The history of the project of a residential complex in Odintsovo began simultaneously with the history of the Aquareli complex in Balashikha - during the 2008 crisis. It was then that the Tekta company was not afraid to launch two large projects at once and turned to the Ostozhenka bureau. Both complexes have been successfully commissioned today and, moreover, have been noted more than once as exemplary modern housing that meets all the basic principles of creating a high-quality urban environment. Just one example: at Arch Moscow-2014, both of them were among the twenty most urgent projects in the quarters of Russia.
In both cases, it was required to build residential complexes of very impressive dimensions on a limited area. “The main task of such projects is to combat excessiveness,” says Alexander Skokan. “We strive to make a giant building acceptable for its place, using various techniques: arches, spots of color, working with scale and silhouette … These are compositional, plastic techniques, from their use. the house does not get smaller, but you can get interesting spatial effects that can revive the boredom of modern construction. It seems to me that the space of the courtyard of the house in Odintsovo turned out to be interesting and even fascinating thanks to its giant arches”.
The site on which the house was built is the territory of the former motor depot at the entrance from Moscow to Odintsovo, to the left of the Mozhaisk highway, where the scattering of cottages is replaced by high-rise residential areas. The place was conducive to the creation of a noticeable building here, a kind of entrance sign, solid and memorable, indicating the change of the village scale to the urban one taking place here.
From the point of view of planning techniques, the project follows the principles of quarterly development - it is not surprising that he had the opportunity to present this popular genre today on Arch Moscow. The bodies, raised on a common stylobate one level from the ground, "embrace" a trapezoidal area along the perimeter. One of them, the longest, fixes the borders from the north-east and north-west, forming an almost right angle along Vokzalnaya street and Mozhaisk highway. The second - grows into an impregnable wall on the western border of the site. The third building, the most compact, occupies a position from the south, leaving on the sides wide passages to the courtyard arranged on the stylobate.
It is interesting that the courtyard here is two-level, it is not even a courtyard, but a vertical structure: the upper one, green and quiet, is spaciously located on the roof of the stylobate, and the lower one is vain, with a whole system of driveways and streets, one of which cuts right through the complex, hiding inside. This decision allowed to significantly save the territory, which initially, as well as almost always, was not enough for such a large residential area. In addition, having raised the courtyard by one floor, it was possible to almost completely free it from cars, providing only fire passages that stretched along the outer side of the building - under the spectacular consoles of the buildings.
With a fairly simple and laconic layout, the first thing you notice when looking at the newly built complex is its incredibly complex silhouette with a height difference from twenty-four to seven floors. The authors say that the differences that have arisen are the answer to the task of observing insolation norms, providing the necessary amount of light to both the residents of the new complex and the residents of neighboring houses. But here the insolation ruler was one of the design tools. As a result, in the part where residential five-story buildings are almost close to the site, the height of the new buildings is rapidly decreasing to seven floors. From the side of Vokzalnaya Street, where at some distance from the construction site there are three twelve-storey buildings, the border of the complex is formed by a broken, stepped block, the air outline of which follows the rays of the sun, so as not to obscure the neighbors.
The authors also came up with a way to provide the right amount of light for the apartments inside the courtyard. Obviously, the decrease in the number of storeys significantly affected the total output of square meters. The loss had to be made up: this is how the idea arose to work with the typology of apartments. We have already written about how the architects of Ostozhenka coped with a similar problem during the construction of the Akvareli complex. A different solution was found here: in order to fit the required number of areas into the designated dimensions, the buildings that fix the extended boundaries of the site were expanded to twenty-two meters against the usual sixteen. It was possible to do this thanks to deep vertical niches, which cut through the volume of buildings in large steps along their entire length. Around the niches are kitchens, whose windows face the courtyard, while living rooms and bedrooms receive the maximum amount of daylight.
In addition to an interesting typological solution and the necessary "space exit", it was possible to create a very attractive external, or rather, external inner courtyard, appearance of buildings. The facades facing the courtyard, thanks to deep slots-niches, have turned into a kind of slender towers of different heights, forming fractional and varied buildings, on a human scale. The rhythm of the wall pattern in combination with the different heights of the volumes makes the complex look like either a giant organ with many pipes, or like natural rocks.
The complex looks especially beautiful and voluminous in the setting sun, when oblique rays are one of the main tools for constructing a form, here they grind it like a sculptor with a chisel, and paint fantastic long shadows on the walls. In a word: "Sunstroke", according to the apt expression of the authors, highly appreciated the co-authorship of sunlight in the creation of their architecture.
But they were not inspired by the sun, but rather, not only by it. Love for the Russian avant-garde is clearly and distinctly guessed in the whole image of the complex. This can be seen in the colors traditional for constructivists - gray, white, red kraplak; and for clear work with form, where special attention is paid not only to volume, but also to emptiness. Giant "pieces" of the body of a building are simply removed from it, such as, for example, six-meter consoles hanging over fire passages or the same vertical niches. From the same place, from the volumetric-spatial vocabulary of constructivism, and the gap that arose between the north-western and western buildings, through which, like in a gorge, the gliding rays of the setting sun penetrate into the courtyard. And this is another sunstroke.
And the most outstanding element in the series of voids is a huge arch that cuts through one of the buildings, opening a view from the courtyard to the main artery of the city - Mozhaisk highway. The corner of the twenty-four-story building hung spectacularly in the air. The support for him, in the best traditions of the immortal Russian avant-garde, was a deep red volume - a residential building, placed inside this giant arch, also painted red. The red box is in the red cube. This "red foot" serves as a conditional entry sign to the city - vivid and memorable.
“… Based on the experience of the architects of the 1920s, using their language, we tried to comprehend space in our own way,” says Rais Baishev, “For the language of architecture, painting, sculpture, air is sometimes more important than the body. From here emerged huge consoles, a large arch, and a "gap" between the bodies, giving the correct sense of space."
Street facades, already oriented towards the urban scale, are solved differently. Here, the smooth and solid surfaces of the walls are practically devoid of any plastic. The fragmentation of perception is provided only by a stepped silhouette and a coloristic solution, which make it possible to avoid seeing the volume as excessively large. The dull, but dense gray color of the crowning part of the complex merges with shades of blue-gray cloudy autumn sky. The main body of the building, "tied" to the line of the surrounding buildings, is designed in unobtrusive white. Thus, a clear horizon line is drawn on the facade: everything below it belongs to the city, everything above it belongs to the sky.
The desire to smooth out the volume, to make it commensurate not only with the person, but also with the environment - in the details. So, in order to facilitate the massive forms of the main volumes, corner windows were invented, and the glass seemed to "hug" the corners of the building. And this is another bow to the ideas of Bauhaus and Russian constructivism. Very large, from ceiling to floor, square glass openings of the same size set the meter and rhythm common for the whole complex, and, in addition, create additional opportunities for interior ideas.
All the necessary social infrastructure is in the stylobate, the plastic and color solution of which is perceived not from distant points, but when approaching it. At the level of the first floor, in contrast to the flat vertical forms of residential blocks, the facade of the non-residential part is designed as plastically as possible. Made of colored glass, it resembles a stylized, surreal river bank washed out by a violent stream of water, or a fragment of a rock with protruding rocks of bright red loams … And this is already a waterline through which the sun also breaks through, “crushing and swaying on the surface of wide lakes” …
