Kashira near Moscow is now best known as the Priokskoye dacha place, and not at all due to the several factories located here, among which there is one for the production of alcohol; and not even because of the Kashirskaya GRES, built under the personal leadership of Lenin. And I must say that the name of the "urban settlement", now assigned to many localities, suits Kashira more than the "city" itself: the city as such, in ordinary urbanistic concepts, is not immediately found here. Kashira is a historically torn city, “moving”: after the Time of Troubles, it was moved to the right bank of the Oka from the devastated left bank, where, in Old Kashira, a settlement was preserved. On the right bank, the city existed as a district and a bourgeois one, with wide streets and low buildings - until they decided to develop it as an industrial center, laying several railway branches to the Oka, which is very convenient, since it allows using two types of transport at once, and arranging to the east three kilometers from the county Kashira, behind the field and the railway, the town of "Kashira-2", at factories and power plants. Later, on the eastern outskirts of the old (well, relatively old) city, a microdistrict "Kashira-3" was built, which netizens have now dubbed "a natural ghetto": block five- and ten-story buildings, "nowhere to go", but according to Soviet norms there are schools and kindergartens … Nearby, right on the border with the field and next to the highway that leads from the Don highway in the direction of Kolomna - at the end of the eighties they built the building of the city administration, from the regional committee of pink bricks, but according to an individual project. The administration turned out to be geometrically in the center, but psychologically - on the very outskirts of old Kashira, adhered to a not too developed microdistrict. And in the middle, or rather between the townships of the bourgeois and the industrial, there is a void, a gap that the city-machine in the seventies began to fill with "Kashira-3", but stopped short, did not fully cope with it.
It is here, on the field to the east of the offices of the city government, now it is planned to build an "Academy of Sports Games" - on the scale of Kashira, a town with a population of about forty thousand people, - a very large, federal scale, the total area of all planned premises - 85 thousand m2, which is average for Moscow, but a lot for Kashira. The project is very multifunctional: in addition to two halls for the actual competitions, a large and small, a training complex, a swimming pool and other sports infrastructure, a boarding school, housing for teachers and an interuniversity center are planned (branches of several Moscow institutes operate in Kashira), as well as three shopping centers, which will continue the business of the store, which is already perched on the road next to the city administration. Officials talk about the importance of the new "Academy" for the development of the city and"
increasing its investment attractiveness”. The project was approved by the city council of the Moscow region; the architectural concept of the Academy of Sports was developed by Yuri Vissarionov's PTAM, and showed it among its new projects at the Zodchestvo festival stand, stylized in the spirit of the twenties (by the way, the bureau's stand received the festival's "golden diploma").
Now, as already mentioned, the territory of the future "Academy of Sports" is an open field with a small copse in the background, where the teachers' housing is planned. But according to the city's development plan, it should be cut by a road that will continue Tsentrolit Street, leading through the fields from Kashira to the foundry located just to the south - then it will be possible to drive from the factory to the city in a straight line. The new road is, on the one hand, a plus for the new "academy", since it will provide a convenient access to the sports complex itself and to its public and administrative center, and on the other hand, it is a minus, because the transport artery will inevitably divide the ensemble into two parts … Therefore, the architects proposed to “cover” the transport watershed with a green boulevard bridge. The wide boulevard serves as a public center and the green heart of the complex; in particular, it will be possible to walk along it from the old microdistrict "Kashira-3" to the central part of the "Academy". Generally speaking, the main sports center looks like an oval donut, a semblance of a spaceship from a science fiction novel, landing on the grass slightly obliquely and from this partly embedded in the ground. However, it is tightly pressed to the ground by five gentle triangles, which fit a fitness center, a training complex and the continuation of the main sports complex. It turns out something like a giant octopus (more precisely, a five-legged one), or even a button, which, if viewed from above, seems to be trying to connect different parts of Kashira scattered in the landscape. A kind of space clip.
The roofs of triangular volumes, the conditional "legs" of our paper clip, have been turned into boulevards-hills, from which it will be convenient to ski in winter. Doubt arises in the image of the spaceship: what if the "donut", on the contrary, has grown out of the ground? And then some secret underground "Kashira-4" appears - it's amazing that parts of the city were built so far from each other, there must be some reason - and so, there was a secret "donut" underground, some kind of collider, and tectonic shifts forced him to rise to the surface - something happened there, like in a submarine, and he got out, and the massive attachments that held him there inevitably rose - well, they turned into slopes convenient for skiers and children with sledges … Dmitry Bykov in the novel "Railway" has a similar image when "the earth rises." Of course, all this fantasy is akin to space, but she explains the resulting image quite accurately.
Green slopes on the roofs, together with a promenade above the road, turn the complex into a very landscaped one, belonging to the relief and even partly park, although there are not so many trees, there is more grass and especially a lot of ground parking lots: there are no underground parking lots, and asphalt for cars occupies about 12% of the entire territory … The fusion of buildings with the landscape, their assimilation to the results of tectonic shifts and cut hills is a common technique of modern architecture from the category of ecological, showing respect for the environment. In addition, thanks to the boulevards-anchors, the sports facility, which is obviously too large for this city and this place, has acquired the necessary scale for its near and distant surroundings: it fits into the urban-suburban environment.
The problem of conformity to scale is solved here delicately. The location of the "Academy" between the existing residential buildings and the picturesque landscape of the nearest suburb predetermines the rational distribution of administrative, residential, trade, educational, sports and other functions throughout the center. At the same time, the architects had to find the right proportional solutions, to melt, dissolve such a significant object, to “grow” it into the city. What we managed: the exaggerated rhythm of large volumes of the middle part of the ensemble is transformed to the periphery into a scattering of small rectangular prisms in plan, forming the exact topography of the complex. In the western part of the territory, next to the Kashira-3 microdistrict, there are administration offices, a hotel and shopping centers. In the east, near the forest, there are family dormitories for coaches and educators, a rehabilitation center and a kindergarten. And there - further, on the so-called "reserve" territories, "low-rise housing" is planned in the future: apartments, mini-hotels and boarding houses, whose scale towards the borders of the territory decreases to a cottage, smoothly growing into the image of the county Kashira, trying to overcome the characteristic of this place the fragmentation of the semi-urban tissue, to grow it together as much as possible in such cases.
