The site intended for the construction of a new residential complex is located in the very center of the capital of the North Caucasus Federal District between the two main avenues of the city - Kalinin and 40th Anniversary of October. These routes are connected with each other by Bulvarnaya Street, along which the Beshtau tourist complex stretches - one of the best hotels in Pyatigorsk, which boasts not only spectacular views of the Caucasian ridge, Elbrus and Beshtau itself, but also a developed infrastructure. It is this hotel that should become the closest neighbor of new residential buildings - they will be built right behind it.
The investor had several requirements for the architecture of the future complex: an expressive and memorable appearance, decoration and layouts corresponding to the de luxe class, the height is no higher than 75 meters (the seismicity of Pyatigorsk is estimated at 9 points). Thus, from the very beginning, a certain contradiction was incorporated into the terms of reference: the house of the most expensive category should not have turned out to be small and intimate, since the investor sought to maximize the potential of the site. “The idea of elite is largely determined by the socio-historical conditions of the development of society. In Europe, for example, an elite skyscraper is rather an exception to the rule. It is common in America, but in China, which is rapidly developing in conditions of super-urbanization, the phenomenon is almost universal. As for Russia, it seems to me that it is difficult to identify a trend here, - says the chief architect of the project, Andrey Nikiforov. “So the geography itself prompted us a way out: we had to find a middle ground, and, as it seems to us, we succeeded.”
Anticipating the description of the master plan developed by the architects, we note that the site, separated by two noisy routes and the hotel's parallelepiped, would have had a strict rectangular shape, if not for the “cube” of the dentistry office, nestled on its southwestern border. Thanks to him, the site on the side of 40-letiya Oktyabrya Avenue acquired a characteristic "gnawing", which, in turn, forced the authors of the project to puzzle over the configuration of the residential complex. In particular, it was the irregular shape of the site (as well as the requirements for insolation of neighboring residential buildings) that pushed the architects to divide the object into two volumes and not close the perimeter of the new quarter. This is how SKiP got a planning structure reminiscent of the open quarters of Portzampark: the perimeter is fixed with the help of two towers, and a pedestrian courtyard is laid out diagonally between them.
The active relief, which is generally very characteristic of the landscape of Pyatigorsk, did not pass by this site either: the height difference between its northern and southern borders is almost 6 meters, and this also largely predetermined the composition of the residential complex. Its underground part is occupied by a parking lot, which, as it approaches Kalinin Avenue, becomes three-level (such a reserve of space allowed the architects, in addition to the actual parking spaces, to design storage rooms for each apartment), the courtyard is raised above the street level, and the playroom acts as the uppermost terrace kindergarten playground. In addition to the preschool, the complex includes a cafe and a fitness club - they occupy the first floors of houses.
Residential volumes have different number of storeys - 15 and 23 floors, with the taller building being almost a square in the plan, and the 15-storey building being an elongated rectangle oriented along 40-letiya Oktyabrya Avenue. At the same time, the houses, of course, are interpreted by architects as siblings: their facades are faced with the same materials, and the roofs have the same shape.“At first, we designed towers with flat roofs, but realized that such volumes looked alien in the panorama of Pyatigorsk,” explains Andrey Nikiforov. - And then we gave the endings of the houses a simple, even lapidary form of gable roofs. Semantically, this form resembles a house drawn by a child, but for all its simplicity, it perfectly solves the problem of an expressive silhouette."
The houses resemble two stalagmites, which look very appropriate in the hilly landscape of the city and harmoniously coexist with the “cardiogram” of the Caucasian ridge, which is invariably present on the horizon. It is noteworthy that the architects cut through the ridge of both roofs in several places - the southern climate makes it possible to make this structure as economical as possible, since it does not need to be glazed or insulated. Instead of an attic floor, which would certainly appear in the Central Russian strip, the Pyatigorsk houses have wide terraces available to the inhabitants of the uppermost two-level apartments.
The slopes of the roofs pass into the side facades - both are faced with copper, patinated in different shades - and the cracks, figuratively cutting through each ridge, turn into moderately narrow windows, "flowing" to the very ground. These almost blank facades, which in their texture and palette unambiguously resemble mountains, face the private areas of the apartments. And all living rooms, on the contrary, have panoramic glazing - the other two facades are a lattice of thick and thin beams, the space between which is filled with transparent beams of windows and loggias.
The layouts of the apartments are extremely rational. And this applies not only to the division into public and private areas - depending on the needs of the investor and the market, the total number of apartments per floor can vary from two to five. The architects are also proud of the fact that they were able to design a back door in every residential building - without dividing the "cargo" and "front" streams, they are sure, the typology of de luxe housing is hardly conceivable at all. Of course, to provide each apartment with a back door would mean a significant overspending of space (the investor would hardly agree to this), but the architects separated the entrance areas with passenger elevators and the lobbies of freight elevators from each other: you can get to the entrances from the courtyard, and building materials or furniture download directly from the street. The entire load of the public areas of the complex is also oriented there, due to which the courtyard, although not closed from the city and visually connected with it, turns into a self-sufficient space intended only for residents of the houses - a picturesque plateau between two mountain peaks.
