Let us recall that this is a site located not far from Preobrazhenskaya Square and bounded by Krasnobogatyrskaya, 1st and 3rd Bukhvostov streets, as well as by an intra-block passage. Today, there are warehouses and half-life production facilities, which in the near future should give way to housing and the accompanying infrastructure. In the spring of this year, Hals Development held a closed architectural competition for the best project of the complex, in which Sergey Skuratov Architects, TPO Reserve and ABD architects participated. The concept of the latter will be discussed below.
Due to the bend of Krasnobogatyrskaya Street, the plot allocated for the construction of a residential complex has a trapezoidal shape in plan with one noticeably rounded side. And if Sergei Skuratov and Vladimir Plotkin, without saying a word, inscribed their houses in a conditional rectangle, and the sector adjacent to the street was allocated for city-wide infrastructure and public gardens, then Boris Levyant's team took a completely different path. ABD architects reasoned that in order to protect the new quarter from the noise of a street with very busy traffic (in addition to the traffic on Krasnobogatyrskaya, a tram rumbles with enviable regularity), a low-rise volume or a small park will not be enough. Therefore, along its arc, the architects place four fifteen-story towers. Compact in plan, they are raised on a single two-storey stylobate and form the outer eastern front of the building. At the same time, the authors solve the stylobate in the form of a complex polygon, carving out numerous niches and "pockets" in it both from the side of the street and from the side of the projected block, giving the elongated volume a more interesting and complex plastic. From the side of Krasnobogatyrskaya, these indents from the red line will serve as an additional invitation for pedestrians to enter the shops and cafes located here, and from the side of the courtyard, they allow architects to set up small squares overlooking the central inner promenade - a diagonal echoing the arc of the street. The stylobate itself has been lowered to one floor here, and the roofs of public premises are also greened up - these landscaped areas intended for games and recreation can be accessed both from the courtyard and directly from the towers.
The boulevard and the "flowing" squares between the towers are by no means the only green areas in the projected residential complex. The architects are actively developing the theme of courtyard spaces flowing into each other along the western border of the site. And if they turned four strict verticals to the noisy street, clearly indicating the presence of the new complex in the panorama of the area, then along the Bukhvostov Street, quieter in terms of traffic, but dull in the sense of the city context, ABD architects form an almost continuous development front. These are three long, multi-section houses, which together form square brackets in the plan, which hold both street corners of the new quarter. The architects make small gaps between the houses, providing access to the territory of the complex from the side of Bukhvostov Street, and inside each of the brackets they design cozy courtyards. Between them, in turn, there is a kindergarten with a large walking area, which is also landscaped and overlooks the promenade. “We gave preference to the traditional for Moscow solution of a residential complex in the form of a compact quarter, but we slightly diversified the reception of perimeter development and filled it with greenery from the inside,” comments Boris Levyant, CEO of ABD architects and head of the team of authors.
The architects deliberately design all four towers the same - the narrow verticals are located at a sufficient distance from each other, so that the unobtrusive theme of multi-wide windows and light-colored facades chosen by the authors does not seem redundant. On the contrary, such a stylistic unity helps to create the effect of a permeable, but still a screen that reliably protects the new quarter from the outside world with its traffic jams and crowds. But multi-section houses, on the contrary, are recruited from emphatically different segments. To decorate the latter, architects use two materials, each of which is taken in two colors. This is stone and brick, alternating which, the authors achieve a calm but varied palette with a gradual transition from almost white to rich terracotta. Different heights of individual sections also help to visually diversify the long volumes of houses - the number of floors in them is the same, but the architects sometimes underestimate the ridge of the roof, sometimes overestimate it, giving the elongated volume an expressive “pulsating” silhouette.
Realizing that it is not economically feasible to design expensive housing in an area so remote from the center, ABD architects initially relied on practical apartment layouts, a convenient combination of housing and infrastructure, and an inexpensive but expressive architectural solution of the complex. The light palette, laconic plastic and high-quality materials, according to the authors, could favorably distinguish the new quarter against the background of the existing buildings in this part of the city, making it the new "face" of Krasnobogatyrskaya Street.
