ADM architects have been working with the site in Gorokhovsky lane'12 for more than ten years: this was one of their first orders after the creation of their own bureau in 2006. Initially, the building was planned as an office building, and the facades, at the request of the customer, were plastered. After 2008 it became a residential club house consisting of apartments. Everything has changed: the function of the plan, the volume, the type of facades. Only the location remained the same.
The house, whose construction began in 2014 and ended in the spring of 2016, is located in the back of the block behind the Ecuadorian Embassy, on the site where until the 2000s there was an abandoned boarding school, which for a long time frightened passers-by with broken windows. Even earlier, at the beginning of the 20th century, when Marina Tsvetaeva studied at the Von Derviz gymnasium located just to the west, half of the site belonged to the gymnasium garden, beautiful roses were planted there. Well, in the 1980s, passing right through to Kazakov Street, one could inadvertently find stacks of eagle-colored bricks of the 17th century - someone was apparently collecting them for their dacha. Now, of course, there are no such liberties. But the area is old, on the border between Basmannaya and Nemetskaya Sloboda, fifteen minutes walk from here to the Yauz palaces of Peter's associates, Ivan Demidov's "Golden House", a masterpiece of Moscow classicism, or, for example, to Ivan III's traveling palace - five minutes of easy walk … The area is old, although badly damaged by blotches of Soviet plates and towers. Its historical environment is fragmentary and discrete, so that the new club house, which offers its residents the silence of the Moscow almost-center-immediately-behind-Sadovy, did not violate the integrity of the environment: there are only seven floors in it. On the contrary, gleaming beautifully because of the two-story mansions, it quite delicately fills in the caesura that is unnecessary in this place.
In plan, the house resembles the letter H with symmetrical volumes of risalits protruding deeply along the edges of two longitudinal facades. Compact and rational, even elegant in its rationality, the plan is almost the quintessence of axial symmetry. The entrance is recessed, in front of it is a small square, even a mini-square with a couple of benches. Inside, “in the very middle of the house,” there is a reception, symmetrically on the sides, there are four glass vertical stairs, which are simultaneously deepened into the volume, but are easily found and well lit. From the outside, the stairs look like glass "lintels" between the risalits and the central part. The volume, which can be clearly seen on the model, is fragmented everywhere by such vertical jumpers-ledges: the “letter H” is cut at the ends - the smallest apartments are located behind the cutouts. On the longitudinal facades of the risalits, thin deepened verticals are also found. The plan thus becomes more like a very stylized quadrifolium - four sections adjoin a common middle. Everything is in strict accordance with the layouts of the apartments.
The apartments are quite large, from 50 to 130 m2although they can be combined up to 400 m2… In the lintel there are two of the largest apartments, facing south and north, even a study is provided in them. Each risalit has five apartments. Below is one tier of parking.
From the outside, the house is just as rational. The facades consist of evenly spaced verticals, equally neatly intersected by wide interfloor horizontals, of ceramic bands imitating limestone in the binding of metal projections of the same color above and below. The verticals consist of alternating stripes of glass windows and walls of terracotta tiles with glaze similar to friezes, but slightly darker beige. The glaze of two shades - darker and lighter - forms a speckled texture that resembles white-stone masonry and the walls of "Stalinist" houses, but here the pattern is smaller and devoid of intense spotting, which makes it noticeably more delicate. The tile is special: on the right side of it, a terracotta ledge-recess forms a seam approximately half a centimeter thick, horizontally there is the same ledge, but deep - all this provides an even masonry graphics without the need to plaster, rub and tint the seams. Quite comfortable and clean-looking, and the seam pattern is well accented.
The verticals of glass on extended facades are approximately the same width as the piers, which is why they look not so much as windows, openings, but as an element of the general rhythm. At the corners, the glass verticals close and there are more of them, which gives the apartments more light and significantly lightens the volume, since the corners are fixed not by a stone, but by a window that is transparent to the light or, depending on the angle, dark and slightly recessed, giving way to the interfloor ribs of the friezes, which at the corners go forward, showing the frame of the building.
The role of windows is somewhat more complex. They are all framed by a thin dark brown metal frame; glazing lintels are made of the same metal. The windows themselves are wooden double-glazed windows of a similar shade, but a little warmer. The austere set is enlivened by the greenish glass of the fences of the French balconies: high, to the floor, the windows can be opened from the inside. The transparent greenery of the balconies, supported by the same glass of the canopies above the entrances, adds the same restrained kind of picturesqueness to the glass verticals as the different tone of the tiles to the walls.
“I see something Berlin in this house,” says Andrei Romanov. - Glass corners, rational construction, façade tiles. On the whole, we are satisfied with the final decision that we managed to reach while working with this site."
Berlin or not Berlin, but you can also find a lot of Moscow in this house. Corner windows are a favorite technique of both the German Bauhaus and Russian constructivism. And in beige tiles you can see a lot, but I associate it with the modern facades, the Sytinskaya printing house and many Moscow buildings of the early 20th century. The closest example of such a glazed surface is the church of the Pomor community, built by Ilya Evgrafovich Bondarenko in 1908 and hidden in neighboring courtyards (although the architects might not know about this, the tiles were removed from the facades ten years ago). There is no stylization in the new ADM house, but thanks to the tiles, it does not look alien in the historical, albeit badly beaten by the Soviet regime, surroundings. In some obscure way, it echoes the building of the School of Watercolors, the nearest noticeable building, a semi-castle built at the end of the 19th century for the Evangelical orphanage (the German settlement was also the place of development of non-Orthodox confessions in Moscow). There is something in tune between the yellow slabs of the sidewalk in front of the School of Watercolors and the various pavements of the clubhouse grounds behind the old gates more than a century old.
By the way, these gates have survived, one must think, from the time of the Von Derviz gymnasium or even earlier. Painted in beige, they are open, there are not even sashes, and you can freely enter the territory of the house and even go deeper into the quarter: here it was possible to pass before, it would be wrong to block pedestrian connections. The house's own fence is a symbolic low fence, which makes the nearest playground, for example, accessible and nearby. And in general - by sharing its territory with pedestrians (but not with cars - for them a barrier), the house expands its own urban horizons, gets more "air", without excessive isolation and restrictions. It's quiet here, but also calm: I walked around the territory for half an hour and no one kicked me out, didn't even ask about my personality; apparently, the territory is guarded unobtrusively. Such a friendly mood is also captivating.
The surroundings of the house, as is customary for ADM, are meticulously maintained. Old linden trees have been preserved, they meet those entering and even form a pedestrian alley with several benches and lanterns, leading directly to the entrance. The pavement is of many types: metal slabs along the house, squares of red and gray concrete around, a tree in front of benches, red and burgundy on the roadway, black and white squares in rubber nets at the site of a fire station. In front of the plinth, rare strips of illumination are mounted in the pavement. Embossed metal strips are installed in the pavement before the crossings. This land has never before known anything but asphalt, and it is not everywhere. And then there is such an abundance. To the left of the exit to the street is a retaining wall made of dark designer bricks. The parking shafts, located on the north side, look like rectangular sculptures belonging to the garden. The grass is green, and many shrubs are even in height with low lanterns - about knee-deep. However, there are also three types of lanterns, there are also high ones. In a word, if you look under your feet, the texture is even more varied than not the facades.
The facades, on the other hand, captivate with their simplicity of solution: they are not as multi-layered as in many other ADM houses, they feel a kind of noble laconicism and purification. Allowing the architects, among other things, to combine the respectability of beige color necessary for expensive housing, without getting lost in vanity and without sacrificing the integrity of the solution, with a distinct modernity of technology. This is one of the recognized modern trends, especially when building in a historic city: balancing on the verge of traditional material and undisguised manufacturability. In addition, the house, if we return to the theme of Moscow and non-Moscow, stands in the old Moscow way in the depths of the site, builds a garden around itself, and does not prohibit anyone from entering its linden alley. No matter how much Berlin is in it, perhaps the house has taken root in its place. In Gorokhovsky lane, where Rokotov lived and Tsvetaeva studied.
