Archi.ru has already talked about this site, presenting Sergey Skuratov's project that participated in the tender. The territory of the former industrial zone, bounded by Krasnobogatyrskaya streets, 1st and 3rd Bukhvostov, is supposed to be built up with business-class housing, which will also include a kindergarten, a sports complex and shops. The developer of the project, Sistema GALS, is betting on the quality of the living environment being created, hoping that the implementation of a complex, which is comfortable and interesting from an architectural point of view, will become a kind of catalyst for the renovation of the entire area. That is why the participants in the tender had to carefully consider the infrastructure of this facility and make it as green as possible. According to the customer, the team of Vladimir Plotkin coped with this task best of all.
Work on any project TPO "Reserve" begins with a thorough analysis of the immediate environment of the future construction site, and Preobrazhenka was no exception. Alas, the picture was rather bleak: the buildings existing in this area are characterized by chaos and a total absence of iconic objects. Sights here, if there are, are rather conventional, and they are located far away - Yauza in three blocks, a park that smoothly turns into the Bogorodskoe cemetery, two, but on the other side of Krasnobogatyrskaya street. On the western side, the site is adjoined by a green zone reserved by the city for the creation of a sports complex, and from all the rest it is surrounded by streets with rather heavy traffic and motley housing. “We understood that in a situation where the context did not provide any hints and guidelines, we had to take a particularly responsible approach to developing the composition of the future complex,” recalls Vladimir Plotkin.
Architects have tried many different options for the layout of residential volumes on the site in the form of a trapezoid with one rounded corner. At first, there was a proposal to build it up along the perimeter, but this would inevitably mean that the new complex would fall out of the scale of the surrounding development. Then the houses were arranged in "corners" - it turned out quite impressively, but without the possibility of organizing full-fledged closed courtyards, which in a metropolis serve as almost the only way to give an apartment building coziness and security. Linear buildings had a similar drawback, and discrete, when the architects scattered a dozen separate towers on the site, completely deprived of any place of any recognizable character. So TPO "Reserve" again came to its favorite idea of building blocks.
The trapezoid of the site was conditionally divided by the architects into two halves, in each of which they designed a rectangular house with a large courtyard. Each of them is opened in such a way that the two rectangles face each other and enter into an obvious dialogue. Between them, the architects designed a wide boulevard, through which gallery passages were thrown at the height of the seventh floor, so that two high parallelepiped houses will not seem too closely shifted and will not merge in the panorama of the city, but at the same time they will look like an obvious pair, and not just by accidentally adjacent volumes. “The dualism underlying this project is a simple but effective technique, especially when applied to such a scale. It was also very important for us that such clarity of the composition allows us to preserve the original image when using a variety of facade and planning solutions,”comments Vladimir Plotkin.
So, on the site appeared two rectangular houses, each with more than four hundred apartments, and two large rectangular courtyards intended for their inhabitants. Vladimir Plotkin would not have been himself if he had not been able to grow an effective and original volume out of this simple and extremely rational scheme. First of all, the architect does not fill the parallelepipeds themselves completely, but raises them above the ground on supports and cuts them through arches and niches of various widths and heights. This was done both for the sake of insolation of the apartments, and in order to visually crush the massive planes of the facades, and to relieve the courtyards of the feeling of isolation. The theme of even smaller divisions is introduced with the help of the so beloved TPO "Reserve" vertical slats, which here alternate with blind inserts. Moreover, for each floor, its own combination of "thin plates - wide dies" has been developed, and from each other they are delineated by the horizontals of the interfloor floors, which makes it possible to diversify the facade pattern as much as possible, saturating it with rich chiaroscuro. It is interesting that only one of the two buildings the architects propose to solve in white, which is usually associated with such an element as lamellas. The second building is painted red - and this is not a pastel tint under a brick, but the very color of a fire engine: such a pair will be very difficult to miss. In the panorama of the district, the residential complex will undoubtedly become a noticeable color accent, and the nearby Bukhvostov and Krasnobogatyrskaya streets seem to be illuminated with its brightness.
The architects themselves called the second option for finishing the facades "practical" - here the large form works by itself, without the subtle nuances that in the first case were introduced by the lamellas. Here, the details, on the contrary, are not revealed, these are solid planes, which are saved from monotony by a motley cladding, somewhat reminiscent of the game of Tetris. And the third variant of a possible solution of facades TPO "Reserve" developed after winning the tender, when the customer asked the authors to dream up on the theme of Stalin's Art Deco.
Living spaces raised on columns create a very special atmosphere in pedestrian yards - on the one hand, these are spaces completely freed from cars and transit human streams, on the other, they are literally stitched with visual corridors that create the illusion of the continuity of the green zone (the courtyard flows into the boulevard, and in turn, merges with the courtyard of the opposite house). Numerous arches play an important practical role: right in them, the architects placed some of the playgrounds and walking areas, so that inclement weather, so frequent for Moscow, does not interfere with the activity of residents in the fresh air.
Returning to the decisions of the general plan, it is important to note that the houses are not located directly opposite each other, but with a slight offset - the architects build them diagonally along Krasnobogatyrskaya Street. Accordingly, between each residential parallelepiped and the street going at an angle, there is a triangular "exclusion zone" - the authors of the project fill this space with low-rise volumes of shopping galleries and cafes that will work both for the residential complex and for the city. The roofs of these buildings are supposed to be completely greened, so that the apartments with windows overlooking Krasnobogatyrskaya will be separated from the noisy street by a green buffer. On the opposite side, another green area will adjoin the residential complex - several sports grounds and a kindergarten, the green courtyard of which is also supported by a green "belt" along the outer perimeter. The territory, continuing the theme of a single green flowing space, will become not only a place for active leisure for preschoolers, but will also significantly improve the view from the apartments.
