Archi.ru:
Have you been working together for a long time?
Alexander Popov:
We both graduated from the Kiev National University of Construction and Architecture (formerly it was called the Kiev Civil Engineering Institute). Even at one department they studied - at the department of architectural qualimetry (method of quantitative assessment of quality, see definition - ed.). I am a 1999 graduate, Dmitry - 2003. And already in 2005 we organized our own bureau - "Archimatika". The science of qualimetry has taught us to evaluate objects not only from an aesthetic and artistic point of view, but also to analyze quantitative indicators. We are actively implementing this approach in practice, so thanks to the teachers for a good school.
Was it difficult for young architects to establish themselves?
A. P.: If we consider “overcoming the walls of misunderstanding, mistrust and prejudice” as difficulties, then, fortunately, we did not have to experience this - of course, we worked a lot, sometimes for days, and not always everything worked out the first time, but when we came up with an architectural solution, which we ourselves liked - we almost always managed to convince the customer and the city authorities of it. It seems to me that the key to our further development was the generous credit of trust from customers, which we received then - when we did not yet have a portfolio of successful implementations, and our only asset were ideas and a great desire to implement them, they just believed us. I would like to separately mention among our customers the head of the company-developer “K. A. N. Development ", Igor Nikonov, who ventured to entrust the young team with a large and responsible object - the residential complex" Parkove Misto "in Kiev. The project is really large: almost 500,000m2 on the territory of 13 hectares + landscape park of 4.3 hectares. We managed to convince the customer that the city needs a fresh stream and that a bold, bright project will, firstly, be demanded by the market and be financially successful, and secondly, it will be absolutely realizable. Actually, in the process of working on it, the basic life principles of the ARKHIMATIKA bureau were finally formed. No revelations, everything is quite obvious: the creation of a comfortable environment for a person is at the forefront.
There are five main ingredients to achieve this. First of all, it is high-quality, expressive, human-scale architecture. The house should be an architectural projection of the self of its inhabitant, its presentation, an object that one wants to be proud of, showing photos to friends: “I live in this house, which I like, which is different from others, and expresses what I want myself with identify and call this house your own."
I have a slightly humorous, but essentially serious thesis that a person should easily find the window of his apartment on the facade. Living in a standard residential neighborhood (not built according to our project), I once tried to go outside and wave my hand to my wife. Of course, I was able to calculate the location of my own window on the facade of a large 25-storey building, but only thanks to my architectural education, remembering the layout of the floors and evaluating the location of the balconies. In fact, giving a person the opportunity to identify their entrance or even a house is not so difficult - this is, in fact, the work of an architect: "playing" with color, shape, texture, decoration, facade plastics.
The second obligatory component of comfort is an internal closed pedestrian landscaped green courtyard. Regrettably, the typical development of microdistricts has practically destroyed this most important phenomenon. We were literally weaned away from the yards. Today they are looking for an alternative to microdistrict development, and we observe this process not only in Kiev, not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but in any city of the former USSR: Minsk, Lvov, Novosibirsk, Astana, etc. The semi-private space of a green, pedestrian courtyard is a must-have convenience that a person should acquire along with the square meters of housing. In the Parkove Misto complex, on the one hand, for each residential section, we organized a pedestrian residential courtyard with playgrounds and recreation areas, and on the other hand, a service courtyard, where cars can access. And accordingly, we provided two entrances to each residential section - from the side of the service yard and the pedestrian.
Among the undoubted advantages of the residential complex "Parkove Misto" it is also important to mention the landscape park "Kristerova Gorka" located on the territory with beautiful cascades of lakes. By agreement with the developer KAN Development and the investor, the UDP company, it was put in order, landscaped and opened for visits even before the first stage of residential buildings. This “calling card” allowed to attract people's attention and maintain sales levels even in the economic crisis of 2009. When many construction sites stopped, without receiving refinancing from the sale of apartments, we continued to work and successfully sold apartments precisely because people appreciated the completely new quality of the organization of the environment.
The next point in our understanding of comfort is properly organized public spaces of the house: lobbies and inter-apartment corridors. The route, which every inhabitant of the house takes at least twice a day, should pass through the designer's interior, and not through a dreary-utilitarian tunnel with heaps of engineering "constraints" stemming from the reluctance of architects and engineers to think once again about laying communications. Designers must do their job with high quality, and future residents and guests of the houses must experience positive emotions on the way to the apartment.
Moreover, we are confident that high-quality beautiful designer public spaces of a residential building are not a luxury attribute of a premium class, but a mandatory program even for an economy class - after all, the more modest and smaller the apartment, the less comfort a person can afford in his own apartment, the more it needs the comfort of “sharing with neighbors”.
Fourth, apartment layouts should be rational and comfortable. Each insanely expensive square meter of an apartment must honestly work out its value, creating comfort. People's lifestyles are different, their ideas about comfort are different, each has its own “comfort scenario”, and how many of these “comfort scenarios”, so many architects must offer options for apartment layouts that exactly correspond to each “scenario”.
It is annoying and strange that some developers continue to offer thousands of outdated planning types of apartments, this resembles a government uniform, which was created as universal, the same clothes for everyone, and therefore does not suit anyone in particular, and is inconvenient for everyone in their own way. Fortunately, the post-Soviet society does not dress in official uniforms, how naive is it to think that our contemporaries will continue to buy several outdated, inconvenient and inconsistent with any of today's “comfort scenarios”, “uniform” apartment layouts?
And finally, the fifth component of comfort is all aspects of physical and chemical comfort: temperature, humidity, acoustics, the use of "healthy" building and finishing materials that do not emit "etheric components" harmful to humans. Of course, the house is aesthetically perfect, but in which it is cold in winter and hot in summer - this is an uncomfortable home.
Dmitry Vasiliev:
For us, architecture is, first of all, an idea, an image, a dream that the customer helps us to realize. And for a commercial customer - a developer, the creation of real estate objects is a business that must necessarily be profitable (no one will invest money in an unprofitable project and it will not be built). It is not enough for us to defend our "architectural dream" on paper (put it on the website), we want to realize it and, understanding the dialectic of the developer's work, we are ready to help him make the project as attractive as possible, respectively, as profitable as possible. As a result, no conflict of interest arises, on the contrary, a common goal arises: to make the building about rovo! If it turns out to create a new, interesting, comfortable living environment on the site, then it will turn out to be profitable to realize the object, and it will be easier for the developer to raise money for future large-scale projects.
I am glad that more and more developers share this philosophy and place emphasis in their work on the quality demanded by future residents of housing, but alas, not all - just recently, the head of one of the reputable companies for which we developed the project concept, said: “All this, of course, interesting, but our park is adjacent to the site and therefore we will sell anything, but we simply will not spend energy and money on beauty and comfort, this will still not increase our revenue. However, the “invisible hand of the market” puts everything in its place: another developer, already aimed at creating high-quality, attractive architecture for the buyer, having seen the architectural concept of this site on our website, and having learned why it did not go into operation, began to negotiate about buying a site.
This position of developers is widespread, but how much do your ideas really increase the cost of construction?
A. P.: Basically, the cost of designing is increasing, and it is only 2-5% of the prime cost of real estate objects. In the end, very little comes out. But here reinforced concrete, masonry materials, engineering equipment, materials on the facades, we use exactly the same as our less "creative" competitors: just a different, more creative and high-quality layout of the "ingredients" used by all! A variety of colors and textures, plastic finds - all this usually has little effect on the final cost of the project. Only the work of the architect is added. Especially when you consider that it is possible to maintain the quality of construction only by literally living at a construction site. For example, we have created a separate field supervision service in the bureau - “supervisors of the implementation of our projects” who are constantly present at construction sites. This approach is a little more expensive, but hack-work is excluded. In fact, competition naturally squeezes out “lazy” companies from the market and, in our opinion, the days of panel microdistricts and other representatives of the “discomfort class” are literally numbered. Developers of the "discomfort class" are already forced to dump, closing the eyes of buyers to the shortcomings of their projects at a low price, as a result, the profitability of their projects decreases, even less cost - even lower quality - even lower sales price - even lower profitability - even lower quality … The circle is closed! After a few turns of this wheel, the developer naturally faces bankruptcy. For a while, you can postpone the denouement, exponentially increasing the volume of construction, but this actually translates the activities of the developer into the category of financial pyramids a la MMM, in which the money of today's buyers finances the construction of apartments of yesterday's buyers, but the end of all financial pyramids is the same - inevitable bankruptcy after stopping growth in sales volumes.
D. V.: This is the aspect of creating a comfortable environment for a residential complex that really requires additional investment - greening. Small, meter-long tree seedlings are several times cheaper than, say, three-meter ones. Even a birch, the fastest growing tree in our climatic zone, needs five years to grow up to three meters: this means that a person buys housing, and he has to wait for paid comfort for five years! Of course, if there were not enough money, you would have to wait, but the paradox is that the size of the additional budget item for high-quality large-scale landscaping of the site is at the level of statistical error in relation to the construction budget as a whole. Therefore, even if you literally shift the additional costs for large trees to the buyer, he simply will not notice. But the green courtyard will definitely notice.
Another paradox is that an asphalt desert instead of a courtyard is also more expensive than a green courtyard - a cake of an asphalt pavement is more expensive than a cake of a grassy lawn or ground cover plants. This means we are optimizing car lanes, reducing the amount of asphalt, increasing the green coverage, and planting big trees with the money saved.
At what facility did you manage to fully implement all these ideas?
D. V.: Together with “K. A. N. Development "managed to implement another very important project for us - the residential complex" Comfort Town ". It is located in the sleeping Kiev left bank. When we looked at the aerial photo, we saw that the sleeping area looks like a huge gray spot. There was an irresistible desire to add color to this gray. The area of the site is almost 30 hectares, and the total area of the complex for 5,470 apartments is more than 610,000 m2so our brightly colored intervention had to be visible. At the same time, there was a crisis year in the yard in 2009: the buyer could be interested only in a high-quality product, and only the most budgetary materials and technologies could be afforded. Pragmatically assessing the situation, we chose color as the main tool, added a confused rhythm to window openings, abandoned terraces (they will still be barbarously glazed and violate the whole composition) in favor of flat facades and loggias specially prepared for glazing. According to preliminary calculations, it turned out that for the financial success of the project, it is necessary to get about 14,500m2 apartments per hectare (19,500 m2 total overground area from 1 hectare). A dense eight-storey quarter building allowed reaching the required indicators. Blocks from sections of the same height are boring, so the second method after the color is multi-height buildings: some sections were lowered to six, others were raised to ten, adding high-rise thirteen and sixteen-story accents.
And finally, the third technique is pitched roofs. It was they who made it possible to create an expressive, diverse architectural composition. As a bonus, one- and two-level mansard apartments have appeared.
The prevailing stereotype that duplex apartments sell worse was debunked in the very first months after the opening of sales: they were sold out first, because they managed to create a cool, unusual, but at the same time comfortable space. If a two-level apartment is two parts of a one-level apartment, mechanically placed on top of each other, it will be bought only after the one-level apartments run out, because for an adult, lazy person, walking from floor to floor is tiring (if the decisions about buying apartments were made by children, the situation would be diametrically opposite: the two-level ones would always be bought up first). However, if we take advantage of the opportunities provided by the double floor height and the attic roof, and create a cool space - “adults will remember that they too were once children, and happily run from floor to floor with their children, admiring the play of light and space”, Thus ensuring high sales figures for apartments.
In the layouts of not only two apartments, but also one-level ones, we set a course for maximum diversity: out of 1200 apartments of the first stage, 600 different types were presented in the investment albums handed over to the sales department. We used every opportunity to create personality: the apartments on the first floor were different from the second; the apartments of the second differed from those located on the standard floors, and thanks to the facades with the windows in spacing of the standard floors, there were two. And, of course, individual apartments on the upper attic floors. Based on the results of the sales of the first stage, together with the sales department, we analyzed and adjusted the palette of apartments, replacing less demanded types with more demanded ones, and in the same way following the results of the sale of the second stage, the third, and so on - thus, as part of Comfort Town, we have designed and built more than a hundred sections, none of which was 100% repeated, created one hundred percent variety. To change buildings typical sections we offered building like sections that have common techniques, principles, methods, general style of architectural solutions, however, in each case, an individual solution is proposed on their basis.
Unlike the principle of typical repetition, the principle of similarity is natural for a person and human society - people are both individual and similar to each other. A society built on the principle of a typical repetition will be a society of clones, just as inferior and depressing as a typical building.
Of course, our design of individual such sections requires much more effort and costs more than the binding of typical sections. But these investments in the high-quality variety of the project have paid off a hundredfold, making the project commercially the most successful out of 1,050 residential complexes that make up the market for new residential buildings sold in the Ukrainian market.
The inner public space of the residential sections: lobbies with two entrances, one from a car residential street, the other into a green pedestrian courtyard. The corridors and lobbies are, as they should be, designer. A small but important element that made it possible to avoid bulky ramps in front of each entrance (the marks of the first floors are about a meter higher than the ground marks): a compact lift for the disabled - its cost turned out to be less than the cost of the ramp, and we received a small budget optimization along with the improvement of the architectural appearance.
The center for the formation of the landscape of the complex has become a small green park, inherited from the factory previously located on the site, whose employees took care of creating comfort on their territory. We planned the first stage of housing around the park in such a way as to preserve all the trees (so as not to wait 30 years for new ones to grow), and also preserved and reconstructed the monument to the plant employees who died during the Great Patriotic War - a memory of the place.
We managed to find mutual understanding with the developer on the need to create infrastructure: a fitness center with a 25-meter pool and another smaller one, an arts school with a well-equipped hall for 250 people (even adults are happy to go to it), a kindergarten, a school, a shopping mall. a complex built into the first floors of cafes, shops, salons, pharmacies, banks. And this is all not elite housing, but an affordable comfortable economy class. The complex has been under construction for six years, sequentially putting the blocks into operation in separate stages. It has become really important for us and, I would like to believe, for the city as well.
Is the focus on budget residential construction more a coincidence or a deliberate choice based on the realities of the market?
A. P.: In fact, we managed to design many objects of other classes and functional typology,in particular: the 52-storey premium class office and hotel complex "Victory Towers"; class A office complex 101 Tower; shopping and entertainment complex "Respublika" with an area of 300,000 m2; residential complex of business class "Central Park"; Pechersk International School, kindergartens, fitness centers, office centers, hotels and many other facilities. We love diversity, and we gladly take on a new functional or status program for us each time, setting maximalist goals in each project.
Why don't we focus solely on "elite, expensive" architecture, which has a much wider range of architectural materials and technologies than in the budget, and, consequently, the possibilities of creating an expressive architectural solution?
You know, before the founding of ARCHIMATICS, I managed to design and build several luxurious private residences. I remember the picture: you get a good order, for example, you build a very interesting country house, you will have something to boast about and what to print in stylish progressive magazines, but every day you return to the dullness of a faceless sleeping area. In this situation, there is a structural dissonance and, in my opinion, it cannot be corrected, even if over time you build your own super-architectural private residence, away from the city, all the same hopelessly impersonal. And this is not even so much a question of morality, a humane attitude towards the inhabitants of sleeping bags, as the desire to live interestingly, to communicate with interesting people in an open, architecturally interesting city, and not to hide in "high-style bunkers" from the aesthetic desert and its tasteless inhabitants, which is my mind is just boring. An architect can transform the environment in which he lives, the society, the city of which he considers himself a part, and only in this case his work becomes interesting and meaningful. You can loudly call it our mission if you like.
Today, compared to other types of real estate, the largest share in new buildings is occupied by budget housing, therefore it is these new economy class residential buildings that change the urban environment to the greatest extent, and if our projects, both by their appearance and the reaction of the competitive environment of architects to them and developers, will make budget housing of high quality, improving the urban environment, and not worsening, as in the example of the "discomfort class", we will take a confident step towards a city in which it will be interesting for us to live.
D. V.: Yes, for example: last May we started working on our first project in Lviv - a residential complex on Striyskaya Street.
Then came the project of a residential complex on Pasichnaya Street (developer "Vash Dim"), an office complex on Nauchnaya Street, a hotel and trade complex in the very center of the historic city on Adam Mitskevich Square, as well as a residential complex "Samotsvet", developer "Intergal Bud". At some point, the whole city was covered with billboards with renders of our projects. And now projects are being actively built.
A year and a half ago, the chief architect of Lviv said that when he meets guests, he shows historical architecture, but unfortunately he cannot boast of modern architecture, and he hopes that our projects will become an exception to this rule. Indeed, then there were simply no interesting modern projects either built or even in projects. A year later, leafing through the Internet pages, I was surprised to find a whole galaxy of interesting projects by Lviv architects. It is pleasant to realize that to some extent our works served as a catalyst for this process, and I really want to believe that the new projects of our Lviv colleagues, and, of course, our projects will be able to form a worthy face of modern Lviv architecture, which the citizens will be proud of.
You are not at all afraid of bright colors on the facades, what is “color” in architecture for you?
D. V.: Color is the ability to convey emotion. For a long time we tried to formulate something like our own architectural credo and realized: in whatever color scheme our objects were solved, from whatever materials they were made, whatever form they took - the main thing is that they do not leave the viewer indifferent. We are apologists for expressive architecture. Not everyone likes the same "Comfort Town", a lot of people say that they will not live there, because they prefer more restrained shades, but there are a lot of people who like "Comfort Town" very much, who bought apartments there and everyone is happy day pass by our bright facades. Perhaps you should not try to please everyone and look for a universally acceptable solution that will not embarrass anyone - such a solution will be indistinct and simply leave everyone indifferent. On the contrary, architecture should be expressive, even if it embarrasses and even scares off someone, but on the other hand it will attract ardent supporters who understand and are close to just such an architecture. Color is the most democratic means of creating architectural expressiveness; in the architecture of high-budget objects, it is one of the tools, in low-budget objects it is sometimes the only one.
Architectural color differs from artistic color - on the surface of a large architectural volume, color works much stronger than on the plane of a painting, and a shade that is not at all bright on the "fan" will be ultra-bright when it fills the entire facade. At the same "Comfort Town" we had to make dozens of colors, we literally tortured facade builders and paint suppliers to find the right combinations. We once suggested that the Belarusian developer, who is unable to completely abandon panel development (the monopoly plant, alas, dictates its own rules to the Minsk market), paint the facades in bright colors and thereby save the situation. The customer had doubts at first, but having visited the “Comfort Town” already completed by that time, he decided to take a chance. Again, in the sleeping areas of Kiev or Minsk, such a color play is quite appropriate. But in the historical environment it is necessary to use much more restrained colors so as not to “devalue” the nuance nobility of the historical facades. Therefore, yes, we are not afraid of bright colors, because we know when and how to use them.
Among the projects of the bureau there is a multifunctional complex "Pisanka" in the shape of a giant egg. How do you generally feel about this kind of architectural "hooliganism"?
A. P.: There must be such projects! It's at least boring without them! But seriously, architects of each generation form good, correct and progressive criteria "good or bad" at first, sets of style, functional, aesthetic and semantic codes, but with each new application these criteria and codes, gradually, from a route freely chosen for its optimality, turn into a deep rut of worn-out patterns, moving along which it is simply impossible to imagine that architecture can be different from the increasingly dull reproduction of stereotypes. The only thing that can knock out of such a rut is an incredible, paradoxical idea, "which is beyond the boundaries of good and evil."
When in 2005 the artist Kirill Protsenko shared with us his idea of a skyscraper in the form of a giant Easter egg, it seemed to us that it was “really complete nonsense”! That is, a rather “incredibly paradoxical idea”. And we immediately began to develop it. A month later, we came up with a media facade, which is lit every evening with a new animated picture "Easter Eggs", and perhaps we found the direction of the answer to the question of what can be presented to the media facades of skyscrapers that are improving from year to year - the media structure needs a media-architectural image, a completely new quality of architectural expressiveness, which should have its own plot and meaning, in our concept we borrowed the plot and meaning from the centuries-old tradition of Easter eggs, but they can also be invented from scratch without any historical parallels. But without a meaningful plot, media facades turn into banal advertising banners and RGB overflows annoying after half an hour of contemplation.
With such a bright and bold style as you are ready to work in the prevailing historical environment of old cities
A. P.: If you have the honor to work on such a site, we treat the wonderful architecture of old cities with the utmost care, like a living person, guided by a doctor - “do no harm”. We know how much talent, work and adherence to principles is required in order for an architectural work to take place, and we will never allow ourselves to express ourselves by killing someone else's architectural work. Therefore, we are very careful with each architectural and spatial composition that our predecessors managed to realize.
A significant territory of our cities, built up with typical housing and industrial zones, can be defined as an "aesthetic desert" - this is a gigantic space for ambitious self-affirmations, it needs revolutionary revitalization, and today's and tomorrow's citizens, and even if you want: architectural history, will be grateful for work in this direction, in which there will be an application for bright colors, and unusual shapes, and large-scale accents, and a bulldozer. The architect who, instead of creating something new where there is nothing worthy and where they need your innovation, directs his “architectural-revolutionary impulse” to self-assertion against the background of the silent works of the past, I personally will probably never understand or approve.
As an example of our approach, I will give a competitive work - an architectural proposal for the very center of Lviv, right next to Mickiewicz Square. In the nineties, on the neighboring site, which, like ours, is included in the zone with a UNESCO protected status (and even without loud historical and protective titles: it is surrounded by beautiful original old architecture), a real architectural crime was committed: they built a large bank building in frankly postmodern style, ignoring the scale of historical buildings. Perhaps this building could even decorate some gray sleeping area, but within the miraculously preserved historical center of Lviv, it is sheer barbarism. If I am not mistaken, the architect was even forced to leave the city, such a rejection was caused by his work among the townspeople. A site that had been empty for almost twenty years next to this "unfortunate work" was proposed for development. We have proposed a modern building, but commensurate with the historical environment, a building that does not hide what was built in the 21st century, but respectfully "plays by the rules of the architecture of the old city." Unfortunately, we cannot yet publish our project until the results of the closed competition are summed up, but we will definitely present it as soon as possible.
Another example from Lviv: the Semytsvit residential complex. Customers have approached us with a request to offer a vibrant color architecture. The site is located outside the central historical part of Lviv, but due to the elevated relief, it actively participates in the panorama of the city. We made a variant with bright colors of the facades, which the customer really liked, but when we checked how bright facades work in the panorama of the city, we prepared a more restrained version that does not "try to overshadow with its brightness" the noble shades of the facades of historical Lviv, and, admittedly, not without difficulty, but still convinced the customer of the correctness of the restrained version.
We tried to apply the same principles in the project of the apart-hotel on Mikhailovskaya Square in Kiev: modern architecture can and should respectfully coexist with the works of the past, without falling into ingratiating imitation.
What are you dreaming about? What are your most ambitious aspirations?
A. P.: I would like to build an object that would become a real business card of the city loved by the townspeople. In our cities there are many revered monuments of the past, but what project could be called a hallmark of the modern architecture of the city, and at the same time not with a sarcastic and caricature, but with a positive meaning? Something that brings new fresh colors to the image of the city, like the Sydney Opera House, or the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
