The penthouse, on the image of which Sergey Estrin worked, is located on the 76th floor of the City of Capitals residential complex. The architect received an order to develop a design project only for the guest area of this apartment - premises with a total area of 450 square meters, in which three of the four walls have panoramic glazing. The view of Moscow that opens from here is especially spectacular in the evenings, when the lights of the cars trace the structure of the metropolis with all its medieval rings and beams. So it is not at all surprising that the customer asked to make the interior restrained - according to his plan, nothing should distract the guests from the contemplation of the eternally seething city.
“Having given the view from the window the main role in this interior, we tried to link the space opened to the outside with the architecture of the building itself, to emphasize that we are talking about a skyscraper,” says Sergey Estrin. The massive structural columns of square cross-section are ideal for solving this problem: they are faced with travertine slabs, which are shifted relative to each other in such a way that the supports seem to be folded from separate cubic segments. In such a composition, one can easily recognize the silhouette of the "City of Capitals" itself - a skyscraper, which seems to be composed of separate glass blocks displaced relative to the central axis.
The deliberately uneven, "cyclopean" masonry, the play of asymmetric depressions and protrusions, unequivocally appealing to the archaic and ancient ruins, has become one of the main themes of this interior. The bottom of the pool deepens with ledges - from above it corresponds to the wooden ceiling plates. But the main focus of the theme was the load-bearing wall. The architect recalls that its design was perhaps the most difficult in the project. The original idea was to finish the wall with rusty iron, and not artificially rusted, but real, exfoliated, however, it turned out to be almost impossible to find such material in sufficient quantities, therefore, instead of metal, the architects used formwork plywood with plastic mass (based on plaster), covered with copper leaf. The copper was exposed to air to oxidize it and then coated with a matt varnish. Moreover, each fragment received its own texture. The rich relief and complex texture of a warm hue make the wall look like a remnant of an ancient palace, where many decorative layers have merged into a single mass that comes to life in the morning when the reflections of the rising sun (the penthouse is oriented to the east) enhance its golden glow.
The second theme, no less important for the architectural solution, is plane: a thin, smooth and shiny border, similar to a force field, the exact opposite of the brutal relief of depressions and ledges. Peace is her strength. Its representatives: glass of the outer contour; transparent water surface of the pool, located on the same level with the parquet. And the flatness of the floor, not disturbed by anything, even a biofireplace, designed flush like a spectacular fireplace: tongues of flame will appear directly above the surface, forming an exquisite and expensive version of the fire.
The plane, in contrast to the archaic relief stone, is responsible for modernity with its sky-high and the quality of surfaces. And the tension that inevitably arises between the golden brutality of "antiquity" and the transparent brilliance of "modernity" becomes the main subject of space. It must be said that this plot is almost inevitable for penthouses, which, for more than a century of the genre's history, have combined the eternal human desire for luxury and the demonstration of modern technical capabilities. Sergei Estrin's answer is extremely articulated, he accentuated the contrast between the palace and the skyscraper, building his own architectural mise-en-scene on it. It turned out to be a kind of "palace in a skyscraper".
The complex and multiple lighting of the penthouse is designed to echo the countless lights outside its windows in the evenings. The relief of the wall and the ceiling plates are highlighted, but the metal columns installed in the glazing imposts are especially interesting. They are assembled from cylinders of perforated metal, and inside them are LED-lamps that allow you to change the color of the window sashes. These columns are also parts of the "palace", but due to the ornamentation they are not brutal, but rather lace inserts into the glass.
Reflections of light emphasize the play of masses and planes, echoing the lights of a big city bustling somewhere far below. And it becomes clear that the most important accent in the architectural performance of this interior is a gigantic, unthinkable, breathtaking height.
