In 2008, a young and energetic company, Tekta, approached the Ostozhenka workshop with a proposal to design a large residential complex in the center of Balashikha. At that time, the customer had only one completed object in Sergiev Posad behind him, but in the wake of the crisis he was not afraid to launch a new serious project and was even ready for all sorts of experiments.
The site chosen for construction was also prompted to experiment. The site is located in the very center of Balashikha near Moscow between two highways - the Gorkovskaya highway M7, which crosses the entire city from east to west, and the central city street that duplicates it - Lenin Avenue. The entire environment is literally buried in greenery, the western border of the site is marked by a preserved cascade of ponds on the Pekhorka River, first built in the 16th century and now having the status of an engineering art monument. To the north, behind a block of residential buildings, there is a huge park. On the opposite side of the Gorkovskoye highway, directly opposite the new residential complex, there is the Pekhra-Yakovlevskoye estate with a park, a large (albeit disfigured) Golitsyn palace and a wonderful rotunda church, which was once attributed to Bazhenov himself. In a word, it is in this place that Balashikha turns out not so much as an industrial gray town, known for constant traffic jams on the highway, as a beautiful historical place that boasts old manor parks and a river with hilly banks. This place is considered to be the center of the city and has been empty for many decades.
In the early 2000s, the city administration even held an international competition for the development of the "Center" - this is the name of the site we are considering in Balashikha. Teams from Russia, France, Holland and other countries together offered to turn this place into a social and cultural center of the city. True, then none of the developed projects received development, and the site was again forgotten for years. And, probably, the main problem lies not in the area, but in the city itself, built in the old fashioned way along the road. It does not have a single traffic intersection, although it is considered one of the largest cities in the Moscow Region (by the number of inhabitants it is the largest in the Moscow Region), and there are no cross connections between its southern and northern parts at all. The incredible traffic congestion of the Gorkovskoye highway, which runs into an eternal traffic jam on the Entuziastov highway, significantly reduces the status of the place, regardless of its other advantages. Who wants to live in a city from which it is impossible to leave anywhere?
Being well acquainted with the urban planning problems of Balashikha, the architects of Ostozhenka took the customer's proposal as a chance to change something in the city itself. Therefore, in parallel with the design of the residential complex, they developed a project for two powerful transport interchanges on the Gorkovskoye highway. The commercial component of this project proposal, without which even the most energetic customer would not undertake to build roads for the city, has become a large business center. Four high-rise glass towers - strictly square in plan - are set up in pairs on both sides of the highway like giant massive pillars of the entrance gate. “For us, this was the main promising task, - says the chief architect of the project, Rais Baishev, - We wanted to connect the northern and southern parts of Balashikha at least at one point, and the Center was perfect for this”. However, the project, which could immediately increase the class of not only the housing being built in this place, but also the city as a whole, by several orders of magnitude, remains unrealized so far. And no one undertakes to assess the chances of its implementation.
The "Center", having practically lost its other functions, has become a site for the construction of housing. But what! Diluted with splashes of colors, the complex received a very poetic realtor name - "Aquarelle". It really looks like a watercolor painting, which, keeping fragments of the original white sheet, fills its space with flowers with many reflections, which is even more emphasized by the abundance of water around the complex - a river, ponds … But everything in order.
Currently, the “East” quarter is under construction, and the “West” quarter (as the authors call the components of the complex) is still at the concept development stage (we will talk about it separately in the following publications). Between two blocks of equal volume there is a strip of green park. As the chief architect of the project, Rais Baishev, said, this is not just a park. Once there was a graveyard of an ancient settlement, then a cemetery. Since the middle of the last century, it has been closed and now, densely overgrown with tall trees, is transferred to the status of a memorial park. It is difficult to say whether such a neighborhood made the future residents of the complex happy. “In Europe, a wide variety of objects are located near cemeteries, including housing and schools. And this does not bother anyone,”explains the architect.
The authors immediately abandoned the idea to build up the site with a forest of high-rise towers, trying to reduce the height of the buildings as much as possible in this case. The use of a mixed typology allowed the architects to save the required amount of square meters: they crossed tower, sectional and gallery types of housing with each other.
But this is not its only feature: the residential complex has become a real collection of favorite techniques, if not - archetypes of classical modernism.
Its plan is similar to a hairbrush with four long and sparse teeth. The teeth stretch towards the highway, and their "base", the handle of an imaginary comb, stretches along the boulevard and represents an extended 14-storey building about 330 meters long. Either a house-wall, or a house-beam. If you look from the side of the highway, best of all - from a bird's eye view, it is obvious that a long beam was put on the four transverse hulls, and then this is a horizontal skyscraper. But the space under the beam is filled with housing (it would be impossible to lose so much space), and when viewed from the side of the boulevard, of course, it is a house-wall, a relative of the famous house on Tulskaya. However, the house is cut through by six driveways, letting rays of light through to the shady side and leading to three large courtyards of the complex. Due to the nine-story height, these openings look like narrow slots, and the house from a distance resembles a centipede elephant walking along the boulevard, drawn schematically, but similar. Thus, the gigantism of the complex is most evident from the side of the city blocks.
The architects tried to make four nine-storey buildings (comb teeth) facing the side of the highway and, in the long run to the Golitsyn estate, as low as possible. The logical way to remove the height without losing meters is to increase the width, and the thickness of each building is 30 meters, which is twice the average residential building. Therefore, the architects turned the buildings into rows of rectangular (almost square) sections, placing a courtyard inside each of them. Inside, the corridors connecting the apartments face towards the courtyard, and it turns out that each block is a gallery building, coiled around its middle of the light like a snail. One of the blocks on each building grows from nine to 17 floors and thus four towers appear.
Then the already perfect classic of modernism begins. All four buildings, just as Le Corbusier bequeathed, are on their feet. At the level of the first floors, there is no housing and the permeability of the pedestrian space is disturbed only by a few shops and cafes, arranged between the concrete "legs" of the two outer buildings and dotted lines marking the border of the territory; as well as the inevitable blocks of stairs, elevators and lobbies with transparent glass walls. The legs in different versions of the project look different: somewhere they are thin and rectangular in section, somewhere they are flat trapezoidal, like those of the "Marseilles Unit" or the Moscow centipede houses of Andreev and Meerson inspired by it. “All this serves the idea of a suite of terraced courtyard spaces of the complex,” explains Rais Baishev.
As if in response to the permeability of the lower tier, the upper parts of the hulls also receive many slots. First of all, this applies to sections with courtyards - slots allow more light to enter the courtyards. For 17-storey towers, the courtyards of which are already real "wells", deep slots on the north side become mandatory: their plan above the fifth floor is no longer square, but U-shaped.
Large niches echo the slots: here and there the architects cut out from the wall a fragment about five stories high and about a meter deep.
When they do this, they find that while the skin of the houses is dazzling white (made of fiber cement panels), the inside is colored. This is akin to slicing a watermelon, revealing red flesh behind a green skin. Everything outside is achromatic white, but as soon as we get inside - no matter in what way, entering the lobby or observing a cut-out made by architects in a prismatic volume on the facade - it turns out that the house is colored, and even very much. Each building has its own color: red, blue, green, yellow - we see it in the recesses, in the courtyards, entrances, on the planes of the walls and ceilings of the permeable first tier. The same color appears in some variants of the project on the lower plane of the visors deeply brought forward.
The color used is simple and bright, and the shades appear due to reflexes - reflections of color on the bright white surfaces of the walls (which will be especially bright on sunny days). This is where the "watercolor" begins: the color dissolves into the whiteness of the walls almost literally the same way as the transparent paint dissolved in water falls on the translucent white sheet. This effect is especially similar to watercolor on wet paper - when a brush touches it, the paint instantly spreads, giving streaks almost the same as on the walls of a house on sunny days.
The technique, as you might guess, was invented by the same Le Corbusier, who, inspired by Mondrian, painted the slopes of the loggias of the "Marseille Unit" in bright primary colors and received a slightly different, more complex perception of basic shades - not straightforward, but in perspective. The motive, both simple and complex, has become one of the favorites in modern architecture: colored piers, colored reflexes are very popular, suffice it to recall the Japanese experiments of the Frenchwoman Emmanuelle Moreau. The version of "Ostozhenka" is larger, and, moreover, it is not devoid of additional meaning: the color will become a distinctive feature of each entrance, and passing under them through the courtyards, it will be impossible to make a mistake where you are - so strong will probably be immersion in the color shining from above and reflected pavement.
The theme of mixing shades of color is supported by glass planes. Especially nice are the courtyards, which are surrounded, as we remember, by corridors connecting the apartments. The outer wall of the corridors is glass and when viewed from the courtyard the glass, the bright paint of the walls and the depth of the space give together an extravaganza of shades - a kind of apotheosis of watercolor, precious. The theme is supported by the diagonal glass loggias of the apartments of the beamed house from the side of the courtyard. They "catch the light" for the residents and, on the other hand, fill the white plane with fractional coldish-gray strokes, in some places diluted with reflected light, strokes.
The foundation of the complex also turns out to be quite complicated. A kindergarten and a school are built into the basement parts of the two buildings (below the legs-supports of the first floor): their facades with glass ribbons go out into the buried lawn of the courtyard - a very bold and infrequent decision in the conditions of Russian norms. Under the rest of the buildings there will be an underground parking lot, where, due to the non-standard width of the buildings, cars will stand not in two rows, but in four. The underground parking will provide a parking space for one apartment, and this is not counting the ground garage located along the Gorkovskoye Highway - also multi-layered, because on its roof, sloping towards the courtyard and covered with grass, there are sports grounds.
As we can see, the gigantic housing complex in Balashikha uses the best traditions of modernism. Moreover, it is characteristic that these traditions in this case do not formally represent themselves, showing themselves ("look, we have here homage to the avant-garde"), but are used in full force to comprehend and organize the urban space, turning out to be both effective and relevant. In this sense, the Akvareli quarter is a living and full-fledged heir to the experimental microdistricts of the 1970s, of which only one was built in our country at that time, Chertanovo; there are quite a few such quarters in European countries (see, for example, the report by Archi.ru
about the London Barbican.
However, it is easy to notice that "Aquarelle" is not in every way similar to the microdistricts of classical modernism. Those would hardly bow before the context, would lower the number of storeys because of the neighboring estate; there would hardly be possible rows of courtyards - this is a motive that refers us to the apartment buildings of St. Petersburg, or, more precisely, to the structure of Italian palazzo with galleries around the inner courtyard; the modernists preferred plate houses. Towers were also disliked in the 1970s. Therefore, in the Balashikha house we see rather a fusion of the techniques of classical modernism and later, more subtle solutions motivated by context, lighting and other conditions. However, in the case of "Ostozhenka" it could not be otherwise.
