Archi.ru:
Igor Zinovievich, in December it will be two years since you and your team moved to a new office. How is your professional life going in your new home? What is the architecture studio doing now?
Igor Shvartsman:
- We are quite closely engaged in our main activity - the development of actual projects at different stages and of varying complexity, we accompany them until the final implementation. And if two years ago we often shook our heads in sadness and said that we have to deal with conceptual contests quite a lot, because there is not much real work, but now the situation, fortunately, has changed: there is work, a lot of work, and all our teams are maximally loaded.
These projects have emerged precisely over the past two years, or are you finalizing what was started before the crisis?
- Differently. There are projects that were started 3-4 years ago and even earlier, and now they are revived and brought to mind, and this gives a pleasant feeling that our developments were not wasted. But there are also absolutely new orders that were received by us during tenders or directly from investors. In other words, we lead a full-fledged professional life: we participate in competitions, bring already developed projects to implementation, look for a compromise between our vision of a particular object and the wishes of customers. You know, our company has never been engaged in simple sketching, we try to do everything in our power to ensure that the project is completed inside and out.
As far as I know, you have several major realizations now. For example, a residential complex "Literator" is under construction
- Yes, now we are conducting field supervision there and, I think, next year this complex will be put into operation. Not so long ago, we also developed a project for the interiors of public areas for him. At first they made them very laconic, working on the contrast and unity of the quality of wood and stone in the modern style inherent in us, and then we modified the project, because the customer wanted the interiors "a little warmer" and close to the "literary" theme. I confess that the process of finding a compromise was not easy: we didn’t want to slide into frank literature, it’s too straightforward and, if you like, poppy. First of all, we refrained from the idea of associating each building of the residential complex with some writer, hero and generally moving in a similar direction. Other lamps were introduced into the interiors, the scale of the vertical divisions of the wooden wall that decorates the lounge area was made smaller, and the plasticity of the stone surface was enriched by niches of different shapes and sizes, framed by natural wood. It is in these niches that you can, if you wish, introduce "literature" - photographs of writers, some statuettes, books. But the style of the space itself remained emphatically modern - for us it was a fundamental moment.
And in volumetric design, how often do you manage to infect the customer with your confidence in the correctness of your decisions?
- In this sense, a good example is our long-standing object, which is finally being completed, -
administrative and business center at the 1st km of Rublevo-Uspenskoe highway. The main author of the project, developed back in 2007, was Sergei Kiselev, and it was he who came up with the main figurative idea - the building seems to be wrapped in a wide ribbon along the buildings. It was very important for us to preserve both the original compositional solution and the plastic of the facades of this complex. Over the years, the customer has repeatedly tried to persuade us to straighten the ends of the buildings and straighten the roof, but we were able to convince him that banal parallelepipeds are not appropriate and not interesting here, and we are very grateful to him for his willingness to listen to the opinion of architects. Yes, we have given up some of the excesses of pre-crisis luxury, but we have not lost the expressive appearance of the building.
- Another long-liver project is
the reconstruction of the 109 quarter in Tekstilshchiki, where also Sergey Kiselev, according to his own figurative expression, managed to "whistle a melody".
“This project, which received the name“Volzhskaya-life”from the Pioneer Group of Companies, changed more than once in the process of implementation, although we managed to retain the original idea of the structural grid, the segments of which are filled with facing slabs of various colors. Floors have been added on two buildings, and the function of the first floors has changed in one of the buildings. In addition, one more house was included in the complex, and the new volume actually led a column of six already almost completed buildings.
And here is the dilemma: design a new tower in the same style or visually reassign the buildings of the entire block to it. A lot of options were developed, some of them were more pleasant to us, some to the customer, and the Moskomarkhitektura said the last word, recommending a very restrained of the compromise options we proposed. The appearance of this house is also dominated by a lattice, but taking into account the location and dimensions of the building, its cells are enlarged, vertical divisions are emphasized, and the facades are painted in two different colors, which creates the feeling of a skin turned inside out.
The architects of your studio are generally very fond of working with color, preferring bright colors and spectacular combinationsas, for example, the widely recognized house "Avangard"
- Bright colors are not an end in themselves, but one of the means of creating a harmonious living environment. And we do not always strive to make the facades of our objects as bright and cheerful as possible. In a sense, this theme can be traced in our new project for the Pioneer company - a multifunctional center on Mitinskaya, 16. These are two volumes - a 10-storey business center with a developed public area and a 23-storey apart-hotel on a common stylobate, which houses retail premises, a fitness center and parking, the very typology of commercial real estate for this district of Moscow is completely new. We developed a lot of options at the pre-design stage, this concerned both space-planning and functional solutions and facades.
And this is exactly the case when it seemed appropriate to us to make the palette of facades calmer and colder, and at the same time a little defiantly contrasting with the usual environment. But the customer chose a different coloristic solution, which, in his opinion, is more in harmony with the surrounding buildings and is close to the "corporate" color scheme of the future chain hotel. And although our very imaginative idea - a more permeable office façade and a more pixelated hotel façade - was retained, the reasoning behind the choice of color does not seem convincing to us.
It turns out that today the very structure of the order with which you work is changing, and you are less engaged in elite housing and more and more working in the economy class segment? How interesting is it?
- Now it is customary to call it "comfort class", and personally I like this definition much more economy class, and even more so the expression "affordable housing". Affordable housing in Moscow is already a cliché behind which pre-fabricated panel housing is often hidden, depriving the city of any expression and character. Someone very accurately said that the city does not need affordable housing, but decent housing, and the "comfort" class allows you to achieve an optimal ratio of price and quality, and at the same time expressiveness and individuality. This genre is very interesting to us - it's like making porridge from an ax: both the result suits everyone, the costs are acceptable, and each participant considers himself smarter than the other. In general, we are happy to undertake such projects.
It's no secret that often such good intentions of developers end exactly at the moment when he is close to the completion of the project, or even ready to go to the site. How can you not remember your own project "Marfino", which was postponed to the far corner, and the developer instead built a huge block of panel residential buildings
- Yes, "Marfino" is a rather sad and insulting example for us. But, you know, time puts everything in its place: the developer eventually realized that the stake only on panel housing is, by definition, losing. Several years after Marfino, Vedis Group contacted us again. Now they are engaged in the construction of a residential quarter in Electrolitny Proezd in Moscow, and they understand that it will not work to make it interesting using only typical panel series, so they ordered us two houses, which, standing out against the background of all buildings, number of storeys, shape and decoration, will become Hopefully, a kind of flagship of the renewed area. These are monolithic buildings with an expressive trapezoidal shape in plan. Moreover, such a solution to the plan was chosen not for the sake of the "sculptural" volume, but for a combination of factors: the prevailing urban planning situation, insolation, rigidly specified apartmentography. And the image of the facades was formed by the architects, although as a result of enumerating options, but it is quite natural and logical: in my opinion, a tactful presence in the proposed circumstances and healthy ambitions are combined here. What Sergei Kiselev characterized as two "U": relevance and skill. Here, by the way, we deliberately abandoned bright colorful tones, relying on the win-win expressiveness of the black-white combination.
How did you manage to agree on the project of a residential building in the middle price category with almost no balconies and loggias?
- There are public loggias of smoke-free stairs, on which we propose to place air conditioner units, plus we were unable to fight off several near-apartment loggias under the pressure of marketers. There is, of course, some stereotype in this topic: with a balcony, and even more so with a loggia, an apartment is more expensive, for a Russian person they have become an integral part of the organization of everyday life, and it is extremely difficult to change this. I will not speak for everyone, but the overwhelming majority of residents strive to connect these areas to a warm circuit, thereby increasing the usable area of the apartment. So why not do it right away, especially since the norms allow it with two escape ladders, and the "cold elements" themselves are still sold at the same price? In general, these two topics - balconies and air conditioners - are perhaps the main trouble of modern Russian housing construction, the field where considerations of aesthetics and the interests of future residents come into irreconcilable conflict. For example, in houses in Tekstilshchiki we have provided places for installing air conditioning units - special niches on the loggias. And what do you think? People's ingenuity pushes residents to hang outdoor blocks directly on the facade, arguing that they will adapt "paid" niches for something more useful for them, and the air space behind the plane of the facade can be used free of charge.
- Workshop "Sergei Kiselev and Partners" entered
among the finalists of the competition for the concept of a residential complex on Rublevskoye Highway. Do you take part in other high-profile contests of recent times?
- Not all in a row, of course, but we participate. We choose competitions, the topics of which are close to us in spirit and interesting from a professional point of view. For example, we took part in the first round of the competition for the project of the International Financial Center in Rublevo-Arkhangelskoye - this place is well known to us, here we designed on two plots in a development project for a previous investor. We also applied for participation in the competition for the design of the park in Zaryadye, and now we are waiting for the results of the first round of the competition for the project of reconstruction of the territory of the Sickle and Hammer plant. Previously, we took part in a custom-made tender for a shopping center on Tverskaya Zastava Square. We do not refuse less pretentious and ambitious "chamber" contests. So, we recently completed a competition project for reorganizing the former industrial zone on Suschevsky Val, did not win, but this type of competition is already a concrete work in itself and is another addition to the experience.
- Reconstruction of industrial areas has always been one of the specialties of your workshop. Even in our recent review of Moscow development projects for former industrial zones, SKiP is mentioned almost most often …
“This is truly one of our favorite areas of professional endeavor. We are still working on several projects of multifunctional complexes on the site of former production facilities, including comprehensive landscaping and the creation of public recreational spaces. It is too early to talk about this, there will be a reason to continue the conversation on this topic later, when it becomes possible to evaluate the result. Our cooperation with "Krasnaya Roza" continues - now we are building three objects there at once in the format of "small houses" within the framework of the territory development concept developed by our company back in 2003, taking into account today's realities.
