The theme of the improvement of urban spaces entered our life somehow quickly and everywhere: it would seem that five years ago it was enough to plant the notorious chubushnik in the adjacent territory (in Moscow it is called jasmine), but now the architects go out to mini-rallies for the competition on Triumfalnaya Square, The Construction Department is changing Pokrovka beyond recognition, and the PR services of development companies publish reviews of the improvement of large office complexes. The project of the bureau T + T architects, being implemented, has every chance of getting into one of these reviews.
T + T architects received an order for a project for the improvement of the Savelovsky City complex, which is being built on Skladochnaya Street according to a project by SPEECH. The surroundings are typical of the transformation period: a large industrial zone (No. 11 Ogorodny Proezd, total area of 330 hectares) has been turning into a conglomerate of business centers, business parks and other office institutions for several years in a row. Some of which are still housed in the unsightly buildings of Soviet factories, some are settling in an artistic get-together, such as the Flacon design plant, some are being rebuilt, like our hero, Savelovsky City.
Its territory stretches from north to south along the railway tracks, from which it is separated by a dense chain of barns, and now it is, frankly speaking, in the depths of a semi-industrial, semi-office, but so far, to put it mildly, undeveloped territory. On foot - from the metro stations Dmitrovskaya or Savelovskaya - you need to get along wooden paths through the railway tracks - not far, but unpleasant; by car, backyards, and also through the railway crossing. In a word, hell. And the prospects are bright: on the site of the wooden footbridge on Novodmitrovskaya Street above the railway, a nine-meter overpass is planned: it will pass near the northern border of our office and business center and will make it much more accessible. From the south - the Ring Railway, it has long been planned to make it a passenger railway; near the metro and the railway station of the Savelovsky direction. You just have to wait a little, when the whole territory "rises" to the city level, just about.
In the meantime, T + T architects had the task of turning a very small - 1.65 hectares - territory of the office and business center into paradise (well, or just a cozy place), where you can relax both after a run from the metro and after a busy business day … In an extremely constrained position, the architects had to work in the genre of landscape gardening miniatures, thinking over all the little things in several versions, saturating the space, reacting to the past and future surroundings.
The complex consists of four twenty-story office buildings in its northern and central parts and two forty-seven-story residential towers in the (loosely interpreted) Chicago style - in the south, closer to the Sovenok and Stancolith. First of all, it includes the construction of a parking lot, two northern buildings (they are almost completed, they can already be seen from Zvezdny Boulevard) and an improvement project developed by T + T architects. Thus, the project is made a little "for the future", since it considers the entire territory as a whole (although it excludes the territory directly around residential buildings and office buildings of the second stage). The architects did not only design the landscaping concept, but also developed the working documentation.
Since the public area is small, and there are a lot of parking lots on the territory: under each building and there is also a wall of an eight-tier parking in the eastern part of the complex, the architects suggested leaving at least fourteen parking spaces on the ground. And they also slightly redesigned the transport scheme, turning one extra passage into a firefighter: if necessary, a fire engine will be able to call in here, and for the rest, not a critical time of life - that is, almost always, this space will be pedestrian. The rejection of one duplicate passage allowed us to attach a piece of a park with greenery to the pedestrian zone - earlier, on the way to it, one would have to cross the road. At the beginning of the former automobile passage, the architects arranged a small triangular pedestrian square - the square became one of the accents marking the main entrance to the territory.
The main entrance from the side of the Dmitrovskaya metro station and the future overpass of Novodmitrovskaya street, it must be admitted, was the result of a confluence of town-planning circumstances, plastically and spatially it is invisible, a cut off corner of a plot of irregular shape, no courtier is obtained here and a small triangular square at the corner is all that can be done. In addition, the entrance (and the entire complex) is fenced off from the future overpass by the diagonal of the Mediamakrt building - and in order to make it easy to find the way there in the future, accents or at least signs were required. The architects offered customers a choice of a whole set of stele-signs of different shapes and heights: from a stylized arrow made of perforated metal to a cube with luminous ice under a shiny surface, on a leg like a large billboard. It is also planned that a series of smaller similar steles will line up from the arrow-stele installed at the corner near the overpass to the entrance to the complex, stretching a thread from the city highway to the business center so that no one gets lost.
It is planned to continue the road leading from the future overpass to the south of the complex and make a through road leading to Skladochnaya Street - the passage will run along the western and southern borders of the complex. The architects decided not to make a fence on this side, thus opening the territory of the complex to the city; in addition, the buildings are located next to the passage and the fence would clearly have squeezed the space, making the complex unfriendly to the changing environment.
On the other two borders, the fence, on the contrary, is necessary - the authors of the project believe - but not the same everywhere: they offer several gradations of the fence, smoothly merging into one another. On the northern border, next to the equipped area of the Mediamarkt, the fence is low, rather symbolic; one of the possible options is a retaining wall 60 centimeters high. The eastern border, especially in the middle, where the neighboring section looks especially industrial, requires a concrete fence: with a texture that imitates formwork, and an uneven height - where the neighbors become more decent, the concrete gradually decreases, gradually giving way to a translucent fence made of vertical metal strips, which, again, in places they thicken, in places they become more rarefied.
Having walked around the site in this way, let's return to its content - it is diverse. Considering the fact that the territory will be viewed not only from below, but also from above, from numerous windows, the architects paid special attention to the geometric pattern that is formed by paths, benches and flower beds. The drawing is actively complemented by strokes of bright colored asphalt: they continue the stripes of non-ferrous metal on the facades of office buildings, which, thus, either grow out of the ground or grow into the landscape with decorative "roots".
The colored dotted line of the ornamental pavement sets the main theme, which receives different interpretations in the thematic zones. On one and a half hectares, the architects have planned six such zones. We are already partly familiar with one of them - this is the square adjacent to the triangle of the main entrance from the Dmitrovskaya side, a place of meetings and communication, where an extra car passage gave way to a technical one, combined with a pedestrian path. The lines of colored asphalt flowing from the facades are echoed by the dotted line of rectangular benches, closed from the mini-parking by tall grass, bushes and trees in tall tubs. Here you can come to your senses after the road from the metro, here you can leave the office, relax and have a chat. The second zone - business and busy, here is the most saturated pedestrian traffic - between the two buildings, there is almost no greenery in it, only a little grass in rectangular bollards.
Further - to the east, on the relative periphery, there are three recreation areas. The first - northern, “park”, is concentrated around curved benches built into the landscape: “following the example of Gaudí's bench in Park Guell,” the architects explain; but only in this case, the benches are not majolica, but wooden. The wavy lines of the benches complement the touches of colored asphalt, hinting at the connection between the park and the business area. To the south - a terraced square, it was here that a concrete fence was needed in order to fence off an unsuccessful industrial neighborhood; terraces that use and accentuate the difference in relief also help to distract attention from the surroundings. They are echoed by plates of screens-pergolas, entwined with plants, dissecting the space and hiding the fence. This is a "playground for secluded relaxation."
The next element of space is a promenade stretched between the buildings and an eight-tier parking lot - a street covered with a long canopy with a wooden seamy side, a zigzag snake of illumination and expanding in the middle into a small square. The canopy hides the rustic facades of the parking lot; it accepts visitors from the side of Stankolit and Savelovskaya, and also serves as a pedestrian boulevard connecting parts of the complex with each other; under it it will be possible to pass from residential buildings to offices.
South of the parking lot, next to the residential towers, there is a public garden with playgrounds. Here a wide path forms a wavy line, clinker bricks of a natural terracotta shade appear on the pavement. One can argue whether residential towers will have enough of such a recreation area, or even whether residential buildings (in the status of apartments) of forty-seven-storey height are needed here, but it must be admitted that the sites put an end to development, complete the fan of various squares that the architects managed here place.
Another feature of the landscape proposed by the architects is the multitude of lamps. The strokes built into the plane of the pavement, a now popular technique, echo stripes of colored asphalt; several types of column lamps of different heights determine the scale: from automobile to pedestrian and to low - for children. Flexible ribbons of ice illuminate from below the lines of the benches, sometimes wavy, sometimes angular; they also form a zigzag on the inside of the canopy above the promenade. Round lamps are planned to be built into the grass of the lawns.
There are a lot of offers; the detailing of the space reaches a kind of almost interior quality, it has less landscape space, and more man-made courtyard or a small city square (which is completely opposite to the traditional Moscow scale, the width of unformed asphalt spaces, to which we are accustomed in the city and which is especially acutely felt in industrial zones). This space, on the other hand, is rather urban, carefully designed, like an island among not yet comprehended semi-factory territories. One thing is certain: the spatial and decorative ideas in this project are compressed so tightly that future residents and office workers will not be bored.
