The area located to the north of the Shukhov Tower and the adjacent workers' quarters has recently significantly grown with new, large-scale residential complexes. In the mid-2000s, at 23, Shablovka, architects of Ostozhenka built five towers of Constellation Capital-1. To the east, on Mytnaya Street, the construction of the English Quarter, designed by Mikhail Belov, was completed at about the same time. The site on which the construction of the multifunctional, albeit predominantly residential, Sky House complex is now being completed, is located between these two residential complexes, on the right side of Mytnaya Street. The buildings were built on the site of several, by that time dilapidated, buildings of the Krasny Proletary plant around the Trud stadium, which once belonged to the same plant. Thus, we also have an example of the reorganization of an industrial zone. By the early 2000s, the stadium was already largely abandoned; it was overgrown with weeds, and a pipe of an elevated heating main was even thrown across the field.
The design began more than ten years ago, in 2003, and it was not planned to preserve the stadium at that time. The architects, having the opportunity to occupy the entire site, proposed to connect the houses of small height - up to nine floors, into a closed composition akin to the Roman arena built around the perimeter of the courtyard. It was proposed to compensate for the loss of the football field by creating a sports cluster inside the stylobate: with a mini-football field, a fitness club, a universal gym and a swimming pool. In addition, offices were included in the residential complex - an idea that was innovative at that time, became widely popular in Moscow only later.
Both the customer and the city liked the project. However, after a while, the city authorities decided to keep Trud, one of the oldest Moscow stadiums, modernizing it for use as a training football field. Of course, the entire project had to be developed anew - within different boundaries, dimensions and areas. Having lost a solid part of the territory for building, the complex has grown sharply in height - from nine to almost thirty floors, and shifted deeper into the site. According to one of the authors of the project, Valery Kanyashin, initially the architects planned to restore the building line, eliminating the "failure" of the stadium by building a low office building along the red line. Later, imbued with the history of the place, they came to the conclusion that the city was accustomed to the existence of a courtier with a small square behind an old pre-war fence. To build a house here is to deprive the place of its history. As a result, together with the stadium, the square was preserved and the fence was restored. The office center joined the high residential towers of the complex at the back of the site.
The core of the final composition of the complex was the same stadium without stands; slightly lost in size, it is surrounded by buildings of different sizes. A long office center that rises as you approach high-rise buildings is located in the depths along its long border. Four residential towers stood closely in the northern part of the site, occupying only about a hectare, a third of the site. The towers, trapezoidal in plan, similar to each other, are evenly, but freely placed on the stylobate, the horseshoe of which opens to Mytnaya Street. Meanwhile, months of work are hidden behind the seemingly unobtrusive lightness of the pictorial arrangement of volumes. Valery Kanyashin explained that in addition to the difficulties associated with ensuring insolation norms in a very cramped area, it was necessary to take into account all possible species points, even the most distant ones. For example, in the perspective of Vavilov Street, located at a considerable distance from Mytnaya, the towers were not supposed to overlap the domes of the Donskoy Monastery. And this is just one example. The skyscrapers were rotated around the axis, shifted, swapped, lowered and raised. The latter option suited everyone, including future tenants, since the visual shortage of "air" and open spaces outside the apartments is not felt. The found configuration of houses and competent layouts of apartments provided residents with views of the city. Neighboring buildings are practically invisible from the windows.
Despite the fact that at the base of the complex it recedes from the red line of the street, the tops of the towers fix this line in one way or another, forming a corridor from the facade walls. In the fracture of massive houses, leaning towards Mytnaya and similar to the pillars of a giant bridge, one can read the desire of the authors of the project to restore town-planning justice. Of course, they had to preserve history, delicately step aside. This approach is close to Ostozhenka. But we must not forget about their ability to work with the existing context, to feel the city subtly and find the right urban planning solutions. Inclined flying "flags" of the tops of the towers when driving along the street create a special tension. The caesura of the stadium is not obvious in the future.
Having found the best variant of the composition, the architects of Ostozhenka, despite the scale of the complex, decided to endow it with contrasting bright facades. I must say that in the initial version, a cold palette of colors with a predominance of gray and blue shades was selected for the buildings, matching the realtor name Sky House. But ultimately, the heavenly shades were replaced by the rich multicolor of the warm "autumn" color - sand ocher, burgundy-brown and black pixels of tinted glass. Such a decision, according to Valery Kanyashin, is due to the impossibility of combining all the diverse buildings of the street into one urban planning concept. The contradictory neighborhood of the surviving old houses with new ones, including the early Ostozhenka complex, and the English Quarter by Mikhail Belov, and panel housing from the P-44 series, did not allow one to become attached to one thing without joining contradiction with others. “We decided not to look back at the surroundings, not to repeat anything. The new complex is a contrasting gesture. The towers still look too high and noticeable, they could not be hidden, so we made them completely different,”explains Valery Kanyashin.
Nevertheless, the vertically oriented pixel mosaic of facades in its own way fits into the environment and reacts to it, comprehending the cityscape from the point of view of a pointillist painting: warm red and yellow panels thicken closer to neighboring houses, and become more rarefied towards the sky. When the sun comes out and the sky is reflected in the glass, the attempt of large-scale towers to dissolve in space will become more convincing - although we know that such volumes cannot be completely masked by any optical techniques, but besides dissolving, pixel coloring serves another task - it almost completely knocks out the rhythm of windows, transforming a house from a rational checkered array into a sculptural volume. "Ostozhenka" already has some experience in this kind of artistic disguise: it is enough to recall, for example,
Residential complex "Vesna" on Kievskoe highway or even better - RC "Panorama" on Presnya, all consisting of a complex mosaic of tinted glass in different ways, reflecting and crushing the city's picture. Here is a slightly different story, the houses are more variegated than merged, and meanwhile glass is used of varying degrees of transparency, adding an impressionistic picture of shades: in the morning it is one, in the evening it is different. The head of all three complexes is Valery Kanyashin, which gives some reason to talk about the development of handwriting. Now the pixel coloring is no longer news, but by the efforts of DSK it is beginning to get bored, but remember that the LCD “began” a long time ago, and even now it looks fresh, carved out of some kind of variegated lattice-aluminum material.
The history of the project is a history of overcoming: changing conditions, the requirements of the city and customers, who also replaced one another - the project was started by the Capital Group company, and completed by MCG; rejection of scale and color by residents, doubts of the authors and constant search for a compromise. It was not Ostozhenka, but Mosproekt, who was involved in detailed design and actual implementation, although the authors tried not to lose sight of the building. For all the complexities of the protracted process, the complex, designed a decade and a half ago, meets the requirements of today. Unless the apartments are much larger than the current standard in area. The complex prudently combines both public functions and high-quality improvement of the adjacent territory and a small courtyard, where cars can enter only for disembarking passengers. One of the towers houses a kindergarten, united by a bridge with a stylobate. On the green roof of the stylobate there are playgrounds and sports grounds, inside it a pool with a 25-meter bowl, a large universal sports hall, shooting galleries, mugs, a mini-hotel, a cafe, a restaurant and shops - in short, everything that ensures a quality life even inside a dense urbanized environment.