The address sounds modern: the rural settlement of Chulkovskoye, near the village of Zelenaya Sloboda, not far from the village of Volodarsky. Three hundred hectares of land with a beautiful natural landscape and interesting relief stretched along the smooth bend of the Pakhra River. Economy class settlement. Housing, all infrastructure facilities, a large park, shopping and office areas, a large medical center. City outside the city. In essence, it is a thing in itself.
From an urban planning point of view, it is a polycentric interconnected structure that unites residential areas and public spaces saturated with a wide variety of scenarios.
Two years ago, when it all began, the task seemed reasonable and not too difficult, if not for two "buts". Firstly, part of the village was separated from the main territory by the riverbed. And secondly, at the time of the start of work on the project on this site, located by the will of fate between the Kashirskoye and Novoryazanskoye highways, a loop of a new highway had already been laid. Its construction was undertaken by the state. But this new four-lane road cut the future village strictly in half, practically isolating the parts from each other and depriving them of the atmosphere of quiet suburban life. In addition, on such a small number of hectares, it was necessary to place about 350-400 thousand square meters of low-density housing, taking into account all natural protected areas along the river and forest, as well as other numerous restrictions.
The most accurate idea turned out to be the idea of breaking a complex and twisted into an uneven loop into five separate and independent parts, denoting them with the popular word "clusters". "Each cluster has its own character!" But the point is not in the term: the shape of the site itself dictated such a decision. On the one hand, all parts, that is, clusters, are completely self-sufficient, on the other hand, they are inextricably linked by a dense network of pedestrian routes and the very road that, after long negotiations, was rerouted, moved from the center to the outer border of the village, providing additional exits inland. quarters. As a result, only trade and office zones, a medical center with a sanatorium and a boarding house, as well as a hotel complex, standing separately in the middle of the park, remained “cut off”. As for the river tearing apart the territory, due to its non-navigability, the problem was solved by several bridges, to which long alleys and pedestrian boulevards lead.
We took up the Pakhra project at a time when “new urbanism” became a very popular direction in urban planning, implying absolute clarity of lines and functional clarity of the planning structure, as a rule, orthogonal or, in Russian translation, a rectangular grid, - says Aleksey Ivanov. was chosen by the customer, putting us in a rather rigid framework”. But despite the framework, the architects managed to find ways to add variety to a clear and, in fact, pragmatic neighborhood development.
So, in the main - northeastern part, a fragment of a radial-circular layout was used: all buildings, following the relief, descend to the river. Here you can see the Pakhra bank from almost any point. The inner road ring marks out the urban center of this cluster with a theater square and a green square inside it. A sports complex and educational institutions are located in the most remote, northern part. On the opposite bank, at the entrance to the village, it is planned to build two-storey townhouses. A little closer to the center, on the other bank of the Pakhra, there is the Church of the Archangel Michael: most of the streets are oriented towards its domes, which ensures the visual interconnection of the village, the unity of the integral town formation”.
The last stage of construction is the western section with an area of 80 hectares. Here, residential buildings as a whole are subordinated to an orthogonal grid, within which, nevertheless, almost all groups of quarters are solved in different ways, and the streets refuse to intersect at right angles, every now and then changing direction. In the south, a separate area near a small lake will be given to temporary housing - hotels and houses for rent. Beaches and boat stations are planned on the river.
Alternating and interspersing fragments of simple planning solutions, developing them in different directions - south-north, east-west, the architects managed to make the traditional quarter cut diversified, subordinating the plan to an elegant arc that enlivens the landscape of the village, linking together not only different fragments of the building, but also many landscape angles, picturesque views of the surroundings.
