The Lefortovo district, one of the oldest in Moscow, is actively changing. If now more than half of its territory is occupied by industrial enterprises, then in the very near future this ratio promises to change in favor of residential, cultural and public spaces. Not so long ago, passions were raging around plans to build the territory of the Hammer and Sickle plant, and in August 2014, Morton Group of Companies announced
a blitz competition for a sketch of the development of a neighboring plot belonging to the property 14 on Krasnokazarmennaya Street. According to the results of the competition, one first and one second prize were awarded, eight more works were included in the short list (which means, according to the conditions, “they can be involved in subsequent creative competitions and projects of Morton Group of Companies and Regional Urban Center LLC). One of these eight was the project "Annenhof Grove" by the "Fourth Dimension" workshop.
Since the existing buildings on the territory - production workshops, warehouses and other structures that do not represent any noticeable cultural or architectural value - are not planned to be preserved, the competitors' imagination was not limited by anything, except for the actual terms of reference. But there was an entertaining historical context - the difficult fate of the Annenhof grove, located here since the 1730s, planted, as is commonly believed, by the obsequious courtier Biron in just one night to delight the gaze of Tsarina Anna Ioannovna, but the townspeople did not like it, but at the beginning last century and completely "shaved" (Gilyarovsky) at the root of a powerful tornado of 1904. The project of the Fourth Dimension Bureau is intended to correct in some way the historical injustice, giving the grove a new life, and the Muscovites - a comfortable urban space with an open park zone. In a difficult and not everyone's favorite genre of blitz competition, the workshop team feels like a fish in water. “It's like a clause in an institute, only in an adult way,” says Vsevolod Medvedev, one of the authors of the project. "An excellent test for the speed of creative thinking and the speed of decision-making." In this case, it turned out to be a super blitz - the competition task was completed in just five days, and the authors themselves are very pleased with the result.
The project of the "Fourth Dimension" is inscribed in the spatial context no less organically than in the temporal one. The master plan of the development continues the main axes of the district, the combination of which determined the cellular diamond-shaped structure of the plan, divided into five mini-blocks, plus an office center brought out to the southern border. In such a solution, the architects from the "Fourth Dimension" see continuous advantages - it allowed them to create a clear and laconic composition with the location of residential, office and public spaces in just three axes. Spaces gently flowing into one another, free air circulation, excellent insolation, visual sensation of permanent movement (an absolute plus of the project compared to some neighbors on the short list, which provide for the construction of closed volumes with courtyards-wells) - all these are also functions of the repeated rhombus, representing a certain compromise between canonical orthogonality and randomness of broken lines. World practice actively uses this dynamic geometric figure in the design of facades, but the rhombus rarely falls into the building plan - but if this happens, it almost always turns out a vivid architectural statement, take at least the Barcelona dominant “DiagonalZeroZero” designed by the “EMBA” bureau or the three-hundred-meter "Blade" under construction in Seoul by Dominique Perrault.
In the "Annenhof Grove" project, all the buildings are rhombs with rounded corners, in terms of almost the same, but differing in number of storeys (from 13 to 22 floors with lowering to the south) and orientation to the cardinal points, which avoids monotony. Residential buildings sprout through the stylobate, which, in turn, according to Le Corbusier's principles, is suspended at the level of the second floor above the first, serving as protection from the rain and uniting the towers with quarter circuits, closed and semi-closed, surrounding courtyards. In this way, a hybrid space is formed in the lower floors: in essence modernist, but with a hint of the structure of a traditional city - more closed, protected, subordinate to a human scale and complexly organized, and not open to all winds, unlike the usual microdistrict. Above, the towers rise - an elegant compromise is obtained between the modern Moscow trend of quarters and the requirements of insolation. The game of horizontal connections between the towers suspended in the air is supported by the hinged passages proposed by the architects "4 dimensions", laid along the lines of the diamond-shaped module at the level of the fifth, ninth and twenty-first floors - a spectacular technique on the one hand, transforming the entire complex into a complex spatial structure, and on the other hand, bold and costly.
The architects proposed to make a significant part of the roofs of the stylobates exploitable: the recreational spaces planned here are intended, in contrast to the lower level accessible to everyone, only for residents of the district and employees of the offices located here. The fact is that if most of the other participants in the competition were inclined to a strict functional division of buildings into residential and office buildings, the architects of the "Fourth Dimension" preferred to solve this issue in two directions at once. They propose to build the main office block at the corner of Entuziastov highway and the projected passage - which, firstly, will create an architectural dominant from the side of the main transport artery of the district, and secondly, will provide autonomous accessibility for employees. At the same time, the entire second tier of the stylobate and part of the first floors of the eastern towers are allocated for offices (together with commercial and public premises).
The overall impression of the charming futurism of the project is not least due to the solution of the facades - laconic, even minimalistic "majestic snow-white icebergs" (in the figurative expression of Vsevolod Medvedev). The authors proposed to make them in glass with a little metal inclusions - it's nice to imagine the specific characteristics of the apartments! By the way, the apartment design promises to be interesting and varied: the area of apartments is from 60 to 150 m2 plus duplex penthouses.
"Not the most humane", according to the architects, the building density provided for by the terms of reference (300,000 m2 on an area of 9 hectares, excluding the underground part, with a height limit of 75 m) forced to look for solutions for the visual and dynamic relief of the quarter. Since the building on the first floor is not continuous, but fragmentary, this allows organizing a large number of various comfortable spaces, from courtyards to squares, which, according to the architects' plan, should be open to all citizens. And the main planning accent of the quarter in the project is the central artery, which continues the main axis of the neighboring territory of the Hammer and Sickle (it is planned to preserve it during the reconstruction process). It is proposed to make this zone - practically a boulevard, towards which all the main fragments of the building are oriented - completely pedestrian. Moreover, romantic-minded architects even envisioned an artificial river as an homage to the Sinichka river that once flowed here, which now only a couple of local toponyms remind of. With some imagination and in the buildings growing on the stylobate, turned in different directions, one can see not only blocks of ice, but also a certain paraphrase of park trees. However, there should not be a shortage of real trees here: both the boulevard and the courtyards are proposed to be landscaped as much as possible. Also, by the way, in a pandanus to the neighboring Hammer and Sickle, the territory of which the designer, the LDA Design bureau, intends to solve in the concept of a city park. Comfortable, environmentally friendly, and simply pleasing to the eye recreational space has become one of the main advantages of this charming and promising project.
