"Kitezh" has existed since 1992, and today it is a whole village in which orphans live with their foster parents, adapting to society and receiving secondary education. Until very recently, the same houses in which families live were used as classrooms, but the number of students is constantly growing, the curriculum is becoming more complicated, and Kitezh is more and more in need of a real school. A place for its construction was allocated in the field adjacent to the settlement, and the customers tried to make the functional program of the future educational institution as diverse as possible, that is, “for growth”: the school will include a swimming pool, a theater hall, art workshops and a small hotel for volunteer teachers.
Architect Andrey Romanov recalls that work on the project began with a thorough analysis of the role of the future school in the structure of the village. Today, residents of Kitezh have virtually no place where they could all get together, organize a large-scale holiday, receive guests (who come to the community a lot), so the projected volume was originally conceived not only as an educational institution, but also as a kind of community center … Moreover, the authors of the project tried to interpret this center not only as a function, but also as an architectural and town-planning image, and therefore invented a building that, by its very form, would symbolize the epicenter of social and cultural activity.
“One of the prototypes, in particular, for us was the classic European square, around which the whole life of the city was organized,” says Andrei Romanov. “In addition, when designing the school, we really wanted to get away from the traditional corridor system - undoubtedly functional, but very dull - and make a corridor that would be opened to some spectacular view. I think it was these two tasks together that led to the emergence of the final form of our building."
In plan, the school has the shape of an almost equilateral triangle with smoothly rounded corners. The center of this figure is carved out, and a square with a lake and a picturesque hill in the open air is organized in its place (in winter the reservoir turns into an ice rink, and the hill turns into a hill). It is to this comfortable space that the corridor is opened, connecting all the main premises of the school. In fact, architects interpret it as a gallery, along which the building can be walked along the inner perimeter.
Since fields and rare low buildings prevail around the future school, the authors of the project thought it was very important to fit the building into the existing landscape as much as possible. The chosen shape and smooth contours of the flat roof, as well as the minimum number of storeys visually conceal a rather large area of the object (almost 3 thousand square meters) and seem to rhyme the volume with the surrounding hills. This feeling is greatly enhanced by the chosen cladding material - the facades of the future school are supposed to be made entirely of wood, and the roof is to be made of flexible tiles.
Having made the center of the composition a cozy but roomy courtyard, the architects arranged all the interior spaces accordingly. The southern side of the triangle is noticeably thicker - there is a canteen, a school theater and a sports complex with a swimming pool and ballet classes. The corridor in this part of the building has also been expanded with a terrace, which in the warmer months will turn into an open-air playground, and above it, on the second floor, a hotel for volunteers has been designed. Classrooms are located on two opposite sides of the triangular volume - the architects made this wing one-story, closing the chain of offices with rooms that need higher ceilings (for example, an informatics office on one side and an entrance lobby on the other), in order to maximize the use of the space for gradually growing roof. The ideally triangular shape of the courtyard is broken only by a small circular annex, which housed art workshops, which replaced the usual labor offices.
The boring norm about the need to create a closed loop of the courtyard around the school seems to have been turned inside out by the ADM workshop - in the Kitezh educational institution, the courtyard is not behind a dull iron fence, but inside the building itself. And although due to this, the school turned out to be significantly larger than all other buildings in the village, the architects were able to make this volume as organic as possible to their surroundings. The soft plastic of the facades and roof, as well as the fill mound in the courtyard, continue the existing relief, and the wooden cladding of the facades and the perforation of many square windows make the new building related to the existing ones in the village, raising the architectural tradition that has spontaneously formed here to a qualitatively new level.
