The site on which it is planned to build a large residential complex with all the necessary social infrastructure is located in the very center of the city, between Kamenskaya, Pisarev, Nekrasov and Shamshin family streets. Today, a fat plant is located on this place: on the city map, its imposing territory looks like a gray patch on the motley carpet of residential buildings. However, housing here is not particularly attractive, so one of the main objectives of the competition was not just to design a spacious residential complex with houses of different price categories, but to come up with a vivid architectural image that would change the face of the entire area. “The customer has an office in Moscow, and it is located in Tekstilshchiki,” recalls Aleksey Ivanov. - When I first came there for a meeting, they showed me a view from the window of the endless panel building and said: "It's the same in Novosibirsk, and we want to change it." Later I was personally convinced that the customers were telling the truth, with the only difference that Tekstilshchiki is still a relative outskirts of Moscow, and Pisarev Street is the very center of Novosibirsk. Therefore, working on this project, we proceeded from the fact that it is necessary to come up with an unusual, memorable, bright object. Otherwise, the competition wouldn't be worth holding at all, would it?"
A feature of the competition task was the fact that in fact the architects had to design two independent houses. The fact is that the customer actually owns two plots - one is a whole block bounded by the already named streets, and the second is, in fact, a small piece on the other side of the street of the Shamshin family. “It is impossible to combine them, so the idea was initially to come up with a certain pair that would visually actively interact with each other, but at the same time each object in it would be able to exist completely autonomously,” explains Aleksey Ivanov. Almost immediately, the architects decided that a high-rise volume should become one "participant" of the pair - in fact, the entire center of Novosibirsk is built up with low panel houses and it obviously lacks some kind of vertical. That is why Aleksey Ivanov proposed to build a skyscraper on a smaller area. Among other things, such a solution made it possible to minimize the building area and allot more than half of the site for landscaping - alas, the Siberian city lacks well-equipped squares almost more than high-rise dominants.
In many ways, this is why the main theme of the second home was also landscaping. In fact, the architects green the entire block around the perimeter - they get such a giant green rectangular carpet, on which they then "grow" houses. The living quarters are installed on a single stylobate - a completely predictable solution that allows you to hide the required number of parking spaces and infrastructure facilities under a green area. “It was possible to make here the traditional quarter development, but we wanted to somehow stand out against the background of the rectangular buildings prevailing around us,” recalls Aleksey Ivanov. The architect does not hide the fact that before getting to grips with the design of the round house, the studio thoroughly studied analogues - the house in Moscow Matveyevsky, for example, or the wooden round house of the BIG bureau in Copenhagen. In addition to these projects, there was a closer source of inspiration - the building of the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theater with its unique dome with a diameter of 60 meters."In the strict grid of streets and quarters of Novosibirsk, it is unique, and we really wanted to support it with a new volume."
Having inscribed a circle in the green rectangle of the park, the architects then cut it with a wide esplanade running from north to south. First of all, this had to be done in terms of insolation, so that the courtyard system would not be left without sunlight. In addition, the green diagonal opens directly to a high-rise, standing on the opposite side of the street. Another green corridor is “broken through” to Nekrasov Street: the architects reasoned that two entrances to the territory of such a large complex would obviously not be enough. “If we made a house from separate buildings-sectors, then we would not have been able to reach the required level of areas,” says Ivanov, “therefore, from almost every house we let protuberant volumes to the center.” This made it possible not only to obtain the required number of square meters, but also to divide the internal space into a system of yards that are not similar to each other, thanks to which each house has its own separate territory.
There is also a common central square - naturally, round. And since summer in Novosibirsk lasts at most a couple of months, this public space is functionally duplicated with the help of a covered pedestrian gallery, which also has a circular shape in its plan. Moreover, the architects do not encircle the square with it, but raise the ring of galleries to the level of the upper mark of the buildings. In fact, such a halo appears above the square, a glass ring, visually uniting the disparate cases into a single composition. In the dark, it can be illuminated and thus become a noticeable landmark throughout the city.
The architects also intend to make the internal facades of the houses predominantly glass, but they chose brick for facing the external walls of the houses. According to Aleksey Ivanov, this material perfectly emphasizes both the plasticity of the round house and the industrial past of the site. And so that the rounded brick facades do not look completely fortified, the interfloor floors of the houses are painted white, and the balconies are made of glass - transparent belts give the "thick-skinned" walls an ephemeral and lightness.
