The kindergarten project, which we are talking about in this article, recently won first place in the competition "for the best design project for a preschool educational institution of variable forms" organized by the Research Institute for the Development of Professional Education with the support of the Moscow Department of Education. Among other things, the winner was awarded a speech at a conference dedicated to innovative design of kindergartens. The conference will take place tomorrow, February 15, at the IAC at the city's Department of Education.
The order for the design of a kindergarten, located among residential buildings on 2nd Parkovaya Street in Izmailovo, came to the architects of Atrium almost at the stage of the foundation pit. They began to build it according to a project developed by another bureau, which, however, was approved by the official authorities, but incomplete: there were no facades and even the building plan was unfinished and "damp" - although it was obligatory for implementation, since it was agreed.
Strictly speaking, the “Atrium” was only required to “finish painting” the facades and interiors - but the architects could not afford to approach the matter formally, and worked out everything, including the technological scheme. As a result, only the dimensions remained from the previous project, although numerous changes had to be coordinated not with the investor (Donstroy), but with the “less personalized customer” - representatives of the regional authorities, since the kindergarten has a municipal status and number. In a word, despite the tight deadlines, the minimum budget (the construction took place just during the period of the economic crisis) and the difficulties associated with the coordination, the architects managed to transform the building - ultimately it became recognizably "atrium".
Working with the volume, which was generally set by the existing plan, the architects played with its protruding blocks, the alternation of which suggested the central theme of the project - the game one. Each piece of the building can be viewed as part of an exciting game of colorful cubes, with game elements found both in the structure of the building and in the details. The impression is enhanced by the fact that the blocks-cubes are lined up with displacement relative to each other, as if with an uncertain child's hand.
The structure of the building, however, is easy to read: multi-colored volumes protrude from the white rectangle: turquoise and red with round porthole windows - stairs; light green and orange, cut with zigzag verticals of the "fairy forest" - the volumes of the assembly and sports halls and a large pool on the ground floor. Children's bedrooms and playrooms hide behind white walls, but they also keep up with their colorful neighbors: here and there, like curious children, square red frames peep out of horizontal windows. This is how the architects embody one of their favorite principles - they designate the functions of the premises on the facade, constructing the building according to the precepts of the classics of modernism from the inside out. And, as a "side effect" of such decorative functionalism, they get a multi-colored and multi-height "fairyland", which has its own staircase towers, and its own forest, painted on the facades, but growing above the roof with parapet teeth, similar to the battlements of Kremlin towers on watercolor drawing of a child. The game of volumes, colors, heights - everything is motivated and everything is not boring.
The main figurative component of the project was to be the zigzags of the fairytale-pencil "forest". Initially, they were supposed to be made three-dimensional as well, casting a complex shape from fiber-reinforced concrete - just at this time, Donstroy launched its own line for casting fiber-cement panels. “The original idea was to make all surfaces not only multi-colored, but also multi-textured, made of different materials. But the customer abandoned the use of fiber-reinforced concrete and ultimately it all came down to plastering. Only the configuration of the windows and the color remained,”says Vera Butko.
The main disappointment of the project was the interiors. The architects of Atrium worked them out to the nail on the head, every detail was in its place. However, they were not allowed to supervise them, other people were engaged in the procurement of materials and pieces of furniture, and as a result, everything did not work out as planned. In the project, the interiors are drawn as a direct continuation of the facades. There the same round windows appear in the colored planes, the same, similar to the outlines of trees, zigzags on the walls of the assembly hall. It was conceived so that - without deception: if a colored forest is drawn outside, then there is a forest inside, only even more colorful. Either the facades continued in the interior, or the color “sprouted” from the inside out, splashing out onto the walls.
Color has a special place in this project. A bright, cheerful palette unmistakably defines the purpose of the building. “We fought for a very long time for the color solution,” the architects say. “We were reproached, accused, warned that because of the brightness of the color, the children would allegedly be mentally unbalanced. Moreover, it was not even teachers and psychologists who were accused, but builders. And shortly after completion of construction (in October of last year)
there were reports that Mayor Sobyanin praised the building during a regular inspection of the North-East Administrative District: "… the project is good … positive in terms of design and architecture," the mayor said and even recommended its "reuse".
The bureau's portfolio includes several schools, starting with the boarding school in Kozhukhovo, which became famous a few years ago - a yellow-solar building with a complex round shape. Then (like the Kozhukhovskoy boarding school, also commissioned by Donstroy, the architects designed an educational complex in Shchukino, consisting of a school and two kindergartens.
You can see the continuity of the boarding school in Kozhukhovo and the complex in Shchukin: for example, there beams of silver supports placed at an angle supported the perforated "pancake" of the main visor, uniting the whole building like a hinge, in Shchukin this motif moves into the "mushrooms" of playgrounds, similar for artistic installations.
Four rounded "fingers" of group blocks with membranes of deep loggias between them sprout from the rectangular body of the buildings into the courtyard. The color is active, the pattern is asymmetrical and looks like a frozen "Tetris" with the inclusion of development pictures, then like an enlarged ripple of an unsettled TV.
In a word, the theme of schools and kindergartens has become one of the favorites for Vera Butko and Anton Nadtochy. It is not surprising that in the competition for the design of residential quarters of the Technopark in Skolkovo (district D2) they got
a block with a kindergarten - there it was designed according to European standards, in cramped conditions and therefore called a "kids club", but the colored rays from this building built into the hill seemed to illuminate the entire block with rainbow reflections, penetrating through the multi-colored glass of the light funnel in the center.
I must say that multi-colored schools and kindergartens are a common technique, now even Mosprojects have developed into a multi-colored version of a typical kindergarten.
What is the difference between the projects of Vera Butko and Anton Nadtochy? I would say that they have some plastic and even plot richness. Color is inseparable from the form, grows to the form, and then both grow from the facades into the interior. Or it grows from the interior to the facades. The building strives to become an organism, not a flat cheerful coloring, of which there are already many, but a house that is entirely built according to special, game laws, plays seriously, does not pretend. After all, you always feel very much when adults have no time: they have SNIPs, receptions, meetings, calls, and the children ask to play, and the adults pretend to play, and they themselves have a phone in their hands, a client, a boss on the wire, and they get rid of the children. some palliative.
Vera Butko and Anton Nadtochiy play seriously and truly. From this they have a certain supply of ideas - which is very important. After all, if there is only one technique, then it is fatal for a building to lose it during the construction process. If there are a lot of ideas, then no, the losses do not become less painful from this, but something else happens: the building retains its face no matter what. He has something to sacrifice, like a lizard - a tail, remembering that the next time, perhaps, he will be able to realize more, and maybe the whole thing.
