The residential complex will become part of a large multi-storey microdistrict, which is planned to be built to the east of the Petersburg Ring Road, near the Devyatkino metro station, near the village with the beautiful name Murino) and the village of Lavriki, on the former farmland. Arrays of multi-storey residential buildings are now being built here. The project of Yuri Vissarionov's bureau will occupy one of the rectangular sections that make up the new district - and the authors of the project made every effort to make their fragment of the future multi-storey buildings bright and noticeable, endowing it with “signs of a traditional quarter” and many different elements of a comfortable urban environment.
The complex consists of six residential buildings, a kindergarten and a district library, and other "service institutions" built into the first floors of the houses. The architects divided the rectangular area into two almost square parts: north-west and north-east, placing on the conditional border between them a wing of a boiling-white building with a symmetrical L-shaped plan (the second wing is parallel to the north-eastern border of the site). The windows are framed in multi-colored frames - as if with colored pencils: the front view of the house is almost white, but when viewed from the side, the color intensifies from a perspective reduction and turns into a rainbow. In some places the windows are gathered in strict vertical rows, somewhere they tend to a chess rhythm, and in some places they merge into stepped glass spots - all this allows to revive the wall of the facade and make it diverse. Architects use similar rhythmic techniques in other, multi-colored buildings: yellow-orange and reddish houses placed around the perimeter are reflected in glass planes, and everything together resembles the sun in a section from a school textbook: the core is white, red-hot, and the crown is yellow, warm. The antipode of the white middle is the "tanned" black tower on the southeastern border of the site.
But something else is more important: the white plate of the transverse body is cut through by a large square portal, which makes the house look like a giant triumphal arch. A pedestrian boulevard passes through the opening - the longitudinal axis on which the entire residential complex is strung. The boulevard includes squares, playgrounds and even a volleyball court. And if the plate of the white building divides the territory into two parts, then the boulevard, on the contrary, connects it with a strong thread, allowing future residents to move freely. The opening is located in the very middle of the site; two of its slopes are painted green, the third, glass, reflects them - a green frame is formed above the boulevard. Our sun, as it turns out, is green in its very middle. The color is picked up by the protruding frames above the entrances; however, there are also yellow ones among them.
In the western part, residential buildings are built almost along the perimeter of the site, gravitating towards isolation, akin to a quarterly layout. The entrance to the central boulevard from this side is marked by 19-storey towers, similar to the multiply enlarged pillars of the entrance gate. The color makes up for the laconicism of the form: orange and red planes alternate with white and gray, white facades now and then get a cheerful and sunny pixel coloring.
In the eastern “square”, it is planned to build two more residential houses-plates, one yellow-orange, the other reddish - note that the warmer red color is reserved by the authors for the formally “cold” northern border of the site: the buildings are visually “warmed up”. In the eastern part there are fewer residential buildings and more public spaces; a lot of space is allocated for landscaping, recreation areas are adjacent to the landscaped area of the kindergarten, the building of which is partially absorbed by the green hill, as well as parking lots,hidden in the northeast corner of the block.
It is important that the architects have definitely relied on the diversity of the environment within the residential complex. There are a lot of the right things here: grass not limited by curbs, miniature lawn gardens, city furniture, bicycle parking; bright lining of tracks; a small amphitheater on a sloping green garage roof and triangular windows in the same place. Large numbers of entrances. In addition to public and “traditional” public areas at ground level, some of the houses have roof terraces with awnings, flower beds, wooden floors, tables and trees in tubs in places where the altitude drops slightly (up to 15 floors). The result is a very dense, saturated urban environment.
The kindergarten is attached to the yellow corner building, but the cold pixel coloring of the facades betrays its "special" function and distinguishes it from its neighbors. Its name - "Palette", I must say, suits the whole complex well: working with color here cannot go unnoticed. The authors seem to be painting an abstract picture, choosing cheerful and sunny colors, which are so lacking in the rainy St. Petersburg climate. In the harsh conditions behind the KAD construction, among the multitude of high-rise buildings, the architects made their “fragment of the palette” bright and varied, hot, like a little sun.
