The house, renovated according to the project of the ADM bureau (we have already talked about the project) is located on the border of the large Stalinist district to the south-west of the junction of the Leningradskoye and Volokolamskoye highways. The area is motley built up, but houses of the “Stalinist” period, the middle of the 20th century, still prevail in it, supported, for example, by the solution in the same spirit, only by the even larger complex “Marshal” by Mikhail Filippov. All this is closer to Leningradka, and to the west, the houses are simplified, here they are often diluted with “Vukhlokh towers”, five-story buildings and giants of the “Luzhkov style” period. Along Berzarina Street, which arc separates the residential area from the old industrial railway, houses of the 1950s were built, and among them there are both cozy post-war three-story buildings and five-six-story houses in the spirit of extremely simplified classics: made of silicate bricks, but with a plinth and cornice. One of these houses, built along the red line, was reconstructed by the architects ADM, completely renewing the facades and radically changing the image of the house.
Being built into a rare series of provincial-home Poznestalin buildings, the house now evokes completely different imaginative associations, and in order to understand which ones, you need to consider it. First of all, there is no plinth and cornice. The upper part has been turned into an attic with bunk apartments, the sleeping "lofts" of which are illuminated by antiaircraft windows built into the roof - they are not visible from the street, but a number of brick window frames are clearly visible, embedded, almost like loopholes, into the galvanized slope of the attic.
The top of the house is thus subject to the vertical, not the horizontal, and is more open to the sky than separated from it, as would be the case with the cornice. This allows, on the one hand, to visually reduce the height, since with a cursory glance from below, we do not quite understand where exactly the upper floor ends and therefore we do not take it seriously. On the other hand, the same technique becomes either a starting point, or - the final accent in the new priorities of the facade composition: namely, the house is now a dense mass not cut through by windows - it is more perceived as a network woven of verticals and horizontals, the interweaving of lines of force associated with this or that material.
So, brick planes, or rather, lined with artificially aged bricks of different shades, are responsible for the verticals, although the fractional grid of joints is rather horizontal. Gray-painted metal I-beams visually separate the floors and set a large horizontal step, while made of related material, that is, also metal, balcony gratings (half for air conditioners, the second for balconies proper) “play for the vertical”. At the same time, the house is stitched through and through with giant brackets of vertical staircases - glass in metal frames, somewhere with wooden inserts, somewhere combined with courtyard bay windows, whose role of "vertical communications" is figuratively played in every possible way - and rightly so, these axes, like a frame, they sew the whole house and restrain the light rhythmic mobility, given by the alternation of alpolica inserts imitating wood at the window openings.
There are many details linked to a common rhythm, and all the techniques are basically already familiar to us from the works of ADM, but they are used here in a slightly different way, they are subordinated to a different purpose - and, by the way, it is, the authors hone their favorite techniques on different problems. For example, inserts similar to a tree of Alpolik are familiar to us from the facades.
complex Smart park (its customer is the same company Sminex, as in this case, near the house on Berzarina street), but there they resembled open shutters or the edges of institute buildings of the seventies, here the inserts are wider, their extension is smaller, and they are similar, forgive me this free comparison, to fragments of a half-timbered structure of wood - as if all the wooden parts were hidden, replaced, smeared, and these remained. Or half of the door trim. But, however, it must be admitted that this is a completely decorative, abstract technique, not much like anything, but it allows architects to revive the rhythm and compare the texture of the darkish brick with the bright sun shine of the (artificial) tree, and as a result soften the texture and humanize the impression of the building in the whole.
Architects have also been working with "special" bricks for a long time - in the house on Berzarin Street, this material is responsible for respectability and continuity. Vertical proportions of windows are also a favorite ADM technique, almost everywhere where architects undertake the reconstruction of buildings of the Soviet era, they stretch openings to a noble outline. The same can be said about the multi-layered facades: working with the wall, architects consider the thickness of about seventy centimeters to be “their own”, and here, too, the wall has: the plane of glass, the thinnest and most “inner” surface, the surface of a light gray fiber-reinforced concrete “forehead” above it is a ribbon, visually flashing all the windows in the upper part, then brick, metal, and finally, the balconies - the ephemeral "avant-garde" protruding farthest forward. The I-beams between floors, which are trademark for ADM architects, are also transformed here, as they bend forward, repeating the projections of the balconies - in other ADM houses they look stricter and more like rails, but here they suddenly show their decorative essence and kinship with an element of classical architecture, a frieze interfloor rods - by the way, among the Stalinist houses of the district you can see at least one, where the floors are separated by very similar, albeit plaster rods.
And finally, one more favorite technique or even a theme - architects, as we know, are very attentive to the improvement of the adjacent territory, doing what is supposed to be done for the city and the dwellings of the house, and even more than, perhaps, required. Here too: the backyard is fenced off with a transparent lattice, - only for our own people, - decorated with special lanterns and equipped with a gazebo, the wooden slats of which hide the conversation from prying eyes.
Even more attention is paid to the street side: the trees on the sidewalk are supported by lawn grass, brick pavement and benches made of wooden slats embedded in a stone parapet with flower beds, stairs and metal gratings. This parapet is the most unexpected, at least unusual for Moscow, detail of the house. The fact is that behind it is hidden a rather deep, semi-basement floor of the house - the windows open into a rather deep and wide "trench" lined with stone, and thus receive quite a lot of sunlight, although less than the windows of the main floors. Here, as well as on the first floor, there are shops and office premises.
A wide parapet with flower beds, benches and trellises, interrupted by stairs leading to the first floor and ramps, does not allow anyone to fall into the trenches. And all together looks like … well, just like London, or another North European (Dutch) or, on the contrary, an Anglicized American city. Lattices alternating with stairs and flower beds, bricks, respectable long windows with gratings at the base (already, if we talk about sources, they are more likely French), add up to a picture recognizable from many films, and who is more fortunate, and from tourist impressions. So, on the half-asleep Moscow semi-outskirts, which, if you look around, evokes more nostalgic memories of bakeries with halva in chocolate, walks with a dog, playing football, a piece appeared that was completely London, in structure and sensations. It is not surprising that there are already a lot of cars around, shops are working, and beauties are coming out of the salon - the house began to live its own life.
