The apartment, the design project of which was to be developed by the TOTEMENT / PAPER bureau, did not initially differ in its original layout. In plan, it was the letter "G": the main rectangular space had three windows, and a long narrow appendix ended with one more. The area of the apartment was 105 square meters ("almost tiny by now," the architects themselves note), and all these meters were "cut" by load-bearing concrete walls into inconvenient cubicles, which precluded the possibility of total redevelopment. The customer, meanwhile, wanted exactly radical changes: a stylish futuristic design and a large open space with an office in the center. At the same time, he had a minimum of wishes for isolated private rooms: one guest room and one bedroom with a dressing room and a bathroom. Architects, who especially appreciate in their work the non-triviality of the task and the complexity of the initial conditions, willingly took on this project.
The authors interpreted the long appendix as a completely private "wing" of the owner, separated by a door from the rest of the apartment. A small corridor leads to the bedroom located at the end, by the window, from which you can also get into a spacious dressing room, as well as a two-part bathroom, one of the rooms of which is occupied by a jacuzzi. A guest room with its own dressing room is located on the same axis with the private block, but it is already directly adjacent to the public area, "occupying" one of the three windows of the main rectangle.
It was not possible to completely free the central part of the apartment from the load-bearing walls, so the architects included them in the new planning scheme. In fact, they left the guest bathroom, located next to the hallway, intact, and used the walls separating the "rectangle" from the appendix and defining the orthogonal vectors of the corridors as the skeleton of the future office.
“We used the principle of Kazimir Malevich's“dynamic parallelepiped”to expand the space, squeezed by the load-bearing walls and the very shape of the room,” the authors of the project say. “The series of verticals and horizontals formed with its help create new volumes,“envelop”functional zones with them and decorate the boundaries of the room, creating the necessary voids and filling them with air”. By inscribing a multifunctional space into a rectangle with rigidly defined boundaries, architects repeatedly play with the geometry of the original form. Parallelepipeds are everywhere here: walls are made of them, and pieces of furniture and lamps are assembled from them. With this technique, the architects created a new, smaller scale, which visually increased the volume of the room, filling it instead of banal right angles and long corridors with complex telescopic shapes.
The boundaries of the living space are significantly expanded due to the chosen two-color palette - all parallelepipeds, from small to large, are painted here in dazzling white, while the "voids" - the ceiling and individual niches - are decorated in black. The architects themselves compare the resulting volume with a white city spread out under the night sky. “White is the best color for form, while black symbolizes a hole, emptiness,” they comment.
An architectural image based on an antagonistic pair is generally one of the favorite TOTEMENT / PAPER techniques, and in this small project the bureau brings it to the absolute. Opposing each other in everything, like two interacting magnets, black and white, nevertheless, do not create a feeling of non-intersecting realities. On the contrary, architects find a way to reconcile the two elements of color - and they do it in the very heart of the entire interior, the master's office.
This is the only non-rectangular object in this space, in which white and black are combined, going beyond their assigned boundaries. The cabinet is a kind of case of broken outlines, two walls of which are made deaf (and these are, of course, white surfaces), and two more are designed as a screen made of black mirror, almost invisible from the outside and transparent from the inside. The latter material brings a touch of surrealism to the living room space - the inclined surfaces made of it change everything around in their reflection.
The TOTEMENT / PAPER bureau was inspired by the architect Kazimir Malevich to create this project, and the resulting interior, despite all its accentuated modernity, fully gives to this architect. Including with the help of colors: black and white here are complemented only by the rarest blotches of bright red - a symbol of movement and energy, so beloved by the great avant-garde artist.
