In March, the Atrium architectural bureau became one of the 10 winning teams of the second stage of the competition for a residential development project in the Technopark (D2) area of the Skolkovo innovation city. As you know, this competition was held in two stages, gathered in the first round about 300 participants, of whom 30 were selected at first, then, at the subsequent custom-made competition - 10 projects. The subject of the design was 15 residential quarters, which, according to the idea of Jean Pistre, in the plan are circles of different sizes with housing of a certain typology within each circle. In the second round, Vera Butko and Anton Nadtoche got one of the small circles with townhouses. Their project became one of the winners of the competition, which means that it is supposed to be implemented on this site.
I must say that the townhouses went to "Atrium" for a reason. At the first stage, all participants were free to choose from three main types of housing, and many designed all three for reliability: cottages, apartment buildings and townhouses. Butko and Nadtochy, participating in the most resounding and representative of the Russian competitions of recent years, from the very beginning purposefully decided to start designing townhouses. And precisely because this task is quite new for them: there are many private houses in the portfolio of Butko and Nadtochy, there are also multi-apartment buildings, but they have not yet had to work with the middle management. Thus, the architects deliberately made their task more difficult, choosing instead of the usual - a relatively new typology for themselves. The rest of the task was complicated by Jean Pistre himself, who proposed to design townhouses with four floors, placing two two-story apartments one above the other.
Such a layout in itself already violates the traditional concept of a townhouse: a private house that occupies a minimal "patch" of urban territory among similar neighbors, providing residents with their own access to the street and expanding their area by growing upwards - several floors connected by internal stairs The number of floors varies from the classic two to four or even six, but as a rule, all these floors belong to one dwelling, firmly standing on the ground and that is why it is called a "house", that is, a house, not an apartment. According to the terms of reference of Pistra, a separate exit from the townhouse to the street becomes a convention - the architects had to place it on the third floor level, and in essence the resulting blocks can be considered as two bunk apartments. However, the concept of "townhouse" itself is conditional: in our time, this term is often used simply to refer to low urban development.
From the very beginning, the architects of the Atrium bureau accentuated the two-tier composition set by Pistrom in the project: each building, already in their first round project, consisted of a pair of two-story volumes, stacked on top of each other. Therefore, the mini-town has become two-level, in front of the entrances to the upper houses there are platforms, lawns and even suspended pedestrian paths. Thus, the entrance to the second-level townhouses came not from the landing of the stairs, but from the green lawn of the "hanging garden", the quarter is divided into two mini-towns: the first level and the second level. And the typology of the classic townhouse (not that it is important, but still) is practically not violated: everyone enters home from the street, but only some from the second-level square.
In the same place, in the project of the first round, the mini-town was divided into two parts, not only vertically, but also into two halves “horizontally”: relatively speaking, into angular and round houses. This theme figuratively reflected the main thesis of the entire "large Technopark": as we remember, Jean Pistre made the working office part orthogonal, and the residential part was divided into round blocks, on which the participants of the competition actually worked.
In the final project of the second round, the architects managed to preserve all the named themes, tightly packing them on the small circle square. No common road cuts this "island", it is calm and isolated, but still - conditionally - it is divided into two parts. One half is formed by a horseshoe of the first tier: a seemingly familiar system of two-story townhouses, but curved like a fan along the perimeter of the site and cut by two narrow footpaths. On the first floor, all entrances, hallways and stairs are compactly grouped from the side of the courtyard, while large windows face the forest. There are also the ledges of the stairs leading to the platform of the upper level. Horseshoe is undoubtedly the heir of the parallelepiped houses from the first round. These are classic, austere and in some ways even brutal houses, merged into one tape, but in no way, in essence, do not violate the "classic" typology of a townhouse. They are planned to be faced with bricks, which, admittedly, is appropriate: "typical" townhouses love bricks, because their homeland is English and Dutch cities.
The roof of the "horseshoe" is conceived as green, and on this roof the architects placed three tower houses - the volumes of a streamlined shape tending to a cylinder (there are three or four apartments inside each tower). Aspiring - because each floor here has its own complex and flexible contour: the ledges, in which the loggias are placed, smoothly pass into the walls of the "warm" contour of the apartments. The floors vaguely resemble cut non-circular medieval coins or irregularly shaped mill wheels strung on one rod. You might think that two slabs with uneven edges rotated, rotated, were cut during the rotation, but not completely, and they froze. A very technogenic form. In a word, the mismatched contours of the floors can remind us of fragments of a certain mechanism, and in no way primitive, but in a mysterious way, seemingly substantiated by physics, mathematics, and even scary to say something - not arbitrary-sculptural, which suits the innovative theme of Skolkovo well.
The architects are going to cover the unusually plastic with thin wooden verticals: what will emphasize the bends, somewhere will strengthen, somewhere will smooth, but at the same time will balance the mechanistic associations with a rustic wooden chord.
The architects placed two other, four-storey residential towers on the second half of the circle, already without a brutal foundation: they also have two tiers of two-storey dwellings. Their high, circular volumes flank the main entrance to the quarter, almost like in some medieval castle. In this case, a horseshoe-shaped brick building can be taken for the “castle” wall. However, the wall is not solid, the gamut is cheerful, and there is no smell of the Middle Ages here, except that a hint of something from the memories of a tour of Europe will flicker and inadvertently cheer you up.
Speaking of the mood: the facades of the towers have been resolved, as is often the case in the projects of Butko and Nadtochii, in a picturesquely positive way. The towers are endowed with individuality and are arranged along the contour of a circular area, like interlocutors in a tight circle - a dialogue inevitably arises between them. One of the large towers and two small ones are faced with strict vertical slats, and their loggias are united by some one “corporate” color: green, red and beige. Another big and small tower is more fun, their wooden cladding is softer and cut through by the ledges of multi-colored boxes-balconies. They are like a family, where the “big” towers are the parents, and the small ones are two sons and one daughter.
On the "islets" - quarters of the Technopark, according to the plan of the organizers of the competition, in addition to housing, various public functions were to be located. On this site, the architects got a "kids club", a library, and, of course, the inevitable parking for residents. All this the authors have located in the central part of the "island", turning it into an "artificial hill". Which is actually not a hill at all, but several buildings, the smooth, grass-covered roof of which imitates the natural relief. Along the perimeter, closer to the houses, where the green roof goes down below, there is a car passage and parking, in the center, around the light well of the courtyard, there is a library and a "kids club". A funnel of glass walls tilted towards the sun allows them to get enough light. Needless to say, knowing the schools designed by Butko and Nadtochim, the glass walls are likely to be colored, in unison with the colored balconies of the houses. The patio, intended for children and books, turns out to be repeatedly fenced, calm, and at the same time open to the sky and "transparent".
Thus, Butko and Nadtoche managed to avoid the apparent crowding and fit a lot in a small area. For this, the architects used many of their favorite techniques that make the project recognizable: "geological layers" of the concrete roofs of the courtyard; stucco volumes, strictly motivated by function and yet obviously flexible, despite some massive materiality; constant color and variety of textures. Everything is tied together by a tightly woven architectural plot, and a person with imagination can make out in this quarter either a fairytale castle, or a mechanism that cut through the soil and froze - probably in anticipation of future innovations.
