The site on which the residential building is being built is located between the Donskoy Monastery and Leninsky Prospekt. The walls of the monastery are separated from the noisy highway by three quarters, of which only the central one has a classic rectangular shape in plan. And it is in it, bounded by Stasova and Ordzhonikidze streets, as well as by two passages - the 2nd Donskoy and the 3rd Donskoy, that the site intended for the construction of a residential complex is located. However, the precise geometry of the quarter had little effect on the nature of its development: different eras left behind a rather chaotic legacy. There is a school, a transformer substation, a typical nine-storey building, and several dormitories of the textile institute at once, and the latter have a well-deserved "older brother" - the "commune house" of architect I. Nikolaev (1930), located just a hundred meters away. Shyness and shading are two definitions that first of all come to mind when getting to know the site, and Sergei Skuratov admits that it took a long time to decide whether to take on it. They helped to overcome doubts … trees - tall and very elderly, they grow almost along the entire perimeter of the site, creating a natural screen and thereby guaranteeing at least some privacy for both the architectural structure itself and its future inhabitants.
It was these trees that became the "irreplaceable capital" for the architect and the starting point in his search for the appearance of the future residential complex. The object received a symmetrical composition of two six-story buildings, spaced on opposite sides of a conventional rectangle and united by a stylobate. And since trees still do not surround the site from all four sides, the architect shifts the main volume of the stylobate from the exploited roof to its southern, most shaded side. The entrance to the underground parking becomes the opposite of this one-storey building, which does not need any additional screen. “The arrangement of the volumes along the diagonal of the site allowed to organically fit the new object into the existing urban fabric, observing both the requirements of insolation and the optimal scale of the development itself,” comments Sergey Skuratov on the decision of the master plan. It is interesting, by the way, that the architect draws the stylobate with an acute angle to the most densely tree-lined southeastern end of the site, thereby bringing the facades as close as possible to the trunks, while the opposite angle is deliberately rounded: following the configuration of the ramp, it gives a very correct and at the same time worthy a response to the proximity of an intra-block passage, giving the geometry of the facade a friendly but completely self-sufficient character.
Rounds Skuratov and the corners of the bodies themselves, as if melting the edges of the parallelepipeds where they come closest. This technique may resemble another work of an architect - the project is also two-part
houses on Vernadsky Avenue, which remained on paper. There, the buildings also converged over the stylobate, and in order to soften this rather brutal tectonics, Sergey Skuratov made the facades absolutely glass, and rounded the corners noticeably.
These projects are also related to the solution of the facades: in both cases, the architect divides them into “external” and “internal”, making the former deliberately tangible, and the latter, on the contrary, ephemeral. True, if on Vernadsky Avenue the antithesis was played out with the help of a pair of clinker bricks - glass with partial sputtering, this time the role of the "peel" is played by weather-resistant steel in a protective oxide film, which gives it an indelible velvety texture of rust. Moreover, this is not a static facing material, but shutters filled with a continuous lattice of vertical blinds. In other words, here the "peel" is able to radically change its character depending both on the weather and lighting, and simply on the angle of view: the blinds and their more ephemeral reflection in the glass create the effects of moiré waves and a visible gradient, a transition from an almost mirror-like, dissolving into reflection to the material, bright rusty facade. On the already mentioned rounded street facade, this is especially important: the armor invented by the architect seems to be stretched at the fold, thinning almost completely, emphasizing the conventionality of the thesis "my house is my fortress" in a modern metropolis.
The inner facades of both buildings are also made of two layers - the same defenseless "pulp" with which they are turned to the roof of the stylobate and the inner courtyard. The outer layer here is the glazing of the loggias, painted in a gradient from milky white to transparent, and the inner layer is the walls themselves, which are a combination of maximum-sized windows with mirrored glass and walls made of mirrored stemalite.
This is a very Skuratov house in every sense. It reveals in abundance everything that is characteristic of the works of this architect - and non-trivial, but recognizably strict geometry, and the unmistakably found contrast of materials, and thoroughly used opportunities of the site. And also, of course, the feeling of a "living" facade so much appreciated by him. Only earlier, the latter was created mainly due to the material - brickwork or beautifully aging copper - and now Skuratov, so to speak, has connected mechanisms to the materials. Each of the shutters, as well as any sliding glass, can be opened here both manually and automatically - according to the architect's idea, such a variety of scenarios is the best way to guarantee the constant change of the facades. An attraction building or a precisely found image of an environmental object? Of course, the second: the residential complex is in constant, but completely unobtrusive dialogue with its surroundings, fixing and harmonizing the quarter, which used to be part of the indistinct urban "noise".
