We were prompted to participate in this competition by two things: Grigory Revzin's fiery appeal at the presentation of the project during the Arch of Moscow 2011 and the desire to try our hand at such a distant topic for us as economy class housing. And the place is resounding!
Precisely because the genre is new for us, we cooperated with the architect Dmitry Alexandrov, who knew the problem better than we did, and considered this work to be more familiarization. At the first stage, we made our proposals for all three typologies, and the jury allowed us to go to the final with apartment buildings. In general, the first stage made a strange impression on us - we were surprised by the project assignment we received and the communication with the consultant of the competition, the Strelka Institute. It is most likely, in principle, impossible to process such a quantity of contradictory information in such a tight timeframe, especially if this information is a mixture of Russian and foreign norms and rules, complicated by the high density and lack of clarity of the issue with fire regulations … Well, yes, these difficulties accompanied the work of all participants, so that we are all in the same conditions, and the first stage was devoted to the choice of an idea.
After the finalists were determined, some of the architects remained to work in their own circle, and all the rest were given new plots and even more stringent requirements for design solutions - TORs with the exact number of apartments for each typology, determined by the cost of 1 sq. M. housing (28,000 rubles. Construction and installation work), specified by the LEED category and limiting the possible deviation from the TEP by only 5 percent. We took it without much enthusiasm, but "in an adult way", setting the task to create an economical housing, practically a hostel, without going beyond the tolerances of 5% of the TEP and not exceeding $ 900 per square meter. As it turned out, it was possible not to do this, but we learned about this recently, after reading an interview with the chairman of the jury, Mr. Jean Pistre, who said “that building density was not the most important criterion … we wanted to get free comments. Whether the given density was taken into account or not was irrelevant at this stage. " Naturally, if the building density on the site is not important, and the number of storeys and sizes of the site are limited, then compliance with all other conditions of the competition becomes meaningless. We learned from the same Skolkovo newspaper that the project that won at our site # 5 was so "beautiful" that it was decided to build it, even though the main function of the quarter - housing - is difficult or impossible to place in this architecture, therefore, “beautiful” offices will be built on circle # 5. Definitely, if all contests and all customers were the same lovers of "beauty", the world would quickly change for the better, and the conditions of the contests would become extremely laconic - "so that it was beautiful." But before the jury's assessments, all the works were reviewed by experts, and the question inevitably arises: did they, too, turn out to be how much influenced by beauty, that they forgot that the competition set the architects the task of designing housing of a certain class, parameters and cost. Why is it necessary to build offices on site No. 5 (despite the fact that a technopark is being designed very close by) and how did the competition for residential quarters become a competition for beautiful architecture? Now we are interested in this not even in relation to the already summed up results of the competition, but because they promise to announce new competitions in Skolkovo, and we would like to prepare for them …
Well, now let's move on to the boring - to numbers, TEP, in general, to architecture. Designing a residential area turned out to be an extremely tedious and exciting thing at the same time. Each spatial idea must be quickly checked for compliance with several dozen parameters, gradually (and preferably faster) approaching the optimal solution. Some "beautiful" ideas were destroyed, some were blurred by direct contact with conditions. In the end, we settled on the most optimal, from our point of view, variant of the quarter's layout, which gives some freedom in working with the shape of objects and allowed us to take into account all the "nonsense" such as insolation, fire extinguishing, minimization of vertical communication nodes, remoteness of parking lots (even if electric vehicles) from residential buildings and the placement of a public area, which we combined with a recreation area above the main serpentine, "piercing" the quarter through and through. The houses were located from south to north, opening spaces to the Technopark, but the two outer buildings received breaks to lengthen the building line and at the same time to isolate the courtyards as much as possible. From the north and south, these buildings rest on the hills, in one of which there is an additional parking lot, and in the other - the office of the quarter's security. The middle building received two breaks, freeing up the southern part of the block for the building of the fitness center and the already mentioned "hanging square", which swallowed up one of the communication blocks. Another merged with a parking lot covered with a green roof. The square was oriented towards the dance hall and "pierced" with glass bulbs, which deliver light from above, through the ceiling, into the shadow zone, and also work as lamps in the dark. The two outer buildings received a slight slope at the end, articulating the beginning and end of movement along the curve of the block.
So, three residential buildings, two free-standing vertical communication blocks and one more building of a fitness center with a "hanging area", which has grown together with a parking lot - these are the main components of the compositional solution. The buildings themselves received "natural" first floors (one-room studio apartments with separate entrances are located here), which have the ability to open or close from the outside world with the help of wooden shutters. The upper 4 floors are duplex, mostly 3-room apartments.
4 communication blocks - "scarecrows" - one of the main spatial and visual accents of the composition, made of matte translucent panels. In the dark, these volumes serve as an excellent guide for residents of other quarters: they come to life as people move along the corridors and stairs, and during the day they dissolve in the gray steel sky. Functionally, these blocks made it possible to abandon the sectional structure of the quarter, which turned out to be not so economical for economy-class hotel-type houses.
It is important that residents can travel around the block and visit each other without going outside, but using special communication links that run through the corridors of neighboring houses and the arms of communication blocks and form the circulatory system of a communal commune, a scientific and technical youth international, community of quarter №5.
The windows of the designed residential buildings also deserve a special mention. The fact is that each residential unit has a separate block of four windows. All of them, of course, are in a special geometric grid and are connected to each other by an "invisible thread", but of course, this is not the main thing. Basically, we designed an anthill house with more or less the same dwelling cells and horizontal connections, and we wanted each residential unit to be readable on the facade from a distance, both as an individual, and at the same time as part of a general whole. We made sure that from a distance the facade worked like "flowers with petals", moving in the wind, as if cut out by a child's hand on a sheet of paper a little unevenly, but very diligently, and as we approached all the windows rose to their strictly designated places, like soldiers,perpendicular and orthogonal. This game with the viewer in the "closer-further" required very painstaking work, in particular, we had to find the exact distance between the windows, when they "dance", then "stand": a few centimeters to one side or the other destroyed this unsteady equilibrium, and it turned into a "chaotic" anyhow, then into a "strict and tedious report."
This became our interpretation of the scientific and practical, that is, the innovation process, when it is necessary to combine a "live" idea with a boring plan for its business implementation, finding that fine line when these two ideas that are not very close to each other become part of one product - creative and technological at the same time.
Levon Airapetov, Head of TOTEMENT / PAPER Bureau