The settlement is being built on the 47th kilometer of the Pyatnitskoe highway, on the so-called peninsula - a wooded area of 16 hectares, which borders the Istra reservoir on three sides. So the village owes both its name and its "green" ideology to the place - it would be a crime not to preserve the perennial pines and birches growing here, and the developer decided to delicately fit the cottages between the trees, making nature an integral part of the new settlement. However, one desire is not enough here - in order for the beautiful phrase "eco-village" to become a reality, a well-thought-out concept of improvement was required. The developer invited the team of Alexey Ivanov to develop it.
“The project for the layout of the village was developed before us and the cottages have already begun to be built, so our task was to comprehend not the entire territory as a whole, but only those small plots that were not covered by households,” recalls Aleksey Ivanov. “At the same time, we well understood that it was not enough to somehow arrange each individual“patch”- they had to be linked with each other so that the village had its own character. And since the developer initially made a bet on environmental friendliness, we decided that interesting walking routes and various recreation areas should become such a "trick" here, which will allow residents to fully enjoy the natural environment. " However, not only the landscape became the starting point for the architects in the development of the project - there used to be a sanatorium on this site, its buildings have long been demolished, but the sculptures have survived, and the customer asked them to be an element of the improvement of the village being created. The piquancy of the situation lies in the fact that the sculptures are the most characteristic representatives of their era - the sculptures of the Komsomol here are adjacent to the bust of Lenin, and if the latter is perfectly preserved, then the girls, alas, are missing some parts of the body. “We could not leave them in such a miserable state, so we developed a project for the restoration of each of the sculptures, playing on the very theme of the“treatment”of Soviet statues,” says Aleksey Ivanov.
And if the architects hide the bust of Lenin among the trees (it will be possible to stumble upon it only by accident during long walks), then the restored Komsomol members will meet the residents and guests of the new village. This is a kind of reminder of the past of the place, which the authors, however, tried to make as unobtrusive as possible. One of the sculptures will decorate a flower garden located in the center of the reversal ring in front of the entrance group, the second will become part of a decorative fountain located immediately behind the entrance. Predictably, the architects paid close attention to the design of the front gate of the new village - the entrance group was interpreted as a solid two-story volume, in the plan as if bent in half. There is a wide entrance arch at the junction, and one of the halves is crowned with a clock tower. In addition to administrative premises and a traditional minimarket, it is planned to accommodate a conference hall, a cafe and a children's room. The lower floor of the complex is supposed to be faced with natural stone, the upper one will be made of glass and wood (including the completion of the tower). The wide eaves are supported by elegant double beams, between which the architects spell out the name of the village letter by letter.
Aleksey Ivanov does not hide the fact that when designing the entrance group, he was inspired by samples of Tuscan architecture: “There are many other suburban and urban-type settlements around, and we wanted to stand out against them with something uniquely memorable. The chosen materials themselves - stone and wood - made us turn to Italian architecture, and the preference for them, in turn, was given due to the eco-orientation of the project”. On both sides, the entrance group is flanked by smaller volumes, designed in the same style - these are engineering infrastructure objects that the architect disguises as medieval structures so that, together with the main building and the tower, they form a single ensemble - recognizable and clearly visible from the road leading to the village.
In addition to the entrance group, the architects identified four more zones on the territory of the village. Closest to the entrance is the so-called farm with a pond for birds and a grazing area for animals, as well as a boathouse for storing yachts. To the south-west of the farm is another area for contemplative relaxation, which the architects themselves call the "rock garden". The fact is that in addition to the sculptures, several huge boulders have survived on the site from the sanatorium times - around them the authors break a picturesque lawn, and in the immediate vicinity they are designing a gazebo oriented towards the surface of the reservoir. From the gazebo, along the southeastern border of the site, a pedestrian path stretches, echoing the whimsical bends of the coastline. This is the main pedestrian boulevard of the future village, and the architects tried to come up with the most intense scenario for it. Along the entire promenade, they place small forms - arches, benches, flower beds - each of which they turn into a memorable landmark.
Where the site is as close as possible to the neighboring island, a small bridge is thrown from it: on each bank, the architects place a sculpture (fortunately, the former sanatorium could boast of a large stock of monumental propaganda works), as if the girls were looking at each other. They use the fallen tree to create a children's house - this "birdhouse" promises to become a favorite attraction for the smallest inhabitants of the village. A kind of culmination of this parade of landscape architecture objects is a wooden fence, assembled from the letters of the word "peninsula", which are fastened together with thin horizontal slats. When asked about the functional purpose of this element, Aleksey Ivanov honestly answers: "This is a place against which residents and guests will be photographed as a souvenir." However, it also marks the conditional border between the residential part and the beach - here the boulevard ends and the recreation area begins with playgrounds for outdoor games and a comfortable entry into the water. If desired, the hedge can also be interpreted as a water facade of a new village - from the side of the Istra reservoir its name is perfectly readable, and in the dark it will be highlighted and serve as a spectacular landmark.
