Mamontovka is a district in the town of Pushkino, a typical suburb near Moscow on the Yaroslavl highway; for those traveling from Moscow, it starts a little further than Mytishchi and Korolev. There are still more village houses here than five-story buildings and industrial zones, but new construction begins in Pushkin as well: the development company APSIS GLOBE is building the O-Pushkino microdistrict. Fulfilling social obligations to the city, the company financed the construction of a new city school on the site of an old two-story building from 1950 in the “village” part of Pushkino, not far from the picturesque Ucha River. The resulting volume accommodated two recently merged schools - №13 and №14, and a library. ***
We all dream of such a school all our lives. First, as students, every morning entering the lobby of a standard panel "airplane" with almost 1000 seats. Then, in the fourth year of the Moscow Architectural Institute, when we try to simulate an ideal learning space “for 660 students” for ourselves. And already quite adults, running around the city in search of a school for our children, we again return to our own pipe dreams. Those who are lucky enough to study or teach their children here will not have to compile in their heads some vague image of an ideal school, somewhat remotely reminiscent of either Eton or the educational center of the Swedish eco-city. There are no analogues in the Russian practice of building schools! Three floors, a standard set of necessary and sufficient school premises, a playground, a school stadium … And not quite a standard landscaping of a school garden with a checkerboard alternation of trees and lanterns on round "cells" of greenery and white paint. And even those are not by the rules. Everything is so, and everything is not so. This school is completely different from what we used to think of as a school. Or rather, it is such a school that almost all other school buildings automatically fall out of this row.
The first thing you pay attention to is the abundance and variety of colors. Nothing is afraid to be bright: columns, walls, doors, window frames. Everything - all colors of the rainbow: every hunter wants to know where the pheasant is sitting! And everything, of course, starts with red. Red walls, red columns, bright red vertical window frames; on the second floor, behind a flexible tape imitating a red breadboard cardboard with a pixel image of a second-by-second analysis of a bird's flight - the hall. In some places in the courtyard you can see a fragment of an orange wall. Then green, blue, blue. From the facade, without changing the intensity, and sometimes even increasing, the colored spots enter the interior, depriving it of its normalized official facelessness. And finally, purple inserts near the doors to the classrooms. This is where the pheasant sits. And you understand that the birds flying on the facade made their way inside and froze on the walls, imitating chalk drawings. Probably, if you take chalk from the board and draw your own next to such a bird, then nothing will happen for it. Only the bird will not be so lonely. And there are practically no right angles here, and the usual: "stand in a corner!" just doesn't make sense.
All windows of all classrooms, offices and recreation areas - from floor to ceiling. As a result, the spaces are easily visible from the inside, from the spreading drop of the inner school yard. And when you are standing in the courtyard, and around you, behind the cascades of glass, your school life is raging, you clearly understand that “we are the same, the whole world is a foreign land for us,” and your Fatherland is here. And you easily and forever identify yourself with this school. And no school tie is needed for this. Open to insiders and closed to outsiders habitat. I look and understand: I would like my children, and if I'm lucky, my grandchildren will study here.
Meanwhile, a rectangular volume from any point is not perceived as a lapidary parallelepiped. Three floors are clearly visible on the facade as three independent levels. Each is on its own, but all together they are a single compositional solution. Simple and harmonious.
“It was important for us to separate the streams, to separate the junior and secondary schools so that the students did not intersect and did not interfere with each other,” says Andrei Romanov. Indeed, the teardrop-shaped courtyard wide open on the first floor to the north behind a rare palisade of colored "counting sticks" hides two entrances: to the thin extended building of the primary school - in the southern part of the courtyard, and to the slightly larger, square volume of middle and senior classes. The younger ones go to the left, the older ones go to the right. There is another entrance to the courtyard - a glass gorge at the end of the rectangle, convenient for primary school students.
If the plan of school classrooms at the level of the first floor is subject to strict geometry and looks like either the letter "P" or "G", then the northern corner of the rectangle is occupied by a bionic volume, the undulating contour of which resembles six small "pseudopods" - a branch of electronic Library named after Boris Yeltsin. The free plan of its volume is supported by completely transparent walls of the first floor and a very light, almost completely white interior with a double-height mini-atrium, the younger brother of the schoolyard, inside.
The library is built into the school volume, even "hidden" in its contour, and its interaction with school buildings resembles the principle of dividing a light beam passing through a prism into a beam of the rainbow spectrum. The white and light library in this witty plot is the initial ray, the sum of knowledge, and it is also the glass of a prism: imagine a ray, it will be directed from somewhere in the northeast, but this is not so important. Passing white through a transparent library, light (in our imagination, of course) is refracted - and the school gets bright spectral walls, columns and colored reflections on the ceiling of the courtyard. It is difficult to think of a more joyful image of the decomposition of knowledge in the head "on the shelves" than splitting the ray into the spectrum of the rainbow, which, according to the book of Genesis, means salvation and hope, but at the same time symbolizes the most pleasant part of the science of optics for the New Age: Newton's theory of light. Only the birds of paradise of happiness on the colored walls of the school corridors glorify the purity of rational knowledge.
