Today, between Rubtsovskaya Embankment and Bolshaya Pochtovaya Street, numerous industries are located - created at different times and for different needs, they form an almost spontaneous motley building, which you cannot really see from the embankment because of the high fence. Most of these buildings are supposed to be demolished, so in the future the left bank of the Yauza, which makes another smooth bend in this place, should acquire a completely new "face". In order to determine what it might be like, the new owner of this territory organized an architectural competition for the best concept of its development. The participants of the competition were given a complete carte blanche: apart from the fact that housing should prevail in the new complex, and its height cannot exceed 50 meters, there were no restrictions. According to the jury, Sergey Skuratov was the author of the most interesting concept that fully revealed the potential of the site.
Legally, this territory consists of three sections at once: two have the shape of long trapezoids stretching from the street to the river, and the third is a sharp triangle, "cut" from the center. Accordingly, the project had to provide for the sequence of construction - Sergei Skuratov identified trapeziums for housing with large pedestrian yards, and placed an office complex on a triangle bordering the outside world. The architect intends to organize additional offices in several preserved factory buildings - one of them faces the embankment, the other, on the contrary, faces Bolshaya Pochtovaya. Another historical building is located in the depths of the future quarter - Skuratov partially preserves it, introducing a spectacular square-section brick tower into his complex. This tower becomes a kind of reference point for the coordinate system of the new architectural organism.
Over her red-brick vestments, Skuratov puts white decor on - one can consider this a microscopic injection of pseudo-Gothic, which the architect needs in order to emphasize the true age of the tower and at the same time set the palette of the entire complex. And if the facades of the houses, facing directly to it, are solved mainly in red, then the planes revealed here only partially, on the contrary, are decorated in white. In fact, Sergei Skuratov interprets every volume as a “shape-shifter”: houses that from one angle seem to be made of bricks suddenly turn out to be plastered on the reverse side, and those that at first are perceived as completely snow-white volumes, on the contrary, suddenly show a characteristic dark red side. On the facades of some of the houses, materials are completely "married", and then white-red pixels scatter along them, or over a plane of the same color, the second is launched with thin edges or is present in the form of deep slopes. We find an equally variegated picture on the sweeps as a whole: for example, mainly light facades are facing the river, but brick serves as a background for them, which favorably sets off the ceremonial snow-whiteness.
The small relief difference on the site made it possible to organize a two-storey underground parking under the entire complex. The top elevation of the roof of its -1 level is at the level of the paving of Bolshaya Pochtovaya, and the elevation of the floor -2 level coincides with the marks of the roadway of Rubtsovskaya embankment. Accordingly, from the side of the river, the complex is located on a one-storey stylobate, and the buildings facing the street are designed as free-standing buildings. The stylobate is decorated in a very Skuratov style: its facade is made up of wide vertical ribs, which then grow high up the ends of the residential towers.
The houses themselves (multi-storey and multi-section, in accordance with the declared by the customer the economy class of the designed housing) are located perpendicular to the embankment and actually close the perimeter of each of the trapezoids. In one case, the quarter is formed by buildings that resemble the letters "G" and "L" in the plan, and in the second a similar "L" is supplemented by a straight "I", and each of the buildings is actually several buildings of different storeys welded together. Thanks to this, they form two comfortable and dissimilar courtyards with each other, on the territory of which there are grounds for kindergartens (the kindergartens themselves are located on the ground floors next to other non-residential functions necessary for the complex), and between the resulting quarters Sergey Skuratov designs a pedestrian boulevard … It does not physically connect the embankment and the street, but provides them with an excellent visual connection, more precisely, it will provide sometime in the future, since today the site is cut off from the Bolshaya Pochtovaya by an impressive parking lot, but the architect hopes that with the advent of underground parking it will be moved from here.
The office building, designed on the third - triangular - section, is also interestingly solved. In order to fully exploit the potential of this generally very small piece of land and at the same time emphasize its dynamic shape, Sergei Skuratov came up with a bifurcated building for it, similar in plan to scissors, the blades of which are scattering in different directions. At the same time, the part located closer to the dwelling is completely solved in its style, and the building, which is as far away from the main building as possible, is made in brick. A kind of outpost of the new district, it simultaneously talks about the industrial past of the site and the modern look of its architecture.
