We have already talked about the project of the Literator residential complex in Khamovniki: Sergey Kiselev & Partners designed it by order of Hals-Development on the site of an old brewery at the intersection of Rossolimo and Lev Tolstoy streets. The site is quite extensive for the center of Moscow - about two hectares, but it is deepened into the space of courtyards and is surrounded on almost all sides by preserved buildings: one building of the plant, the oldest, low and with a pipe, separates the complex from the Leo Tolstoy Museum Park; the other is a three-story building of the late 19th century, stretched along the street named after the great writer; the third, the Institute of Drinks, built in the late seventies and since then pretty shabby, forms the line of the Rossolimo street. The emergence of a new elite residential complex behind these variegated wings is almost imperceptible: on the red line, it manifests itself only in two small buildings, neatly built into the tears of the city's fabric.
According to the chief architect of the project, Alexei Medvedev, the two main tasks of the authors were: to fit the maximum usable area within the limits - and here, next to Tolstoy's estate, they are quite strict - and to "avoid vulgarity" inspired by the same elite-central location and the proximity of the museum. Indeed, the architecture of the project is geometric and restrained in details. Meanwhile, the developer still calls it “modern classics” on the real estate website. With which in many respects we can agree: the complex, although devoid of hints of historical decor, adjoins the stone-brick direction that came to Moscow from Berlin and over the past ten to fifteen years has become the generally recognized ideal of building the caesur of historical districts. Such buildings usually combine cladding made of Jurassic limestone, a favorite of the urban architecture of the 2000s, with various types of unusual bricks, and if the Jurassic stone can be ordinary and plays the role of a background, then the brick often determines the identity of the building: it is black, gray, or rough. then embossed. This is exactly how it is in Literator's buildings: the architects deliberately chose not brown brick, which Moscow got used to in the late 2000s, but a rich red. The resulting color is still brownish, but quite picturesque and falls into the palette of the street formed by the factory buildings of the late 19th century.
Moreover, the most curious plots of Literator's architecture are based on variations of brick cladding. The brick is rough, an admixture of sand and folds of clay "dough" is clearly visible in it, the masonry is evenly diluted with burnt purple blotches, designed, like all of the above, to give the wall a man-made wall akin to the historical one. But the authors are not limited to the basic set of modern retro bricks.
Since the complex is inscribed - or, as the architects say, literally squeezed into the space of courtyards, the main pride of any traditionalist architecture is completely absent in it: the front facade. Even if I wanted to, there was (almost) no room for him. But since one of the goals was to stay within the framework of modern imagery, instead of a proud representative composition, the complex opens onto the street with several driveways and two very small buildings. One of them, facing the Stroganov office center, is minimalistically simple: it is enlivened only by rare inserts of whitish bricks, similar to the glare of sunbeams (their surface is rubbed with something light). The strokes of light bricks reminiscent of the spring sun are also found on the inner buildings.
The second building from those facing the street is the corner building "A", it takes on the role of the main accent, as it is the most curious. The building faces the intersection of Tolstoy and Rossolimo Streets, which is spacious and barely decorated, and the new building is sensitive to its urban unfinished business. Its corner facade turns in a parabola, but the shape is not round, but faceted, and besides, the bricks do not change direction following the planes of the walls: they are lined up with a "saw", at first timidly, and then show wide planes and corners, hinting that they are not at all a flat facing transom and not even bars, but a noble plinth. Which, of course, is an illusion: a special brick was used for the textured part, and a crossbar was used in other places.
So, where the walls are beveled, the brick does not follow their plane, but rushes in corners. This is how other columns in a dilapidated manor look like - but there the plaster flew off, and here it is intended. In fact, the architects carried out an operation in the corner building, which can be called the deconstruction of the facade: they left the facade intentionally unfinished, as if it, like many Italian churches - for example, San Lorenzo in Florence - did not wait for the cladding. The theme is picked up by thin boxes of white-stone window frames, inserted into the loose thickness of brick non-monolithically, like waiting cladding and decorations. But no. It is precisely this, without skin, that he is intended to be.
The churning of bricks - a complete antithesis to the front façade - becomes practically a manifesto of Literator's architecture. This is a facade-sign, executed with a share of illegality, not devoid of artistry. At the southern end of Building B, facing the playground and the old brewery, the theme of incompleteness continues: here the wall is solved in the form of a softly drawn puncture, which also means a break, demolition of masonry. This texture appears on several more ends, already denoting internal "gaps" between the bodies; the stripes are echoed by the spots of brick gratings - also an environmental detail borrowed from the fence of the neighboring Research Institute of Eye Diseases (the fence is not excluded that they will be demolished later, and the reflected motive will remain).
The incompleteness of the docking, outward-facing parts of the ensemble looks like a declarative gesture associated with comprehending the place of the complex in the city: its kinship and, at the same time, alienness to the space being developed. The buildings are wanderers, as if they had been cut out from somewhere and brought here, and there were scraps. However, the message is encrypted: if you just glide as you walk past, you can enjoy the play of light and shadow on an unusual brick texture without hesitation.
Nevertheless, the complex is primarily elite housing, it also has penthouses with terraces on the roofs and duplex apartments. The subtleties of contextual meanings are not the main thing for him, and inside, where urban restrictions are weakening, the buildings become noticeably larger, taller, stricter and more respectable. White stone and brick volumes alternate and grow into each other, forming either projections or depressions, enlivened by groups of deep loggias and rows of transparent balconies. The beam of the long building "B" stretches along the red line of the inner street, parallel to Leo Tolstoy Street. Its façade, revived by asymmetric projections, is clearly visible in the gaps in the building and also plays a representative role - in its own way, from the second row. The long house separates from passers-by and walking the space of courtyards with three short transverse buildings, whose first floors are cut by a suite of high passages on long "legs", clearly visible from Rossolimo Street. The architects say that it was easier to put a second long body in the back; but they took a different path, shattering the courtyards and extending through them not a material, but a spatial axis. You cannot enter inside: the security is meticulously watching the peace of the future residents of the elite complex, you can only walk along the street along the building "B".
The architecture inside the complex is also not devoid of a touch of deconstruction that revives the massifs of stone and brick. Firstly, the windows in the brick walls are framed with thin white-stone frames, which do not at all tend to merge flush with the plane, but look like a "box" of stone slabs inserted into the array, with the same slab-window sill. Secondly, the brick massifs are cut by either wide strips of stone or relief lines of a thin lattice, which in the lower floor turns into a large grid filled with brick, provoking a game of associations - as if the windows or even Corbusse's "legs of the house" were bricked up. In a word, the stone-brick style of recent years merges in this house with earlier, not exhausted in the nineties, variations on the themes of modernist deconstruction, strokes to facilitate stone volumes.
SKiP architects also developed the design of the entrance lobbies - initially laconic, made of wood and stone, but then, at the request of the customer, the authors added “literary” to the project, also, however, in moderation. The reception desk is written in italics, the walls are made of the same stone as the facades, covered with picturesquely scattered niches with wooden frames, the filling of which: flowers, photographs, whatever - remains on the conscience of the management company or residents. The dark wood color echoes the window frames throughout the house, and the leather of the armchairs enhances the literary quality, reminiscent of the furniture of the neighboring Tolstoy estate.
The noble laconicism of cultural codes, however, seemed too small for the customer - and on the end of the institute complex facing the courtyard of the "Literator" they painted a picture of spiritual and patriotic content, with a Rusich in sandals and a wolf. Some of the residents of the elite complex, as well as the architects, continue to hope that the work will be removed.
But back to the architecture of the complex. It turned out to be both laconic-modern and contextual. Khamovniki is an elite place, but historically discrete, which did not form an integral and dense urban space, like a significant part of Moscow, a "big village": there were manor gardens, wooden houses, then brick factories. One chamber remained even from the Khamovny Dvor of the 17th century; now it is surrounded by squares with American maple, fake historic houses and diagonally placed Brezhnev towers. The bodies of the "Literator" neatly grow into this unsteady environment, strengthening their character towards the center, the core of the complex, and "dissolving" at the edges.
In addition, very close by, on the other side of Tolstoy Street, there is the Krasnaya Roza factory, reconstructed as an office center designed by other architects, but the same bureau, Sergei Kiselev & Partners: the facades of the Literator are not very noticeable, but nevertheless they overlap with the asymmetry of the Morozov office building, building, in addition to the contextual discourse, connections that could be called related - between different projects of the same workshop. Yes, SKiP has been built in Moscow enough to respond to their works too.