The construction of an elite-class residential building “Barkley Park” was completed in 2014 and began in 2005. For the architects of the Atrium bureau Vera Butko and Anton Nadtochy, this is the first apartment building completely built from scratch in the city - a kind of debut. although in the same year the construction of a large multifunctional shopping and office center with a twenty-eight-story tower near the Vodny Stadion metro station was completed, so the presence of Atrium in Moscow is now quite tangible. From the very beginning, the Barkley Park house was conceived in an advantageous location: next to two parks and a new metro line under construction and now launched. The site is located in a natural area that is part of the so-called "northern green ray" of Moscow. The consequence was the restrictions, first of all, the height and density, so if in the very first version the area of the house was 65,000 m2, then in the end the city authorities allowed only 45,000 m2… The "green" theme also largely determined the image of the house.
The house added to the architectural ensemble of the Soviet Army Street, which in itself, due to the abundance of parks, may seem empty, but now connects a whole string of buildings, one way or another noticeable architecturally. The imposing Stalinist theater of the Soviet army, behind it - the museum of the same army of the architect Boris Barkhin and the studio of military artists named after Grekov with a monumental panel of Vuchetich and a monument-rocket in front of them, nobly obscured in the spirit of "severe style". To the north, the urban environment is noticeably enlivened by the red and white avant-garde building of school 1414, which received the Crystal Daedalus in 2009, and further, beyond Suschevsky Val, the new facade of the former cinema "Havana" develops a modern theme, which became the first example of nonlinear architecture to be realized in Moscow. and designed also by Vera Butko and Anton Nadtoch, together with Anton's father, the architect Gennady Nadtoch. A little further away - a group of stadiums on Olympic Prospect and next to them - the sharp nose of Gennady Nadtochy's elegantly curved Lukoil building. Not to mention the new Armenian church, the glass office building from the bureau "Ostozhenka" with a glass waist and Konstantin Melnikov's "Garage" a little to the side - in a word, the local urban space looks more like a garden of architectural monuments, diluted with completely neutral panel houses and greenery … Barkley's house in such a park of architectural attractions is quite appropriate. Probably, it would have been impossible otherwise - in a colorful but bright environment, a new house, especially a large enough one, needs individuality.
In addition, the house is also sensitive to the cardinal points and the town-planning context. The brick facade along the street makes two imperceptible bends, supporting the turn of the street, and due to the picturesque glass facade with bay windows, the building seems to dissolve from the road towards the park. Sunbeams and glare are multiplying around it. In sunny weather, especially in early spring or autumn, there is something impressionistic about it. The shell of the facades is composed of three types of conventional architectural "matter". One of them is “shadowy” and at the same time “conservative”, brick, restrained warm color of terracotta is interspersed with the cold shine of free strokes of windows, painted with amazing freedom: the openings are now wider, now narrower, now they lengthen to a height of three floors, now they are reduced to one, and allow themselves even slight shifts, like mixed dominoes. This is a very loosely interpreted version of the holland wall, which probably should compensate for the traditionalism of brick, which, according to the authors, could attract adherents of tradition to this part of the house."Matter of shadow" successfully merges with the neighboring group of trees, where the dark jelly color of the branches is interspersed with highlights and stripes of blue sky. However, the walls are actually not covered with brick, but with its imitation, with concrete tiles from Borisovskie Manufactories with fifteen shades of artificial aged texture. The facades are smoothly illuminated from bottom to top, which is intended to facilitate the volume of the brick part of the building.
The opposite matter - solar and at the same time icy, looks like sparkling snow or crystal, forms the southern facades of two residential buildings stretched into the depths and becomes the hallmark of the house for everyone who drives a car along the street of the Soviet Army to the north. It is different in almost everything: it consists of white interfloor strips, solid glazing and triangular projections - mini-bay windows that catch the sun, as well as views of the park and the Moscow center. Moreover, the triangles of open balconies with glass fencing of full-fledged ledges - bay windows, alternate with each other and echo the concrete triangles of shed lanterns on the roof of Grekov's studio next door.
So, if the shadow brick facade is flat, material and the stripes of windows flow down it really like water, then this one, on the contrary, is light, shiny catches sunbeams at different angles. And the inserts of striped blinds look like clay blotches of red ocher color in a block of ice; the architects believe that they are associated with traditional wooden shutters in alpine houses. However, where the glass part passes to the shadowy northern facades, the dance calms down: there remains a plane and solid white stripes between the floors.
It is not known how the two themes, brick and glass, would have interacted with each other, if not for the third - the "folding plane", the shell from which white ribs "hatch" on the southern block. It is calm, dense and massive - made of Jurassic limestone; in contrast to the brick part, the thicknesses of the windows of regularly alternating horizontals are clearly visible here. As an intermediary, the stone shell not only hugs the fragile "sunny" facade, forming a kind of protective visor above it, but its fragments invade the mass of the brick holland wall: the frames of large inset "TVs" at the corners endow some of the apartments with loggias with views of the street, remotely similar to the balconies of old Moscow houses, where it was so pleasant to drink tea in the days before the spread of cars.
All these emotional facade techniques add up to an angular, as if not completely faceted sculpture. The long brick “body” is elongated and even slightly curved along the street, a thick neck grows in its northern part - the name “terracotta tower” is stuck behind it - at the top it turns its rectangular “head” to the east with a noble sloth, leaning on the glass volume. As if some prehistoric beast, brontosaurus or mammoth, had half thawed, but still sandwiched between two sparkling blocks of ice, seasoned with chalk deposits. The second creature - light-stone, puts a long "head" on the body of a brick mammoth. The horizontal windows make it look like an early avant-garde house, the conditional "skin" of which has half melted, revealing the glass core. Together, everything resembles a volumetric and slightly animated Tetris and, of course, goes back to the search for interaction of volumes, popular in early modernism, at VKHUTEMAS or ASNOVA, in a word, it remains within the framework of the discourse of modern architecture, appealing to its origins.
The knot of forms and meanings arose not only because of the well-known, not devoid of perfectionism, love of the Atrium architects for complex and meaningful plastics, which, while vividly reacting to the environment, does not lose its inner core, remains itself and always carries some latent plot, unobtrusive and not immediately recognizable, but endowed with hidden movement. In the city, the author's principles faced many problems: the requirements of life, determined both by the site restrictions and the wishes of investors.
The first of the topics thrown up by life is the gymnasium of the Center for Sports and Innovative Technologies of Moskomsport (TsST), the heir to the three-story brick building of the sports school, which was previously located on the site and became the basis for the so-called investment construction: to 6000 m2 added a little less than forty thousand square meters of housing, parking and 445 m2 offices. The architects deliberately fused the gym into the building's volume, partly giving up the principle of reflecting functions outside - otherwise, budget facades would contrast too much with the buildings of premium housing. As for the offices, we went further - their location was not revealed in any way outside. The emphasis is on the residential function.
It is important that the gym required a long treadmill in a straight line, so it could only be positioned along the street - this is how the mammoth's "body" arose. Many gray legs in the plane of the glass of the first floor, which turn the mammoth into a centipede, serve as supports for a large-span space 19.4 m wide - there are no pillars inside, they are pressed against the walls, which has become a difficult engineering task, especially since the spectacular the console of the southern building, hanging 8.6 m above the sidewalk. This bundle had to be carefully calculated, which was what Werner Sobek's bureau did in the beginning; and the "worker" was done by the designer of the "Atrium" Alexey Kalashnikov, together with the experts of TsNIISK im. V. A. Kucherenko. The console was worth it: outlining the lateral movement, it catches the energy of the street, becomes the main accent, a spectacular point of view. It also allowed to increase the area of apartments - say the architects.
The second contradiction, no less strong than the contrast between the budget city gym and the elite housing merged into one whole, is the dispute between traditional and modern taste, potential buyers. Some clients buy views of the park and the city center. Others prefer traditional window houses. For the latter, the same brick tower is provided, reminiscent of the medieval houses of the Florentine (and not only) noble families. Lovers of light and modernity got the volumes with a predominance of horizontal - and their contrast, which has become an architectural plot, is well read from any side. By the way, we should note that there are more “horizontal” ones, which reveals the preferences of the architects.
And finally, the main contrast is urban planning, a counterpoint to two super important Moscow themes of recent years, the quarter and the park. In the western part, the house builds a street line and forms something of a block - however, which also helps to isolate it from traffic. The eastern part enthusiastically merges with the Catherine Park: there is more glass, and there is no fourth lintel that could close the quarter square. At the same time, the “calm” layout could remotely recall the manor past of the place, with the exception that the side buildings in the classical scheme would have been outbuildings, but here they became the main repository of elite housing. As Nikolai Malinin accurately wrote, “… the idea of a traditional quarter is subtly combined with the idea of destroying it,” that is, among other things, we are dealing with the construction and deconstruction of an urban unit. Deconstruction salutes the school, the front of the gym corresponds to the building opposite, panel, but placed along the red line, the glass "legs" of the buildings look into the park.
However, the theme of the park, it seems to me, is given too much importance in the descriptions of the house. The reason is simple - the marketing move coincided with the architects' conscientious enthusiasm for the eco-house. Everything here was done in order to comply with the LEED certificate, which, however, was not received, although the house, and quite deservedly, was shown at lectures on green architecture. From the point of view of energy consumption and other things, it is made conscientiously, and can be considered an example of ecological architecture.
There were many trees around the old sports school, and in order to compensate for their loss, the architects equipped roofs, terraces and even elevator halls for gardens, including winter ones, but the gardens have not yet been equipped. So at the moment the “park” component is expressed primarily plastically: the sculptural effect is stronger than the natural one. The house reacts sensitively, even a little nervously to both nature and the city - it seems to be becoming a visible clot of conflict between the urbanistic and natural principles on the conditional border of two environments.
The history of Barkley Park is interesting, among other things, with a complicated history of marketing vicissitudes. In 2005, “Barkley” conceived it as a relatively budgetary one, but after the 2008 crisis, they made a bold decision not to reduce the class of housing, as many did at that time, but, on the contrary, to raise it to the most elite premium class and, therefore, sell at a much higher price. The elitism and sales strategy demanded a big name and Philippe Starck was invited to decorate the apartments; Further, an advertising company, which, as you know, develops according to its own laws, turned the project into a "house from Stark", and as a result it became difficult to understand what Russian architects had to do with it and whether they had anything at all … However, justice was restored fairly quickly. The interiors of the lobbies, four types of apartment finishes for the residents of the south building were made by YOO Inspired by Stark, designer Matthew Dalby. The interiors of the sports complex were implemented according to the Atrium project.
The second of many consequences of a bold marketing decision was the ability to implement, despite the crisis, all the complex, including the engineering parts of the concept. There was even a slight increase in the budget for the facades, which received their own quality materials. The calculation, I must say, was justified: all the apartments were sold for their big money at the construction stage, so the project was, apparently, financially successful.
The house, repeatedly shown in magazines and at exhibitions, received two Green Awards, in 2010 and 2011, one real estate prize, the European Property Awards, in December 2014 appeared among the nominees for Zodchestvo, in May 2015 won the Grand Prix at the Archnovation competition, and all this, apparently, is not the limit.
So Barkley Park is a successful experiment in various fields. For "Atrium" - work with a large residential building almost in the center of the city, on the verge of compromises, but without too painful loss of design. It is especially successful that it was possible to preserve the handwriting characteristic of Vera Butko and Anton Nadtochy and an approach to architectural plastics, consisting in scrupulous honing of the form on the verge between the necessary and the interesting.
