We have already talked about this project as part of the report from the Moscow Archives Council on April 1. The development company Sminex is building a residential building on a rectangular plot of 0.366 hectares in Zamoskorechye on Malaya Ordynka. It will occupy the site of a Soviet building where offices were recently located, and thus change the function to a residential one. The previous building is a four-story, extended, reminiscent of a Soviet school or an industrial building: this is a creation of engineering and construction rather than architectural thought, and in almost everything it contradicts what we are used to associating with Zamoskvorechye. The architects, by their own admission, preferred to ignore the foreign body of their predecessor and came up with a new image for the site, suitable for the increased scale: instead of a four-story building, a six-story building will appear, which, moreover, will occupy several about the largest area.
The new house, however, is carefully inscribed in the scale of street development - albeit along the top line, but it “catches” the level of the eaves of neighboring buildings.
The house responds to the scale of the historical Zamoskvorechye - one of the most complete, in terms of the preservation of the fabric of the old city, territories of the Moscow center. Of course, it cannot turn into a wooden or stone merchant's mansion with a garden, similar to those that survived across Malaya Ordynka Street. But with the city of tenement houses of the early 20th century, the solution proposed by the architects of ADM echoes both on a large scale and rhythmically.
The architects proposed to divide the long street front of the house into three parts, imitating three houses instead of one for a passer-by. Initially, two parts were planned, but then they settled on three - "optimal from the point of view of visual rhythm." The three facades react differently to their surroundings. The left, north - glass: it allows you to create a pause that comes into a certain resonance with the caesuras of the Zamoskvoretsky gardens (one of which is located just almost opposite). The central facade is brick, it responds to the neighborhood of the HSE building, built at the end of the 19th century in the brick pseudo-Russian style with appropriate decorations; in the central part, following the rules of classical art, the main entrance to the house is located, however, not too accented. The third, southern part of the house is white-stone and responds to another “neighbor”, a building from the 1930s.
It would seem that the idea is very simple: one volume with three facades, aimed at dialogue with the context of the historical city - it is not for nothing that the name of the bureau stands for “dialogue with the metropolis”. Three materials, almost like primary elements: glass, brick, stone. The last two are typical of the old Zamoskvorechye, and if we consider that there are many wooden inserts in the stone facade, then all textured themes are thus revealed. Historically, in Moscow and many Russian cities, white stone was used mainly for the basement of buildings, brick was the material on the first floor, wood - on the second; at the top there was a balcony, a gorenka, the sky was even higher. Now let's try to mentally "flip" the house 90 degrees: the alternation will turn out to be almost the same, the glass will be a conditional sky, the southern part will be a conditional base. A series of facades seems to absorb the components of Zamoskvorechye, but precisely that at the level of Anaximander's elements, but builds its own sequence from them, referring to the surroundings textured, and not literally.
The most mobile and lively in this combination is the "air" of glass. At first glance, it is clear that this is not a mirror of the Zamoskvoretsky garden, or, let's say, softer - not only it, but above all an ultra-modern blotch, a neo-modern pearl in the stone-wooden old Moscow. The hot-bent glass structures installed as the second skin of the façade cover the bedrooms located in the central part of the façade. On the sides, where the living rooms are located, the glass is wide and uncovered - so the transparency of the glass facade becomes unstable, like a curtains crumpled in folds.
The flat glass of the living room provides a quiet fit with the central brick façade. Which, as we remember, in texture, chiaroscuro and material has something in common with a pseudo-Russian building more than a century ago, where one of the parts of the HSE is now located. Half of all surfaces of the new facade are planned to be laid out with a continuous curb: the bricks are turned at an angle, and even in a run, the angle above the ledge is not only in the interfloor rods, but some of the walls are made in the same way. It turns out in relief and, moreover, allows you to avoid one of the disadvantages of brick: its flatness and boring monotony of masonry. Here, the brick does not look like a smooth tile (although, most likely, a crossbar tile will be used for implementation), but as an intrinsic and picturesque element.
The section above the entrance, located asymmetrically on the right, is marked by a checkerboard alternation of wide balconies and loggias - inside these are, respectively, bedrooms and living rooms. Two "picturesque" facades: glass and brick, I must say, quite closely overlap with each other, both from the point of view of their composition: thickening towards the center and discharge along the edges, and elements - here and there, textured elements alternate with openwork gratings of balconies, which it is planned to be executed according to the author's drawings of architects, with a plant drawing in the spirit of generalized Art Nouveau. The dialogue of modern forms with historical architecture is felt everywhere here, but these lattices are one of the brightest accents on the verge of approximation. However, they can be perfectly understood in the mainstream of modern ornamental architecture.
Nearby, in two facades - "brothers", so different and so similar, the third seems to be a visiting friend. One way or another, now it is he who provides a calm, respectable pause and a transition to the neighboring building of the 1930s (a little more constructivist, but already with pilasters). This facade is made of limestone of light sandy color, which in the walls between the windows is covered with a rough pattern of narrow stripes - it echoes the fields of a brick curb, but is thinner. Interfloor rods, on the contrary, are flat and therefore lighter. On this facade, one of the favorite ADM techniques is also developed - layering: only here the balconies protrude deeply forward (and their grilles, by the way, are not openwork), and a second layer of light yellow wood, recessed into the depths, appears in the windows, which in places turns into frames, "tightening" the glass around the perimeter.
The corner console hangs at a height of six meters; a fire passage into the courtyard is arranged under it. It is a clear roll call, an appeal to the architecture of the laconic Soviet Art Deco of the 1930s, which is represented by the neighboring house. And the entire southern facade is closest to Art Deco, but without decorative details. The theme develops in the courtyard - the facade seems to "turn" into the courtyard, continuing there. However, in the courtyard, the rhythm is revived by the alternation of blocks with more and less active plasticity, and a forced pause occurs in the middle of the eastern wall: the three lower floors here are devoid of windows, since on the other side of the courtyard there is a school building. At the same time, the balconies, where they are, are wide enough - 1.7 m, so that you can drink coffee in the air, especially since the cardinal directions, south and east, are favorable for this.
Apartments - 67, layouts are varied. Studios are adjacent to dwellings from 90 to 170 m2, the latter prevail. Almost all of them, even the same in area and number of rooms, differ in details: the width of the windows, the presence or absence of a balcony. There are penthouses on the upper floors in the central and southern parts of the house.
On the first floors, as it should be according to the urban planning rules of the historic center, cafes and shops are planned. Street showcases of retail are almost entirely glass, with small inserts of stone and wood. The house has three lift groups, the entrance to the first section is through and leads to the courtyard. The entrance to the second section, which is butt-facing, is from the courtyard. Under the house there are two levels of parking for 139 cars, the entrance to it is from the left edge of the glass facade, from the side of Malaya Ordynka. The entry of cars into the courtyard, except for emergency services, is not provided.
The courtyard, as always with ADM, is thought out in detail, the architects put their whole soul into these stories with landscaping. Here there is geoplastic, and baskets of sheared bushes, and some high-growth cereals. The courtyard, according to Andrey Romanov, is divided into a kind of "green rooms" - so that a sufficiently large number of people could be in a relatively small area at the same time, without concentrating in one place and without interfering with each other. Needless to say, there are new lawns with grass and several trees on the sidewalk along the street.
Designing in the area of historical buildings inevitably raises a number of familiar questions to all: how will the new building fit into the existing context, with the help of what means and techniques? And most importantly, should a new building with its appearance declare itself as something new, or is it better for it to mimic an already existing, time-tested environment? The position of Andrei Romanov, head of the “Architectural Dialogue with the Metropolis” workshop, is well known in this regard: the pseudo-classical look is not a guarantee that the building will become part of the context. Modern facades may turn out to be a better option, provided that the correct scale is proportionate to the environment and human perception, a sufficient amount of detail and a confidently delineated drawing. The new project of the workshop - a residential building at 19 Malaya Ordynka Street - fully reflects these principles. And also can serve as an example of filigree work with details and emotional content of the house, both outside and inside. ***
There was another version of the project: a more calm brick facade took the place of a sharp-effective glass facade in it. Here along the street there was a uniform roll and alternation of large light beige and red-brick spots. Below you can see what this option looked like.
