve" and LLC " Architectural workshop "Sergey Kiselev and Partners". Sections 16 E and 17 F, located on the site of the former cold store of a confectionery factory, were the subject of the competitive design. This is the last building in front of the Patriarch's Bridge, oriented along the embankment. According to the developers' plan, two residential buildings, united by a courtyard and common infrastructure, should appear in its place.
The main difficulty for the contestants was that 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. Moreover, the entire development of the island will have a single underground parking, and the entrance to it should be located just under the projected residential complex, or rather, under its side facade, which faces the Patriarch Bridge. The projected buildings also had severe restrictions in terms of class (moreover, with the distance from the bridge, the status of housing should have increased), height, shape of roofs and facing materials. “We received such a detailed technical assignment that there was practically no space left for a flight of imagination,” admits the chief architect of the project, Viktor Barmin. “Therefore, we decided to act consistently: first, take into account all the requirements of the TK, and then see where and how we can deviate from its dictate”.
First of all, the authors had to "put together" a composition of two volumes - long and short, and they reasoned that such antonymic pairs are not very typical for the architecture of the center of Moscow, so each house should be visually divided into two parts. And it was precisely the duality that eventually became the main theme of the space-planning solution of the residential complex: it itself consists of two houses of different status, and each of them, in turn, is made up of two "halves". Moreover, if the smaller building seems to be assembled from two separately standing "houses", then the longer one is cut into two parts diagonally, and a stone one "sprouts" from the red-brick volume.
As for the dialogue of materials, it was also provided for by the terms of reference: the long body was supposed to be made of brick, and the more elite one was to be faced with natural light gray stone. Viktor Barmin observes this requirement, but uses it in order to diversify the interaction of materials as much as possible, to make it topical. So, the building, starting at the pedestrian bridge, is facing it with two red-brick walls (the front facade is slightly sloped here, in response to such a close proximity). He looks at the embankment in a completely less monolithic way: the brick cover is gradually subsiding, the river facade is cut by a dynamic vertical and decorated with light terraces hanging over the red wall. The opposite end, facing the courtyard, turns into a system of stepped (already completely stone!) Terraces that pick up the courtyard plane and raise it to residential floors up to the fifth.
The first floor of the second house is also faced with brick, but if in the long building the brick symbolizes the factory past of Bolotnaya and plays the role of a kind of shell from which a new volume is "hatched", then this material is used here for a completely utilitarian purpose - a basement and a fence are laid out of it, separating elite housing from the city-wide embankment space. This building consists of two rectangular volumes, which are united by a common hall. It is interesting that the outer “half” is covered with a usual gable roof, and the one that adjoins the courtyard has a pitched roof, and it is supported by a massive solemn portico. Thanks to this element, as well as the system of terraces and the brick cladding of the basement, the four-story building is visually divided into two completely dissimilar volumes, which, moreover, are perceived as multi-story. This is exactly the effect the architects were trying to achieve, trying to bring the complex closer to the scale of the existing buildings on the island.
Such a composition imparts non-trivial dynamism to the residential complex. These are not just a couple of houses neatly lined up along the red line along the embankment, but volumes that interact so actively with each other that even an outside observer has no doubts: these two are part of a single whole … And if the long house is oriented towards the arrow of the island, then a small building, where the most expensive apartments of the complex are located, looks at Yakimanka and the surface of the canal. “When we just started working on this project, I remembered Petrov-Vodkin’s painting“Bathing the Red Horse”, and this plot literally haunted me - until I decided to make the basis of the composition the impulse captured by the artist, - says Victor Barmin. "The long body is, of course, the body of a horse, and the two-part house with a portico is its head, facing the viewer."
The project of AM SK & P LLC entered the second round of the competition, in which the architects, at the request of the customer, made a number of changes to it. In particular, the rare glass balconies on the main facade of the long house were transformed into rectangular bay windows placed in a strict checkerboard pattern, and the laconic rectangular entrance portal to the underground parking was replaced by a media panel visible from afar at any time of the day. In addition, in parallel with the completion of this project, the workshop received an offer from GUTA-Development to take part in a tender for two adjacent plots, where it is also planned to build luxury housing. So, as they say, to be continued.
