The project of quarter number five in the Garden Quarters was made by Sergey Skuratov in 2015. Two residential buildings should occupy the western corner of the territory between the second and third blocks; Initially, this site was approximately twice as large and it was planned to give it to office buildings, but later, after 2008, it was decided to change the function to residential, and, moreover, not to demolish the small fire station building stretched along the outer contour of the territory. The building spot has approximately halved and acquired an elongated shape. Now it is the smallest quarter of the complex, three to four times smaller than the others.
But the place is extremely important in terms of urban planning. In fact, this is the main entrance to the Garden Quarters, since it is this western corner that faces both the pedestrian path from the Sportivnaya metro station and the city square - the site in front of the Usachevsky market. Now the square is filled with cars, and meanwhile typologically it is a trading square, a center of social life, and the market, covered with a concrete wing of a sail vault, is not so simple in terms of architecture. Sergey Skuratov, author of the concept, design of the code, and more than half of the buildings of Sadovy Kvartalov, in his project emphasized, first of all, the town-planning significance of the site, its role as the main entrance to the new complex.
In addition, even at the conceptual level, the project included two diagonal axes balancing each other and enlivening the composition, one in the fourth quarter - directed to the southeast, the other in the fifth - to the southwest. The first went to Andrei Savin and bureau "A – B", and in this place a body appeared that violated part of the design code (in particular about the predominance of bricks), similar to the head of some mercury worm, but extremely effective and original. That strengthened the East-West antithesis inherent in Sergey Skuratov's concept, which was briefly voiced by its author at the level of the design code. Now the east is the mercury "head" - the sculptural volume of Andrei Savin, horizontal, densely flowing in the direction where "the Golden Horde down the Volga". Sergei Skuratov, on the other hand, responded to this plastic challenge with a tower located strictly on the western corner of the territory and saturated with Western European associations.
The tower, especially when viewed from the Usachevsky market square, I would like to describe as a medieval torro, a residential tower of an influential family, located on the border of the market campo of some città - a medieval, but rather Italian, city that is already beginning to respect and defend itself. Such towers were common between the 11th and 14th centuries throughout the former Roman Empire from Spain and Florence to Asia Minor. It was from them that Florence later passed to the palazzo. In addition, there were bridge towers and fortress dungeons, often round and also intended for sheltered living. And the bell towers - one of them, the most famous, Pisa, Sergey Skuratov especially mentions when talking about the project, since the openwork of the facades invented by the architect can really remind her colonnades. In contrast to Andrey Savin's fluid “head”, Skuratov's tower looks like a stronghold of a rational vertical - bristling with buttresses, rough-brick on the outside and sunny-white, like the light of Telperion, on the inside. Certainly, if implemented, this polished metaphor would bring together many nuances and sharpen the meanings. The Garden Quarters would have two heads, one to the east, the other to the west, which is extremely symbolic in itself.
The plastic of the "western tower" is restrained, graphic, balanced, and at the same time, it is endowed with a number of secrets that would make it fascinating to examine it: the facades would have to constantly change in motion.
First of all, it is not a round tower at all, but a short parallelepiped with a distinctly circularly rounded end. It appears to be a cylinder only from a strictly frontal position. The opposite end, facing the center of the complex, is cut in a straight line, but accentuated by a spectacular console: its five lower floors are carved to a depth of several meters. Because this part of the volume is shaded and there is no point in making apartments in it, - the architect explains.
The facades of the rounded part and the side walls following it are rather brick. Rather - because with bricks (high-quality clinker Gent from Hagemaster, with a slight tone stretch and roughness) it was planned to cover only the outer surfaces. All thicknesses and spacious slopes should be bright white, and even a little sparkling in the dark - from Stoneglass "fusion of stone and glass". It seems that on the bevels, like on a cut of an apple, we see the boiling white inner material of the walls, that it is white inside. Which, of course, is not entirely true: all concrete walls are of the same thickness, but hollow boxes are attached to them, forming an architectural relief: the walls of the rounded "tower" part protrude more and look sharpened due to the bevels, and passing to the side walls, they gradually lose thickness and become wider. When viewed from the south, the tower will seem brick, and if you walk along Usachevskaya Street to the north, the tone of the facade will smoothly change, like a gradient - from terracotta to white and then back to terracotta, like the pages of a half-open book. Moving gradient, moreover, serves as a transition - a color "bridge" between the brick building in the south and the light facades of the third block in the north. On the plan, they look like a tractor track or a circular saw, since the bevels are asymmetric and are arranged only on the north side. Needless to say, the relief piers-buttresses reinforce serf associations without a hint of literalism. The historical associations given with a hint are also strengthened by the fact that the blind area around the tower is slightly deepened, referring the observer to the memory of the Novgorod churches in the bowl of the cultural layer taken out around them by archaeologists - the same technique was used by Sergey Skuratov to enhance the contextual flair in the building
Art House in Tessinsky Lane.
In addition to the figurative meaning, the “buttress” slopes are practical: from the inside, they reveal to the apartments a maximum of views of the Novodevichy Convent and Vorobyovy Gory, capturing the maximum rays of the evening sun - which, in fact, determines the calculated direction of the planes. However, the subtleties do not end with the figure of thicknesses and directions: the windows also consistently expand from bottom to top, and the piers narrow, visually lightening the volume and playing with perspective.
The opposite end-console develops a given theme: it is vertically cut, completely glass and framed by a thin white frame - "TV". This supports the observer's initial conviction that the walls of the house are white inside, but at the same time it seems to also demonstrate the emptiness of the shell, indicating some theatricality, the scenic essence of the metaphor in a conversation with the viewer. In addition, the stained glass window leaves no doubt about the immanent modernity of the architecture of Sergei Skuratov, which is important for its author, with all his love for dialogue, context and “literature”.
The first dominant tower is designed higher than the one written in the design code of Garden Quarters - seventeen floors. The second tower strictly follows the rules, there are twelve floors here. It stretches along the boulevard that continues from the Sportivnaya station and separates the fifth block from the second. The architecture of the second tower echoes the main neighbor, but it is somewhat more restrained. The end planes, however, are covered with a fur coat similar to a striker made of prominently protruding bricks, arranged in a checkerboard pattern, which makes the chiaroscuro especially textured. The slopes of the windows are brick and smooth, in their masonry it was even planned to scatter a certain amount of glassy gleaming, like lurex threads, inserts. The relief surface is open to the environment and figuratively, since the wall seems to be hygroscopic, porous; and in meaning, since everything that looks like a striker tells the eye that either something has been broken off from the wall, or it is waiting for an extension. The ends of the tower, thus, "stretch" to the sides, striving to grow into the general round dance of buildings; and window slopes, on the other hand, designate themselves as shaped voids. The extended walls of the second tower are glass "televisions", and when viewed from "Sportivnaya" it reads like a giant portal. If you think a little more, then in the fifth quarter in the project of Sergei Skuratov you can see the outline of the city gates and the tower next to them, which in a “literary” sense is quite logical for the main entrance to the complex.
Both buildings are placed on a stylobate, the height of which rises to two floors as the relief of the Garden Quarters decreases to the central part of the territory, where, as you know, there is a pond. The facades of the stylobate, mainly facing the inner part of the complex, are the same as those of the stained-glass part of the towers: glass with a slight cut with white vertical lamellas. A kindergarten with a walking area on the roof was planned in the stylobate on the south side and along the boulevard along which people will go home from the metro; there is also a ramp to enter the parking lot, separated by a wall of climbing plants. Shops, cafes and other "public functions" were to be located along the northern facade, transforming the deep funnel of the second, triangular boulevard into a city square - a pandanized market square opposite, which, perhaps, will also someday wait for its urbanist.
The Triangular Square, according to the just assertion of Sergei Skuratov, was supposed to "draw" passers-by into the bell of a promisingly narrowing public space. The intrigue is complicated by the two-tier: as already mentioned, the transformed relief of the entire residential complex is perceptible, in places - two floors down to the pond in the center of its territory. On the site of the fifth block, the drop is very noticeable, so the stylobate is equipped with ramps and pedestrian bridges connecting it with the second and third blocks, at least in order to conveniently drive the children to school. Generally speaking, hinged bridges are a trademark of the Garden Quarters, they are everywhere here. Several flights of stairs leading to the lower tier of the stylobate also appear along the triangular square and in its final narrowed part. The entrances to the shops are provided both on the first and on the second floor - the space of the triangular boulevard turns out to be complex, its parts interpret the relief difference in different ways.
As you can see, the project can withstand consideration at different levels - from a fascinating multi-level arrangement of pedestrian spaces and various functions in the lower levels to detailing the facades, plastic accents and the semantic “literary” part of the concept. Sergei Skuratov made the fifth quarter in many ways a key entrance to the residential complex, which for eight years has been said to be an example of a new approach for Moscow to urban space and architectural solutions in luxury housing. Meanwhile, in the process of working on the concept, at a moment close to completion, it suddenly became clear that the project was participating in a tender with a single rival. Further, the customer (Inteko company) preferred the concept of another company. So, apparently, the described project will not be implemented, which is sad, since it could become not only a logical completion of the author's plan, but also a successful urban-planning accent that could decorate a part of the elite Moscow district of Khamovniki.
