Sergey Estrin's workshop developed the design of the interior and entrance pavilion of the Terekhovo station for an open architectural competition, the results of which were recently announced. The project was not included in the number of finalists, but the proposed ideas and solutions are charming enough to tell about them.
So far, the Mnevnikovskaya floodplain is not quite a Moscow place. Low-lying, swampy in places, more natural than developed, but still not a park at all: fields, meadows and two villages. Terekhovo in the central part of the island still exists, Nizhnie Mnevniki to the north have already been abandoned. Wild, spacious, and now littered with landfills, despite the status of a specially protected area; but much nostalgically reminds, albeit with a smack of industrial rust, of a damp, hazy Central Russian pastoral. Meanwhile, according to the 2014 planning project, 150 out of 350 hectares of the territory are planned to be built up, among other things, with housing around two metro stations, whose names are inherited from the villages. Soon the landscape will radically change and become more like a metropolis, although at least half of the natural enclaves are planned to be preserved. In a word, the architects took up the project of the Terekhovo station, thinking simultaneously about the past and the future of the territory.
“We wanted to make a non-trivial, memorable project for this place,” says Sergey Estrin, “to catch the mood of the residents who descend into the metro early in the morning. We wanted a person to be able to look at themselves and those around them from the outside. See the landscape islets, think about the real values of your life and forget about endless movement for a while”.
The leitmotif of the project was the recollection of the character of the place being transformed. In the lowlands with a couple of half-life villages that are about to dissolve into a big city, it is difficult to recognize the standard of beauty. These places seem to deliberately contradict the samples of good mood: fog instead of sun, swamp instead of mountains, autumn instead of spring … However, the subtle melancholy of the Moscow Region is quite tangible, dear; some places are best revealed in autumn, marshy lowlands are among such. In the process of working on the draft part of the project, the theme "Hedgehog in the Fog" appeared. The hero of the cartoon by Yuri Norshtein is “a warm, recognizable character wandering through a mysterious forest,” says the architect. The cartoon analogy helped to find visually clear graphic shapes. The hedgehog itself, however, we will not see in the concept - it would be too literal.
The main themes, taken from both nature and the cartoon, are phosphorescent fog, grass and birds. The recognizable silhouettes of inflorescences of marsh cattail, which in the Moscow region are used to call reeds, grew on columns to the height of real southern reeds, and maybe even a little more. The wide fusts of the columns were planned to be made of tempered frosted glass, illuminated with white diodes from the inside. Stems are laser cut stainless steel. The same illuminated silhouettes of grass are superimposed on the large letters of the station name, which would be difficult to miss from the train carriage.
There is only one rail track, in the center, and the architects understand it as the bed of a conventional river: the ceiling tape trimmed with dark metal above the trains reflects the reflections of the rails, like an upturned surface of water. In the center is a stream. On the sides of its "channel" there are platform-banks, where a giant cattail "grows" on the luminous columns. A little further, benches are placed, the metal waves of their bases resemble the ledges of a clay bank washed away by water. The dark gray granite floor unites all spaces from the entrance to the platform, denoting the surface of the earth.
The theme of fog on the walls from glowing columns and inscriptions is picked up by light marble with a haze of gray veins. The fog is not very realistic, it, like the earth, is only indicated. The cartoon-like hypertrophied size of the grass enhances the feeling of the game, of falling into the plot of a fantastic plot - which, indeed, provokes a look at oneself from the outside: why did the grass grow so? Who am I if I am less grass? Anyone who did not hide in a field of ripe corn as a child could feel something similar among the graphic "thickets" at the metro station.
The birds, in contrast to the easily recognizable cattail, are stylized to volumetric silhouettes with different wing configurations. All lamps, to one degree or another, have become birds, their prototype is a duck wedge, as the authors explain to us. White diamond birds protrude only slightly from the ceiling, being embedded in the diagonal pattern of its panels; multi-colored hanging birds-triangles, volumetric panels, similar to hang-gliders, gather in flocks and, echoing the movement of the human stream, serve as additional navigation elements, set the direction. The triangular lanterns on escalators are similar to bird beaks, although the authors offer a different prototype: the ridge of the roofs, reminiscent of lost villages.
Another bird is outside: a large, streamlined metal wing covers the glass entrance pavilion that shines in the night. Large, illuminated canopies are formed in front of the doors, and on the sides between the glass of the walls and the point supports of the wing there are spacious “sinuses” with benches and bicycle parking - public spaces for relaxation and conversation.
An architect and artist, Sergey Estrin was able to combine the graphics of the reeds and the plasticity of the wings into one consistent plot, catch the resonance between the rhythm of the metro movement and the wedge of migratory birds, high-tech and autumn melancholy. Modern builders are intensively exploiting the well-known cliché about the underground palaces of the Moscow metro. In the same project, instead of a palace, there is a semblance of Kitezh, which has gone underground: with the memory of the ringing silence of an autumn morning, so unexpected in the traffic flow of a big city.
