This house was ordered by Totan Kuzembaev by a man who is sure that there is nothing more boring than the geometry of housing accepted in our latitudes. Rectangular and square plans of apartments and houses, in his opinion, evoke an incredible melancholy, with which he intends to fight in the most decisive way within the framework of his separate home. That is why the main condition that the customer set for the architect was expressive geometry, which promised the cottage a maximum of sharp corners and broken edges. Totan Kuzembaev recalls that at first he tried to reason with the young man: they say, such houses are more expensive to build and harder to live in, and then he realized: this is exactly the opportunity to experiment with all his might that every architect dreams of. And the experiment began.
The client talked about his love for triangles so many times that the architect decided to use this figure as the basis for the plan. More precisely, two triangles, which are cut into each other with sharp corners, and then are slightly displaced in different directions relative to the central axis. But the resulting polygon as a result of this combination seemed to Kuzembaev not sufficiently dynamic for this house, so in its ends (short sides of triangles) the architect makes additional triangular cuts, as if splitting the wall plane in two, and drives an additional wedge into one of the side facades opened by the "book", due to which the plan of the house resembles a slightly doubled letter X. By the way, the double side itself is the main facade of the house, facing south-west: as the architect himself explains, he then inserted an extra block there so that the "Crystal" would face the sunny side several rooms at once.
The volume has been grown to match the plan. The architect interprets each "tail" of the mysterious letter as an independent volume formed by broken planes, most of which converge at sharp angles. For their cladding, Kuzembaev chooses galvanized roofing steel, which blurs the border between the facades and the roof, turning the house into a single crystalline structure. Some of the windows are integrated directly into its edges, but the main role here is played by panoramic stained-glass windows, completing broken chipped shapes and thereby softening their extremely dynamic, if not to say, aggressive appearance. Scale glazing here can be compared to polished edges, which turn a mineral into a gem.
It really turned out to be a difficult task to fit all the premises necessary for the customer into a house of such complex configuration. The existing small relief on the site helped to get out of the situation: by integrating the "Crystal" into the landscape, the architect makes as many as four levels in it. True, these are not traditional floors, strung strictly on top of each other, but an ingenious system of double-height spaces, a recessed basement and mezzanines: in fact, Totan Kuzembaev divides different functions according to different polyhedrons of "Kristall"
So, entering the house, you can immediately get into the living room, kitchen-dining room or one of the many terraces, you can go up the floor and find yourself in the bedroom, or, conversely, go down to the floor and see all the utility rooms of Kristall. From the bedroom level, in turn, you can go up another floor and find yourself in the office - it is located in a separate volume at the highest level. As conceived by the author, the extraordinary architectural solution of the house will everywhere remind of itself and in its interiors. And it's not only about the plans of individual rooms (although the customer, of course, has to somehow settle in such favorite sharp corners) - the walls of public areas, for example, are supposed to be finished with the same steel as the facades, and where this material is visually and tactilely not very appropriate, the tree will dominate - exactly the same as with which the broken slopes of the outer shell of the house are hemmed from the inside.
As already mentioned, one of the main advantages of Kristall is its huge stained-glass windows, which make all its rooms very light. The utility rooms are not an exception either - although they are located in the basement, which is a monolithic box, but wherever the relief allows it, the architect cuts windows in it. It is also important that this relatively narrow strip of openings will not only help the inhabitants of the house save significantly on lighting the lower level, but also play an important role in its architectural appearance, visually as if raising the "Crystal" above the ground, "tearing" it from the soil near Moscow, not very accustomed to such plastic experiments.
