The plate of a residential building is stretched out between Lenin Street and the railway, among greenery, garages and high-rise buildings in the northern part of the town of Dzerzhinsky near Moscow. From here to the Moscow Ring Road - one and a half kilometers to the north, and to the Nikolo-Ugreshsky Monastery, the ancient, albeit rebuilt center of the entire area - two kilometers to the south, half an hour on foot. The new residential complex was named Ugreshsky.
The complex, in fact, consists of one house: two floors of underground parking for 190 cars, a bank branch, cafes and shops in the basement, seventeen residential floors on top, business-class apartments from one to three rooms. It was built in 2012, and “… has become an accent in the urban environment due to its size,” says architect Andrei Asadov. - Therefore, I wanted to make it as clear and structured as possible. As a result, the compositionally turned out to be a shape-shifting house, consisting of two sections with semicircular bay windows at the ends. The silhouette of the house marks a break in the main street of the city. And the details were developed in continuation of the main idea, revealing a two-piece structure and semicircular accents in the corners."
The shape-shifter is because the volume of the house was built according to the principle of rotation symmetry, beloved by the architects of the avant-garde of the 1920s, and then the neo-constructivism of the 2000s: one part of it (aka section) reflects another, but not in a mirror, but as if it was turned on the hinge. Imagine a dummy knife with a rounded blade, the sharp nose of which looks exactly to the south, the other to the north, like a compass needle that has recently been spinning, swaying and now - froze.
From the imaginary movement, a trace remained: the parabolic contours of sharp "noses", similar to fan blades, indicate the direction of stopped rotation (as in a solar sign), which is picked up, in turn, by the plates of the facade protrusions. There are two protrusions: from the side of Lenin Street they are more authentic and from the side of the courtyard it is shorter, they also obey the symmetry of rotation, they are supported by ledges of loggias at the very end of the plate, corresponding to the "noses" and also symmetrical. The step corresponds to the joining of the sections, otherwise unobtrusive, among other things, because the plates on the western and eastern facades are slightly overlapped, as if wishing to avoid a rigid division of the house into northern and southern parts.
The alternation of the plates of ledges and ledges is emphasized by color: the protruding parts of the facades are white with a red end, which graphically enhances their "step forward". Neighboring planes, stepped back a step, are, on the contrary, stitched with energetic red horizontals against the background of gray vertical walls. It was as if the white "skin" had been carefully removed from a part of the house, revealing the striped structure of the "entrails", almost ecorche. It would even be possible (with a preliminary reservation, of course) to read the form like this: the shavings were removed from a neat white, aluminum modern house, and the avant-garde basis of all modern architecture was revealed under the top layer. Or like this: the city is a product of the Dzerzhinsky street children commune, a commune city, but its center was built up after the war with more respectable and cozy Stalinist houses - they are located closer to the city center along Lenin Street. The facades of the "Ugreshsky" house almost literally demonstrate this process of "overgrowth" of the avant-garde-communal home. All this, of course, is nothing more than assumptions, but since they arise, it means that the house provokes them, which means that it is not empty and not devoid of ideas.
Meanwhile, the geometry of the building remains simple and clean, although it is supported by many details, as the architect admitted above. The dominance of the horizontal lines is emphasized by gray strokes on the end "blades", whose row is interrupted by an unexpected insertion - more precisely, a notch: a bright red niche with six white balconies is cut into the bosom, it imperiously moves a row of windows, disrupting the rhythm. This is an accent intended for the main vantage point, an angle that opens from the turn of Lenin Street and looks in the direction of the monastery (maybe this is an encrypted "red corner"? The semantic play of red-white, traditional-avant-garde is definitely present here, although not imposes itself). Other subtleties: red window frames in a white plane, gray rectangles between the windows, again supporting the horizontal, alternation of windows and loggias, and finally, the lace of small latticed balconies scattered around the facade with sufficient irregularity - the necessary finishing.
The house can be confidently attributed to the neo-constructivist trend, popular in the 2000s and even in the late 1990s. Starting from the just, albeit somewhat nostalgic, belief that the avant-garde is our everything, the architects strove to revive its principles and techniques, to look at the world through its eyes, at times suffering from the contradiction in the replication of the motives of the movement, which itself fundamentally denied any repetition … However, neoconstructivism remained one of the pleasant, honest and sincere attempts to appeal to the roots; it gave its fruits, usually marked by a note of idealism, both on a small and a large scale. One must think that it would be fair to recognize the house in question as a somewhat belated, but mature example of neoconstructivism: symmetry of rotation, sharp noses, the primacy of the horizontal line, a subtle stereometric play, neatly laid out from the frame of simple geometry, and, especially, the poster red and white coloring, - all it is a well-known technique of the architecture of the twenties. Deliberate churning of rhythm to revive the form, delicate decoration, balconies alien to collectivism (as well as the 17-storey scale and material of construction and decoration: a monolithic frame, aluminum panels) - belong to our time and the prefix "neo".
The house also has one more pleasant quality that distinguishes it already within the framework of modernity, the 2010s, a very simple quality - it's just a house. After 2010, architecture was somehow completely distracted from the houses themselves, moving to a macro scale: general plans, villages and districts; and micro: landscaping, parks and squares. All these are very important areas, but it is easy to see that the diversity of the urban environment, in addition to the pattern of pavement pavement, is also created by buildings, the thoughtfulness of their volumes, details, texture and color. As soon as architects are distracted from them, houses again go into the jurisdiction of standard construction, already cheaper and ubiquitous. And sometimes it is so nice to see a house carefully thought out by an architect. Just a home.
