The Skolkovo-Park residential complex was built by order of the development company Millhouse not far from the Moscow Ring Road (160 m to the highway in a straight line), south of Skolkovskoye Highway, next to the Grunwald residential complex, on the street Vesennyaya village Zarechye. Class - premium, large apartments, from 60 to 130 m2, and for the residents of the first floors, their own small front gardens are provided. The parking is spacious, the landscaping is beyond praise, it is five minutes walk to the business school, fifteen minutes to the innovation city. From the point of view of the benefits of life, comfort and quality, everything is fine.
Millhouse owns about 600 hectares of land in this area, including the long-term leased and then landscaped Meshchersky park, aka Bakovsky. North of the highway, in the bosom of the innovation city, Millhouse has also set up Europe's largest golf club. In the future, the customer plans to build several buildings of the business park on the site between the new residential complex and the Moscow Ring Road. In addition, the Setun River, which flows along the northern border of the residential complex, was cleaned and landscaped: the banks were fortified, a larch embankment appeared - it was raised high above the water on stilts, preventing floods. These places, which Muscovites now associate not so much with the fences of elite mansions as with the "theme of innovation", are cramped, but beautiful, and Skolkovo Park looks like a piece of paradise, to a large extent due to the architecture of Vladimir Plotkin.
We told
on the project of a residential complex in Zarechye, later named "Skolkovo-Park", in 2010. The construction of the Skolkovo School of Management by David Adazhie was just being completed in the neighborhood, while the innograd existed in the form of a picturesque master plan of the AREP bureau, and no one had heard of Technopark's D2 areas. Then it seemed to me that an important feature of Vladimir Plotkin's project was a sudden transition from the straight lines loved by the architect to curves, a change in the plastic paradigm from a ruler to a compass.
The arched shape is very important for the Skolkovo Park buildings, but, according to Vladimir Plotkin, it was the result of many restrictions on the complex site. In short, the house had to bend in such a way as to get maximum sunlight for its apartments.
The fact is that, according to the rules of the surrounding territories, not a single window of the residential complex should have looked to the south, which is the most advantageous in terms of insolation. From the east - the noisy Moscow Ring Road, and the most pleasant part of the landscape - the river, is located on the north side. Relatively free from restrictions, but also not very good in terms of lighting, the sunset west side. Therefore, as the architect told in his interview to Project Russia magazine (№77, 2015, pp. 41-56), the arcs of the plan were drawn at first as a joke: the sum of reflections on the angles most beneficial for insolation.
So the "legs" of the building face south with blind ends, a round stone wall, and a line of stone "curtains", similar to buttress ribs, popular in the architecture of theaters and regional committees of the eighties. The bend protects, does not allow the windows to turn where it is not necessary, but at the same time allows some of the "covered" openings to catch the rays of the southwestern sun. The main "light traps" are triangular bay windows that cover most of the facades: they turn away, turn, change direction. The arcs of the plan and bay windows of the facades should, therefore, be understood as more pragmatic techniques, which made it possible to squeeze out the maximum comfort for the tenants of a premium-class house - and not self-valuable plastic delights. Like this.
So, but not so. A skilled architect manages the artistic for the practical's sake and vice versa.
In my opinion, the main advantage of this house-complex is its lightness. The subtlety of features, close to ephemerality, although not overstepping the border of the real, is noble, even more, almost unreal, some kind of Modiglianian. Nothing inert, no crowding and mass pressure. The house is thin, which is generally characteristic of the best modernist "plates", but also curved - the spinning makes it mobile due to the constant change of perspective - if you look at the buildings in reality, wandering around.
The effect of transparent whirling on the verge of ephemerality was one of my main impressions of the project renders, which echoed the studio graphics of Vladimir Plotkin, where everything is transparent and flies, and often whirls, rotates like planets - an astronomical, paper effect, extremely difficult to implement. Here, in the completed building, it was partly managed to keep this lightness of form and, as a result, of being.
Surprisingly, the photographs, even the most wonderful ones, do not convey the main advantage. On them you can see the details, quality and subtlety of execution - and the cases, thanks to the customer, were built exactly as planned and finished with high quality. In order to appreciate the energy of a building, you need to see it live, since it's all about movement, in constantly changing reflections of the sky and angles, which makes the house look like water, and you can look at it for a long time.
The architectural composition is perceptibly theatrical - the building guides the viewer using the techniques of baroque scenography: it covers the proscenium with the circumference of a concave facade, plays with rays of “visual shots” that cut the bend of the northeastern part into separate buildings, opening between them, as between curtains, towards the river. The wall either recedes, then comes to the fore, invites inside, then it leads along an arc, forming a closed space of the courtyard, then it opens up a distant perspective.
But it's also about what the wall is. If we recall the ring houses and snake houses of the sixties, then they usually retained a density of mass with uniform window cells, which gave the bend a plastic solidity, sculptural materiality, not to mention the ability to easily count floors.
Here, at first glance, it is difficult to understand how the facades are arranged - we are more likely to see a vortex of the energy field, but not the cells of the windows. The point is in the bay windows, which, as already mentioned, are needed in order to capture more light. The main, mostly western, facades consist of them almost entirely, bay windows combine somewhere two, and somewhere three floors, less often they are content with one, confusing our perception of tiers and scale. In places where multidirectional spots meet, the bay windows are slightly "hooked" to each other, which makes the house a bit like a conveyor belt or a bicycle chain.
The edges and edges break the arcuate surface, make it composite and deprive the inherent sculpturality of the arc. Needless to say, this is one of Vladimir Plotkin's favorite author's solutions for round volumes. The mass in the hands of the architect does not bend like plasticine, but prefers to "break" into many components. It seems that for the first time the reception of a ribbed cylinder was found in one of the 2008 projects for
office complex on Valovaya Street. A more restrained version of the accordion of glass-stone bay windows was tested in the house for Bolshoy Sukharevsky Lane. More recently, the same ribbed facade and the same combination of light and dark stone appeared in the project for Kulneva Street. The ribbing successfully dematerializes the facade, turning it into a gear, then into a folding screen - in a word, replacing the plastic of turning with sharp edges. It also adds an unexpected musicality - you want to press the protrusions like keys, and their groups, sometimes even or alternating, seem to be petrified chords.
On the other hand, the house does not ruffle everywhere, the logic of matter is observed: if the concave facades are assembled by the “folds” of bay windows, then the curved, especially the outer eastern facade facing the Moscow Ring Road “stretches” and rounds smoothly. Here, the house has a "back", a rear facade, and following the logic of the ensemble's direction, it will be considered last.
Another feature is the ratio of glass to stone. They are approximately equal in number, and the stone, moreover, is of two types, light limestone and dark, grayish brown, the first plays the main violin, the second emphasizes the shadows and even draws them with itself, compensating for the lack of contrasting sun in our strip by means of a kind of architectural grisaille (this is also favorite author's technique - on the house in Chertanovo, architecturally completely different, you can see elements of a similar "grisaille").
The important thing is that grisaille is essentially a graphic, not a volumetric device; this is a technique for simulating volume by means of a plane. The stone continues to behave more graphically, without emphasizing its own mass. Blocks of stone float in the coldish plane of the glass, like leaves on water, forming a common pattern with glass - a triplex with a slight mirror effect that protects residents from neighboring glances. And although there is more glass on the first facade, and more stone in the courtyard, this does not change the situation too much - in the formation of triangular protrusions, two materials participate, ultimately, on an equal footing. It turns out that the difference between glass and stone is in the nuances of transparency, that is, it is not very significant, and this approach is completely, I would even say declaratively, classical.
However, the usual tectonic role of the stone is not completely ignored. On the main facade of the western building, the stone forms a mega-frame of a cornice and several vertical rods, similar to the supports of a giant order, but spaced rarely, thin and facing outward not with a fust bulge, but with a light ledge, similar to an open book, emphasizing convention with all its appearance " colonnades ". Meanwhile, one way or another, but the echo of the colonnade is what turns the arc into circumference and evokes a heap of associations, from ancient to manor.
The theme is picked up by another colonnade - smaller, in two rows and transparent, placed on the roof of a glass public center. Functionally, it appears to be the restaurant's terrace. Figuratively, this is an anti-tower, accentuating the entrance to the courtyard, on the one hand, and on the other hand, a milavida gazebo, akin to the columnar rotunda in parks on a dais, and similar, for example, to the Apollo colonnade in Pavlovsk.
It is as if the transformation of the manor palace with a park into a modern house is taking place before our eyes - it spun, went, one grew, the other became thinner and smaller, and now nostalgic fragments are melted into the new structure. This is how you find antique reliefs in the walls of Roman courtyards. It is interesting that all these classical notes, on the one hand, do not at all contradict the whole, since even post-war modernism knew well how to integrate columns without obeying the classics. On the other hand, they are inherent only in the first building, which makes it even more theatrical backstage. He is, in a way, a curtain that meets the audience, and then already - the gears of life.
Subtle, transparent autumn nostalgia for the lost peace of the golden age, be it a manor near Moscow or a fantastic Arcadia, is supported by the landscaping of the territory. I must say that the name "Skolkovo-Park" is justified not only by the proximity of Meshchersky Park, the territory of the residential complex is quite large, and not densely built up, but rather delicately for our times, leaving residents a lot of "air". The first landscaping project was made by TPO "Reserve". Then the customer held a competition, which was won by the English bureau Hyland Edgar Driver. Vladimir Plotkin highly appreciated the landscaping option offered and implemented by the British company - and indeed, it is a very carefully planned, beautiful and also easy to perceive, comfortable and not oversaturated landscape. The park is planted with plants that bloom in turn and change the color of the leaves, regularly refreshing the landscape painting; lawns are equipped with soft geoplastic; everything is illuminated with soft reflected light that does not blind the eyes.
But for me the most interesting, key elements of the garden-park on the territory of the residential complex are two amphitheaters, which were located by English architects in those places where artificial ponds were conceived in the landscape project "Reserva". These are places predetermined by the architecture of the building. The first pond was located at the place where the compass was installed, which drew an arc of the main facade. The British turned it into a green amphitheater, extremely charming: the grassy steps definitely remind of the theaters of ancient cities, but not the glamorous restored ones, but the genuine ones, destroyed by a series of earthquakes, where the stone benches were displaced or completely lost, and the steps remained. What comes into resonance with the contour colonnade of the facade, pushes the thoughts of the walker, making the walk not idle.
The second amphitheater marks the meeting point of the two main lines of sight, cutting through the hulls and facing towards Setun - this is the point with the best view. The grassy steps are framed and Millhouse is considering installing benches here. Another landscape find: a small hill on the eastern side successfully dampens the noise of the Moscow Ring Road, at least for the first floors.
If we break away from the contemplation of the park beauties and again look around, look wider, then we cannot fail to notice that the surroundings of the Skolkovskoye Highway are now in an acute stage of the transformation period. Previously, here, as along the Rublevskoe highway, there were mostly fences - and even now, if you turn a little to the side, you find yourself in their gorges. This is a well-known impression from the Moscow region, emotionally difficult to say. Skolkovo Park also has a fence, but the other one is transparent, in tune with the project's ideology - light and unconstrained. The house, and behind it and its "garden" do not hide in the shell of the castle, but, turning around in the open, breathe in deeply, as if saying in the morning: oh, how good! And what else does a person need.
