A new area will be built in the next 9 years in Patroclus Bay. Until recently, it was considered an uninhabited suburb of Vladivostok - these lands belonged to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation and a civilian did not step on them - but now everything has changed. Firstly, a high-speed road will pass through the bay in the near future, which will connect the Russky Island and the Vladivostok airport, and secondly, the lands themselves became the property of the Housing Development Fund (RHD) and were designated for complex housing development. Local architects were invited to develop a planning project for the new district, but the city administration ordered the team of Vladimir Plotkin to develop a sketch of the building.
It is no secret that housing is one of the hopes of the architect Plotkin, and the opportunity to build a whole city in the city interested him extremely. And if we take into account that in this case it was a question of designing a city on an extremely difficult terrain and overlooking the endless sea, it becomes obvious: TPO "Reserve" could not pass by such a creative challenge. Moreover, even in such conditions, the bureau remained true to itself: for 118 hectares of Patroclus Bay, it developed an extremely complex grid of blocks with impeccable geometry. The main difficulty was that in Vladivostok nobody designs the square-nest building method, so beloved by Plotkin: the general plan of the city, located on the hills, is woven from a multitude of winding "snakes" that make it possible to bypass strong relief drops. “Of course, this does not mean that we, disregarding the local urban planning tradition, have drawn the site into clear cells and placed houses on them,” says the architect, “rather, we figured out how to“marry”these two typologies.”
The plot set aside for the construction of a new district resembles a rhombus or a scarf in plan, the corners of which are strongly pulled in different directions. Its smaller, lower part, facing directly to the sea, is separated from the main roadbed by the axis of the future route, another road cuts the site almost diagonally, and this cut into three parts actually predetermined both the sequence of construction and their functional content. So, as you get closer to the sea, housing becomes smaller - it gives way to open public areas and a multifunctional entertainment complex, which was also designed by TPO "Reserve", while in the two main triangles it is residential buildings that predominate, as necessary "diluted" with infrastructure and green spaces. The total relief difference here is more than 100 meters: the landscape dominant of the site is a large hill of complex shape, so the main projected area is its slopes, to which the architects had to tie dwelling houses. The blocks were chosen as a type of development for their exceptional comfort, but in order to create the desired private spaces, protected from winds and cars, the architects had to develop a series of "cells" for each of the slopes.
For a relatively calm terrain, traditional square blocks were designed, built up around the perimeter of multi-section houses. True, the architects do not close the perimeter itself: in the plan of the house, they resemble the letters G and L, between which wide gaps are left. Plots, where the relief difference does not exceed 9 meters, are built up in a similar way, only the houses here are no longer designed in the form of parallelepipeds, but as cascades following the logic of the slope. Where the drop overcomes the coveted mark of 9 meters, the architects of the four sides of the conditional square build up only two - the upper and the lower, solving the space between them as a series of landscaped landscaped terraces. And in the case when the slope does not even allow this, the quarter becomes triangular and is built up with tower-type houses, between which a semi-closed courtyard is organized. There are also volumes of complex polygonal shape in the project, deployed across the slopes - they were developed by the predecessors of TPO "Reserve", and the bureau included them in the structure for the sake of greater diversity of the latter.
The diversity of the architectural environment being created in general was of great interest to the architects - they understood that five types of quarters themselves were not enough for an area of 118 hectares, therefore each of them was assembled from 4-6 residential sections, differing in height, width and facade design. Probably, in the case of multi-storey buildings, even this measure would not be enough, but since we are talking about houses no higher than 6 floors, scattered over a very active and generously landscaped relief, the task of creating the most diverse area was successfully solved.
The general principle of the district planning is the basis for the planning and the multifunctional entertainment complex, which will be built on the other side of the highway next to a small pond. But if the district itself is divided into several unequal parts thanks to the tracing of roads, then the architects split the volume of the shopping and entertainment center artificially, in order to maintain pedestrian and visual connections of the main residential area. The building, which in the plan could be a monolithic trapezoid, thanks to this technique, splits into four uneven segments. The architects give each of them its own form and endow it with an independent function - there is a cinema, a water park, a sports center and a restaurant complex. The volumes are united by a developed multi-level stylobate, which makes it possible to compensate for the relief drop and organize a cozy pedestrian area.
As for the architectural solution of the complex (in contrast to the residential area, which has so far been agreed only at the level of the master plan, it has already been approved), here Vladimir Plotkin obviously quoted himself: the melted edges of the volumes and the generous use of lamellas in combination with panoramic glazing unambiguously refer to one of the author's most famous buildings - the Arbitration Court in Moscow. Plotkin himself admits that he could not resist the temptation to try the already tested plastic technique in a completely different context, and he is very pleased with the result. Not constrained by either dense surrounding buildings or eternally busy streets, this architecture is really perceived quite differently - against the background of a reservoir and high slopes of a hill, the snow-white "drum" seems to be a perpetual motion machine, and the wooden paneling of neighboring volumes seems to convince of its exceptional environmental friendliness.
