The apartments will be built not far from Leningradsky Prospekt, on the territory of the pilot plant No. 408. The enterprise, which occupies a little more than 1 hectare, has already been taken out of the city, and its buildings are awaiting reconstruction. It is difficult not to recognize the location of the former plant as convenient - a 10-minute walk to the Aeroport metro station, near Leningradka and the Third Transport Ring, so its re-profiling, as they say, was a foregone conclusion. Almost immediately, the investor decided on the new function of the complex - the tightness of the territory and the rather high density of the existing buildings would not allow creating here either an office center or full-fledged housing with the required infrastructure. KR Properties invited its long-standing partners, T + T Architects, to develop the concept of the upcoming renovation. True, the matter was not limited to renovation alone: the architects were given an ambitious task to create a new typology of apartments.
It was not (only) vanity that made the customer come up with something original. The fact is that the closest neighbor of the former plant is the Triumph Palace residential complex - a 260-meter skyscraper that claims to be stylistically related to seven Stalinist skyscrapers. The future apartments are separated from the "Triumph-Palace" only by a narrow intra-quarter passage, and it is clear that it is pointless to compete with it in terms of dimensions and class of housing. But the developer wanted to somehow indicate that the new complex has a completely different origin, and that is how he formulated the TOR for architects - the object should become a chamber and cozy city quarter, as delicately as possible opposing the aesthetics of an “elite” and “closed” residential complex Triumph Palace. “The solution was obvious: due to the difference in number of storeys, our complex faces the Triumph Palace with a roof, so we turned it into a fifth facade,” says Sergey Trukhanov, head of T + T Architects.
For inspiration, the architects also turned to their immediate surroundings - a five-minute drive away, the artists' village "Sokol" with its two-storey buildings, pitched roofs and quiet streets has become one of the main starting points in creating the image of the new complex. As Sergey Trukhanov explains, they borrowed from the famous village of T + T Architects not specific techniques and solutions, but the very aesthetics of old dachas and summer cottage pastime. At the same time, the industrial origin of the object prompted the loft style, and the decision to make the roof the fifth facade prompted the architects to turn to modern Dutch architecture, which is very fond of experimenting with the shape of attics. It was from these components that the ideology of the complex was born: from the "Falcon" the authors take the intimacy and co-scale of a person, as well as the rhythm of pitched roofs, rethink in new materials and supplement them with carefully reconstructed brickwork. This is how factory # 408 turned into the loft-quarter Studio8: the past gets a new life, organically growing into the future.
The difficulty was also in the fact that the factory buildings turned out to be completely different in their configuration and depth. Here there are quite compact rectangular volumes, and narrow elongated "trailers", and a very large building in the center of the site with a large floor depth. Therefore, it was not enough to sketch out the overall style of the future complex - for each volume the architects were looking for their own effective solution. Part of the territory is cleared of old garages and dilapidated buildings in order to create a public space, an internal pedestrian square Studio8 and a parking (however, the required number of parking spaces was obtained only through more expensive automated parking lots).
The buildings of the complex form a self-sufficient composition, a kind of mini-city in the city, in which, in addition to the main square, there are several cozy courtyards, lanes and driveways. A special role is played by the so-called. Building B is a narrow, highly elongated building that actually serves as a wall separating Studio8 from the Triumph Palace: of course, you cannot avoid direct visual contact with the skyscraper, but at ground level this building allows you to isolate the territory of the new complex. The same elongated volume of a multi-storey parking works in a similar way. The location at the junction of two fundamentally different styles is reflected in the architecture of these volumes: the parking is facing the neighboring high-rise with neutral blank walls, and the facade of the residential building is almost as tightly protected by an aluminum roof lowered onto it. Probably, this volume would have looked like an impregnable galvanized wall, if the architects had not split it into separate sections, which deliberately shifted relative to each other. Adds friendliness to the building exterior and large-scale side façade glazing.
The most difficult part was to find a solution for the very large building A, the depth of which is almost 50 meters. In order to provide comfortable illumination of all its premises, as well as the building G, which was moved almost close to it, the architects quite noticeably shifted the ridge of both roofs and used under-roof stained-glass windows. Dormer windows, designed as elegant metal braces, amplify this dynamism manifold: they are like a headdress that is about to slide down on your eyebrows if you don't keep your head high and straight. So this house, looking with its main facade towards the Airport passage, does not hesitate to turn up its nose a little: the monumental neighborhood does not bother him at all, forcing him to think over the outfit and accessories to it a little more carefully. It is no coincidence that at the last "Golden Section" project Studio8 was awarded a special diploma for "Particularly successful solutions within the constrained development".
By the way, about accessories - this is by no means a figure of speech. In their concept for the reconstruction of the former factory, T + T Architects provided for all possible little things: options for finishing facades, and interior solutions, and a navigation system around the complex. Even in the smallest detail, be it a parking bollard, waste collection fencing or signs, the authors carefully follow their chosen loft style. Wall graffiti, which will emphasize its industrial origin almost as eloquently as the brutal brick walls, promise to become a visiting card of the quarter.
