Today, the embankments of the Yauza River present a very variegated picture to the views of pedestrians and motorists languishing in traffic jams. Parks, educational buildings and residential complexes built at the beginning of this century alternate with car services and treatment facilities, garage cooperatives and endless industrial zones. Almost every one of these objects, with rare exceptions, is a "thing in itself" and does not cause any desire to wrap inward. The architects of the ABV Group workshop decided to break this order: the residential area they designed, the main facades of which overlook the Rubtsovskaya embankment, was conceived as the most permeable, attractive for the townspeople territory, which opens new pedestrian routes, directly connecting the embankment with Bolshaya Pochtovaya Street.
The plot of irregular shape has its eastern border on the Yauza, and its opposite western side faces Bolshaya Pochtovaya. Now, behind a gray concrete fence that stretches along the river, there is an area as vast as it is indistinct, cut into small pieces and mostly unused: abandoned buildings of a weaving and finishing plant, a tire service, an electrical substation, motley office premises, scraps of barbed wire …, but a Moscow resident is accustomed to. The only object that can attract an interested eye is a three-storey red-brick building of the 19th century, overlooking the Rubtsovskaya embankment.
The planning, and at the same time the semantic axis of the quarter should be a wide boulevard: directed from Bolshaya Pochtovaya Street to Yauza, it will run approximately along the line of the existing intra-factory passage. The boulevard, open to all citizens, will become a new pedestrian artery, open a view of the river from Bolshaya Pochtovaya, and allow walking from the city to the river and vice versa. It will, of course, be equipped with all the attributes of a modern, human-centered urban space: landscaping, small forms of improvement, cafes and shops, for which the first floors of buildings lined up along the pedestrian zone are intended. The architects, despite the overall rather significant density of the new residential complex, made these houses low - five to seven stories high, and arranged them in a checkerboard pattern, in every possible way avoiding window-to-window gaze and trying to saturate the walking space with "air". Therefore, in particular, and also for a better panorama of the river, the boulevard is conceived quite wide - up to 25 meters in the central part.
At the end of the pedestrian space, cozy squares are planted, which accentuate the entrance and, like the mouth of a river, invite passers-by to go inland. Behind the rows of houses on the sides of the boulevard, there are long semi-closed private courtyards. Also landscaped and already private, intended for the residents of the complex. All this - both the boulevard and two large blocks on its sides, is located on the roof of an underground parking lot.
The southern appendix of the territory will house the two tallest tower buildings: one is a 13-storey administrative building, the other is a 17-storey residential one, with a kindergarten on its first floors. The garden will be surrounded on both sides by a square, which joins its northern border with the entrance area to the boulevard - together they form another pleasant public space facing the river.
According to the authors, the facades of these two towers overlooking the Rubtsovskaya embankment should become a recognizable “visiting card” of the complex, clearly visible from the river. The office tower is brick, and the residential tower is light-stone, travertine. The main part of the "river" facade of both buildings is enclosed in a thin "TV" frame and filled with a zigzag of glass loggias, separated by thin ribs of interfloor articulations - a solution that is sculpturally effective on the outside and rational on the inside, since it allows both apartment residents and office workers to enjoy the panorama river, opened, thanks to the triangular shape of the ledges, on two sides. The architects also took care of revealing the views of the river and the city for the residents of other buildings: at all points of view, the corners of the buildings are "taken out" from top to bottom and replaced with stained glass. Mostly in these corners of the apartments there are public areas - living rooms and kitchens.
The theme of the wave is picked up by another office building, flanking the complex from the west, from the direction of Bolshaya Pochtovaya - its facades are denser, there are more bricks in them, but soft waves pick up the rhythm set by the "river towers". The undulating red-brick facade is complemented by an unexpected accent: a completely different horizontal volume of a two-story penthouse perched on the roof of the building. An austere glass parallelepiped with floor-to-ceiling windows and a thin grid of wooden ribs linking two floors in a vertical rhythm. This is a very large and comfortable volume with an inevitable visual effect from the view of the surroundings of Bakuninskaya, and once after all, the palace surroundings of Bakuninskaya, formerly Pokrovskaya, streets: from here you can see the Church of the Intercession in Rubtsovo, sunk in the trees, and the perky light pink bell tower of St. Nicholas Church, and the Stalinist houses of Gastello street.
The preserved factory building on Rubtsovskaya embankment became an accent of a completely different kind - it should allow the modern complex to better "merge" with the historical environment. The architects decided to restore a small water tower, which you cannot find in the depths of the industrial zone now, according to the measured drawings, but in a new place - to move it to the beginning of the boulevard, where it will become an architectural highlight, emphasizing the diversity of the complex. The first floor of the reconstructed factory building will be turned into a pedestrian gallery-portico with shops - if you look from the side of the embankment, this gallery seems to be the embryo of a cozy city - then the theme is picked up by the square, the boulevard, and the 17-storey tower, whose first two floors are also turned into a gallery …
In addition to the water tower, the architects plan to recreate the facades of two historic buildings that are too dilapidated to be preserved: one of them will be built into the front of the boulevard, the other into one of the private courtyards.
The plastic solution of the buildings along the boulevard is laconic: right angles, a large glass area, a calm rhythm of window openings. For decoration, as in the case of the flanking towers, two materials were used - brick (light and ordinary, terracotta) and travertine. Moreover, some of the buildings are monochrome, and some divides the color in half: for example, to the left of the staircase, the house is light, and to the right is red-brick, and vice versa. Light stone and red-brick volumes alternate freely, but evenly, and two-color red-and-white "propylaea" appear in front of each entrance area to the boulevard. On the embankment, they form a somewhat more complex composition of three parts: on the right is the rich red of the old factory building, on the left is the discreet brown of a modern brick office building, in the center is the light, highest 17-storey residential tower.
The apartment layout of the complex is quite interesting; it will be especially convenient for young families to live here. The layouts of the apartments are flexible, there are practically no one-room apartments - more precisely, due to the fact that in place of the kitchen there is a real living room with a kitchen niche, from a standard one-room apartment (area 45-50 m2) it turns out a full-fledged two-room apartment. The same technique adds a room and apartments with a larger area. And due to the fact that the apartments have several windows along the facade, if necessary, the rooms can be divided by a partition, splitting up the area to increase the family.
And one more perspective. In the future, it is planned to build a pedestrian bridge across the Yauza: on the western bank, it will be integrated into the volume of the historical factory building, and on the eastern bank, a stylized brick tower with a wooden roof should become a pillar - it looks like a reconstructed water tower on the right bank and at the same time resembles bridge fortifications, adjusting in a romantic way, emphasizing the historical value of the place: here nearby, behind the Nemetskaya and Basmannaya settlements, was the royal palace village of Pokrovskoye-Rubtsovo, in which Elizaveta Petrovna deigned to lie sick and plant gardens. Meanwhile, in the architecture of the bridge itself, there is not a single gram of historicism: it is a transparent, spirally twisted beam - and together it turns out to be quite contrasting.
By connecting the banks of the river, the bridge will serve as a continuation of the route along the boulevard from Bolshaya Pochtovaya, as it will allow direct access to the Elektrozavodskaya metro station, which should significantly enhance the connectivity of this part of the city, which has not yet been fully developed from an urban point of view.
