The competition of draft designs for the new district was held in December last year; it was organized by VTB Real Estate, which owns an area of 99.87 hectares in perhaps the most prestigious place of the Moscow region, between Rublevo-Uspenskoe and Novorizhskoe highways. A good half of these hectares, however, fall within the gas pipeline's buffer zone, which divides the site into three almost equal segments. On the one hand, this forced the investor to include a landscape park in the composition of the future residential area (no other options for using the protected area are possible), and on the other, prompted him to create three microdistricts of different class. Actually, these areas became the subject of the competition - the participants had to offer options for either a microdistrict of low-rise residential buildings, or a quarter of townhouses, or a cottage village. “Workshop of Aleksey Ivanov“Archstroydesign ASD”, which has solid experience in each of these genres, proposed a concept for the development of the entire territory, therefore the project was named“Anthology”.
“Our“collected works”offers not only different types of buildings, but also three fundamentally different general layouts,” says architect Alexei Ivanov. “We assumed that cottage buyers appreciate more traditional housing, the audience of townhouses is not against some liberties, and residents of the city block are open to innovation and experimentation, so in our concept, housing from site to site is gradually evolving from traditional to futuristic."
In general, at the time of the competition, the customer already had a functional zoning scheme for the future settlement, on which the layouts of all three quarters were worked out in detail, but the participants of the competition could change it at their discretion, and Alexey Ivanov's team took advantage of this opportunity. The site itself in the plan is an extremely intricate figure, which, perhaps, can only be compared with a hammer with one pointed end. This sharpening is the border of the site closest to the road, which is planned to be allocated for a microdistrict of low-rise apartment buildings. On the other side of the conventional "handle" is a more rectangular section of townhouses, the territory of the future park stretched perpendicular to the road, and behind it is the future cottage village, which in itself in its plan resembles a fish that adjoins the park with its tail, and turns around with its sharp nose away from the highway.
In VTB's version, this "fish" was literally littered with households - square-shaped houses and the same compact plots into which the entire territory was cut. Between the construction lines, VTB designers opened a road that described a simple loop in the center of the village. “It’s as if the lasso was thrown there,” explains Aleksey Ivanov, to whom such a layout seemed not too humane from the very beginning. - Too many houses, no hierarchy of space and, as a result, the absence of a harmonized living environment - solid cottages, fences, roads. " The architects developed a different urban planning scenario: they laid one central alley, shifting it closer to the western border of the site, at its widest point they drew a semicircle, placing the houses in an amphitheater, in the center of which they placed a public square. And in order not to plant absolutely all households on one single axis, they launched several short "branches" from the alley and designed another loop closer to the park - as a result, the panoramas of the village became more interesting, and there is almost no loss in the total number of households …As for the architectural solution of the cottages, here Aleksey Ivanov is faithful to his principle of offering the consumer what has been tested by time. Almost flat roofs with wide overhangs, large windows, a combination of dark stone and light wood - allusions to Wright's "prairie house" are obvious, and the architect does not hide it. The use of wood gives the houses a great semblance and warmth, creating the image of a cozy country dwelling close to nature.
The townhouses in the developer's project were located in two snakes that wrapped around the inner-quarter passage from one side, then from the other. It seems to be a rather interesting planning technique, but multiplied over the entire territory, it threatened to turn into a monotony of the environment and panoramas. "Archstroydesign ASD" launched a road along the perimeter of the site in such a way that it would be separated from the highway by a strip of green spaces, not houses - this allowed the townhouses themselves to be removed from the road as much as possible. Houses are interlocked in different ways: by a "ladder", and by lines, and in the form of small arcs. Such an arrangement made it possible to place the maximum number of households on the site, but due to the fact that they are all deployed in different directions, there are no houses that would look "windows into windows". The sense of privacy of each individual dwelling is also emphasized by multi-pitched roofs and sections deployed in different directions, which, moreover, have different heights. These volumes seem to be formed by several houses inserted into each other, due to which they acquire a picturesque silhouette, which makes it possible to compensate for the maximum building density.
And, finally, the architects decide the area of low-rise buildings in a deliberately futuristic way.
The author of the planning scheme, architect Alexander Khomyakov, gave the scheme the name "Flexebility", which implies a flexible approach to the development of the site: i.e. changes in construction and financing queues and the ability to independently adjust each cluster. Transport service is carried out along the outer perimeter of the quarter. In the pointed triangle of the site, the architects introduce the bisector of a wide green boulevard, on both sides of which houses are located. These are rather large structures, in terms of having the shape of ovals and smooth arcs and therefore resembling ships. Numerous terraces, formed by reducing the area of each subsequent floor, as well as cladding with transparent and multi-colored glass, give them a similarity to liners. Stylobates of all buildings are maximally developed - accommodating numerous public functions and parking lots, they also serve to organize cozy pedestrian plazas, protected from the sun and precipitation. And their roofs are landscaped by architects, so that the main deck of the houses-ships turns into a full-fledged square, connected to the neighboring wide bridge. In fact, the boulevard has an upper level, intended mainly for residents of houses.
In other words, architects connect each of the three segments of the future "VTB city" with a landscape park: an alley leads from it to a cottage village, a wide promenade leads to a quarter of townhouses, and the park itself seems to merge with a wide prominence into the area of low-rise buildings, communicating a completely urban spirit and the density of the environment a distinct flavor of life in nature.
