The new district is being created on the site of the former fine-cloth factory "Yokish" (in Soviet times - the Moscow fine-cloth factory named after Pyotr Alekseev), the main building of which overlooks Mikhalkovskaya street. With a total area of more than 6 hectares, the production occupied the entire space between this street and Maly Golovinsky pond, closely adjacent to a vast park. Actually, the immediate surroundings of the factory in many ways became the reason for its re-profiling: it will be easier for the natural complex if production is taken out of here, and for housing such an arrangement is the best advertisement. And the industrial past of the site prompted the customer to create a residential complex in the loft style that is so popular today.
The face of the new district is the long building 1, which stretches along Mikhalkovskaya Street. Today it is a rather dull panel building from the 1960s, which the Homeland group is transforming into a building with an expressive multidimensional façade. Using clinker brick as the main facing material, the architects complement it with metal and stone inserts, combining them in a different order and thereby giving individuality to the window openings of each floor. At the same time, the attic floor is accentuated by a cladding made of patinated copper, and blank brick walls are tightened with metal channels. The palette of textures and materials specified by this building is used in one way or another in the solutions of all other buildings of Loft Park, although the architects do not directly repeat themselves even once, developing individual "clothes" for each of them. Note also that if the first floor of this building is completely reserved for public functions and in fact represents wide showcases facing Mikhalkovskaya Street, then in all other buildings the first floors are residential, and the arrangement of apartments "on the ground" is used by architects to organize separate entrances and landscaped adjoining territories.
In total, Loft Park will include 9 residential buildings, although, as often happens, not all of them are monuments of industrial architecture. The factory, which had existed for more than 150 years, was repeatedly rebuilt, and by the time of the current reconstruction, only one building, recognized as a particularly valuable object, has survived on the territory - the so-called building 2.1, located on the second building line parallel to Mikhalkovskaya Street. And if the architects actually rebuild most of the volumes, preserving their original "workshop" layout and exterior, then this Homeland group building is carefully restored, cleaning and restoring the original brick, preserving the existing window openings and the main internal structures.
In fact, the only radical change that is introduced to the appearance of this volume is the neat balconies for air conditioners, which the architects make as narrow as possible and are made of black metal in order to visually minimize their presence on the red brick facade. The authors of the project are slightly more free to use the later low-rise extension to this building: its facades are complemented by vertical divisions with the help of wooden columns of different cross-sections, and the roof is landscaped and improved in order to become one of the main public spaces of the new district. In addition to the rather traditional recreation areas with benches and playgrounds for this kind of recreation, there will be a climbing wall - part of the firewall of a historic building adjacent to the habitable roof is adapted for it.
Another fully preserved element of the factory is the existing chimney of the old boiler house. In the Loft Park project, it becomes not only a significant landmark, but also a place where the business activity of the new district is concentrated - the architects are building a suspended glass block of offices around it.
Some other blind ends of former factory buildings are also used in a very unusual way: for example, the side facade of building 11-12 facing the street is covered with an image of Dürer's fresco, which is reproduced by silk-screen printing on glass panels. When asked why Dürer was chosen, the architects smile with a smile that, in their opinion, his work perfectly matches the aesthetics of the loft style.
The green area raised above the ground is by no means the only square in Loft Park. The architects were very keen to ensure that its territory did not look like a stone bag surrounded by a park. On the contrary, the concept of landscaping is based on the fact that the natural complex seems to throw green prominences in Loft Park. The main ones are the landscaped coastal zone of the pond with a completely transparent volume of the restaurant and the central pedestrian boulevard (it is the green roof of the low-rise volume that gives it an additional “dimension”), however, between all nine buildings, the architects throw green chains at least one tree wide. Another roof is also a place for planting trees and tall shrubs - building 6, square in plan, facing Mikhalkovskaya Street with its main facade, as well as a wide open gallery connecting the longest buildings of the complex at the level of the second floor.
