Andrey Stenyushkin, architect, co-founder of the Sovmod project:
“The time of design and construction of Park Place coincided with the era of cardinal changes in the Soviet Union, and it ended in a completely new state - the Russian Federation, thanks to which this residential complex became a direct reflection of what was happening in society.
According to the original plan of the customer, the Foreign Ministry's Office of the Diplomatic Corps (UPDC), the complex was to become an "autonomous reservation" for representatives of foreign embassies. The project team headed by the famous Yakov Belopolsky (the author of such buildings as INION RAS and the Palace of Youth) was tasked with designing a residential complex endowed with all the features of "bourgeois life", which included underground parking, restaurants and a fitness center.
However, in the process of construction, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the new facility, which received the name "Park Place" corresponding to the needs of the time, became a commercial facility, combining the functions of a residential complex and a business center. Such housing appealed to the new Russian elite, thanks in part to a sense of "safe isolation." "Park Place", in fact, has combined all those features that will become characteristic of the elite residential complexes of the nineties and zero.
The complex forms the corner of the intersection of Leninsky Prospect and Miklukho-Maclay Street - two important city highways, so its architecture is very significant in the context of the entire city. It should be noted that Yakov Belopolsky at the time of the design of Park Place had already taken part in urban planning work in the south-west of Moscow: under his leadership, for example, the RUDN complex located in the neighborhood was developed, as well as the Yasenevo and Teply Stan districts.
"Park Place" is a complex of multi-height (7-22 floors) monolithic residential buildings, framing a shopping arcade, and concentrated around it restaurants, a sports and fitness center, a kindergarten, laundries and other commercial premises. The entrance to the building is designed in the form of a postmodern glass portal, through which we enter the spacious lobby space and further into the interior of the shopping gallery, covered with a glass mesh shell in the manner of an early 20th century passage.
Stylistically and functionally, the architecture of the complex looks like a reference to Soviet constructivism and European functionalism, which is clearly visible thanks to the horizontal glazing strips on the snow-white plastered facades. The appearance is fully consistent with the inner content of the building: residential buildings - gallery type with two-level apartments. The volumetric-spatial structure and plastic design of the facades is very dynamic and even somewhat aggressive, which speaks of a close relationship with brutalism. This effect is created due to the interaction of strip glazing, numerous bay windows, balconies and staircase vertical volumes dividing the building into buildings.
However, the building does not produce the feeling of heaviness so characteristic of the Soviet architecture of the late 1980s; rather, on the contrary, it looks easy and, if I may say so, intelligent; it may well mislead a person who does not know his true date of construction. In no case should you belittle the achievements of the architecture of the RSFSR, however, if you compare it with the architecture of, for example, friendly Yugoslavia, the difference will be obvious. The fact is that "Park Place" is made of such high quality that it seems like a gift brought from a capital country by an employee of a foreign embassy. But in this case, it is the result of the work of our Soviet architects, who were given freedom to such an extent that they were allowed to design the first "capitalist" residential complex in Moscow.
"Park Place" is the only example of "Yeltsin's neo-modernism" that has not yet been developed. This building is the result of decades of development of Soviet architecture, which was finally allowed to throw off the burden of systemic constraints and be reborn as a European quality, but at the same time original phenomenon."
