The competition for the best project of a residential complex, which is planned to be built in Moscow at the intersection of Rublevskoye Shosse and Yartsevskaya Street, was organized by the PIK group of companies and Moskomarkhitektura last autumn. Archi.ru has already covered its results, summed up just before the New Year holidays. Now we will tell you more about the project of Sergei Skuratov, whose decision was unanimously recognized by the jury as the best.
As the author recalls, the project had two super tasks: to emphasize the town-planning significance of the site and to create a new architectural dominant of the area. The fact is that the intersection of Rublevskoye Highway and Yartsevskaya Street is a very high point (this is the edge of the Krylatsky Hill) and is perfectly visible even from remote areas of the capital, but the developers who have already checked in here thought least of all about their own urban planning responsibility. Despite the well-known high cost of new buildings on Rublevka, their appearance, at best, causes indifference, although more often these houses are frankly frightening with their height and density. Actually, this is why Moskomarkhitektura initiated an architectural competition: the site facing the intersection is practically the last free site here, which, due to its frontal location, can still "replay" the spontaneously forming urban landscape.
In total, Sergei Skuratov ARCHITECTS worked out more than 12 options for the architectural and planning solution of the future complex, consistently filling an almost rectangular area with houses-plates, now with a single megastructure-screen, now with various towers. Strictly speaking, the architects came to the conclusion that exactly the towers should be built here: the exceptional visibility of the site dictated a transparent and silhouette building, but their number and layout were discussed for a long time. Numerous models show that the skyscrapers have repeatedly changed their shape and moved around the site. The workshop even had an option, when the towers were connected by a stylobate in the form of the letter Y, with its tick facing the Rublevskoe highway. However, from distant points they were superimposed on each other, therefore, in the end, the composition of four different-height volumes won, which are spaced around the perimeter of the conditional rectangle and are located closer to the middle of each of its sides.
The highest (40 floors) is the tower overlooking Yartsevskaya. On the other side of the street, a high-rise building has already been built in the form of a stepped arched ridge. The residential complex of Skuratov picks up the "red line" set by this object, but with its strict thin verticals opposes its excess mass, thereby setting a new coordinate system in the panorama of the district. The tower, bordering on the Rublevskoye highway backup, and its counterparts within the site, are of equal height (30 floors) and, in turn, pick up the rhythm of more distant high-rise dominants that close the Yartsevskaya perspective on the other side of the highway. And, finally, the northernmost tower, the most distant from the tunnel, has only 24 floors - it serves as a kind of transitional element that fixes the relief difference that begins behind the site. Interestingly, by giving preference to a composition of different heights, Skuratov actually violated the requirement of the TOR of the competition on the detailed distribution of areas across the sections of the complex. “We really decided to ignore this point, betting on the expressiveness of the compositional solution, which“catches”the chaotic rhythms of the verticals and emptiness of the old and new buildings, introducing an element of calm and balance into the surrounding urban planning chaos,” explains the architect himself. As we already know, the jury agreed with this argument.
The architectural design of the towers is both simple and expressive. Each of the volumes has two more material and two more permeable facades. The former are ceramic surfaces with "punched cards" of windows, on the latter, light and clear lamellas are superimposed over the solid glazing, behind which are hidden loggias with personal outdoor units of split systems. There are also two colors in the palette of the complex - white and terracotta, and from facade to facade they alternate in such a way that each house differs from its neighbors. It would seem that everything is very simple: here is a white "punch card", here it is red, here again it is white, but this time the end face - but it is precisely due to the alternation of only two types of "graphics" that the authors manage to maximize the perception of the complex from different angles.
The endings of the towers also give expressiveness to the silhouette - the already slender, skyscrapers seem to be thinning upwards, becoming more permeable. Skuratov does not bring residential floors under the very roof, but, on the contrary, creates public terraces here, surrounded by a pergola. The most important public space is also the three-level stylobate, which occupies almost the entire site and contains all the non-residential and technical premises of the complex. Along its entire outer perimeter, there is a zone of shops, offices, banks and services, marked by an arcade characteristic of the “gostiny dvor” genre, and at the intersection of this horizontal line with the verticals of the towers, the stone fabric of the facade is effectively turned away, denoting the entrance halls of residential buildings.
Lapels and folds generally become the most important finishing touches to the architectural image of the complex. And this technique is inspired, it seems, by the same immediate context - Yartsevskaya street in this place dives into a tunnel, and its elongated funnel is directed directly to the future complex. A similar deformation occurs not only at the lower level, but also at the uppermost level: the roofs over the public terraces of the towers are obviously pushed inward. On the diagrams, architects in these places even draw eloquent weights, and Sergei Skuratov himself poetically explains that, they say, the helicopter flew in and crushed with its bowl. That is why one - the most developed - support of the pergola turned out to be inclined - like on the scale of the whole complex and not a very noticeable detail, but an attentive observer will invariably intrigue.
If the stylobate itself is accessible to all citizens, then its roof is only for the residents of the complex. On it Sergey Skuratov proposed to place a park with difficult terrain and a whole system of ramps, passages and bridges. A jogging track is laid along its perimeter, from which green slopes descend like an amphitheater to the central zone with a children's and sports grounds. Interestingly, the architects propose to make a canopy over the sites and connect them with covered passages to each house, which guarantees residents the opportunity to go outside in any weather. Of course, landscape gardening with the effect of natural relief is not a cheap pleasure, but we are not talking about raising the cost of the project budget: the architects offer to save money due to the proposed structure of parking lots and technical premises (only one underground and one aboveground, skillfully hidden in the very slopes, instead of expensive foundation pits).
By the way, the authors of the project approached the constructive and engineering solutions of the residential part of the complex just as rationally. For example, the wet zones of all apartments are located along the inner perimeter of the floor, close to the communication cores, which will give residents the opportunity to plan living rooms at their own discretion. And the use of the universal facade system "Zerringer" will make it possible to mount the facades from the inside to the ends of the floor slabs, i.e. without the construction of "scaffolding" and in parallel with the construction of a monolithic frame, which, in turn, will significantly reduce the time and cost of construction. The efficiency of the project was noted by the jury as highly as the architectural and planning solution of the complex. It remains to be hoped that for future buyers these qualities will be equally attractive - the relative affordability of housing and its emphasized stylish modernity.
