The young and ambitious company Mangazeya Development turned to Asadov's bureau with a request to develop a high-quality architectural project for the Izmailovo Lane residential complex with a fairly limited budget. The house, which was built in just three years, is located on Borisovskaya Street, in a quiet area between Semyonovskaya and Izmalovsky Park metro stations; the park itself is very close, but separated by a northeastern chord. Around, mostly low post-war quarters, but there are also brick high-rise buildings of the post-Soviet period - one of them, red-orange brick, is located just opposite the new house. The site was small - 0.4 hectares, and was crowded from all sides: an office building from the north, a residential building from the south, behind a kindergarten. A metro line runs underground, cutting off a corner and making it unsuitable for construction - as a result, the territory has become like an angular figure eight; it goes to the street with one of the narrow ends.
The contours of the plot determined the composition. At first, there were many options: from an oblique building to an extravagant ellipsoid. But the classic modernist solution turned out to be optimal, consisting of two 15-storey, almost 50-meter sections set with a diagonal offset and connected by an angular "lintel" in which the living rooms are also located.
“The buildings are designed in different ways, but they are conceived as two halves of one whole, like Yin and Yang,” says Andrei Asadov. Indeed, the cases are similar, almost equal in size - the rear is slightly smaller - and even use the same cladding materials: porcelain stoneware. But not simple, to which everyone is too accustomed, but - large-format and ordered from the Spanish factory Porcelanosa Group in three types: smooth light beige, glossy gray, in the walls between the windows, and embossed, wavy brown, reminiscent of ceramic panels of the 1970s, but at the same time, somehow, indirectly, but consonant with the simple brick of the neighboring Stalinist house. Slabs of corrugated porcelain stoneware were made to order for this house: as a rule, such textures are used in the interior, but here it was required the facade quality. The authors did not fail - the texture disguised the seams and annoying "paws", in the sun it shines almost like majolica.
The back building is almost completely covered with relief slabs, the tower facing the street is lighter, more prominent and more mobile, it confidently takes on the role of a ceremonial accent, presenting the house to the city. But the theme of overlapping several types of matter is common to both sections. Starting with a shift of two volumes, the architects actively developed the theme on the facades: we will find calm planes only at the eastern end of the courtyard section. Everything else has been turned into a large relief lattice, which protrudes quite strongly forward from the window planes, separated by dark gray aluminum horizontals of wide interfloor strips - intersecting with the staircase and elevator verticals, that is, where there will be no glazing, the stripes turn into open balconies with transparent borders. Lattice balconies appear here and there at the apartment level, they are also boxes for air conditioners. This is the internal structure of the house, glass and metal.
The external one resembles an exoskeleton - not that it is strongly articulated, but it is brought out quite noticeably, a meter and a half. The windows are separated from each other by large verticals and are collected in slender groups - not even two, but three. Many piers are equipped with wide slopes of a contrasting color: white strokes enliven the massive brown body, dark slopes take on the role of shadows articulating the light frame of the volume facing the street. In addition, the brown building received a light stylobate - the architects decided the lower tier as a whole, taking into account the closer perception. Light, slender pylons support a solid dark brown plate of the inner hull.
But the game doesn't end there. If the verticals of the courtyard building confidently and statically assemble the windows into large verticals, then the rhythm of the ceremonial volume is deliberately knocked down, subordinated to a large, on a scale from one to three floors, zigzag. On the northern facade it is more graphic, but on the sunny southern facade it turns into a sculpture: the “zigzag” ribbon is continued on the smooth wall of the ledge - as if giant fingers, sculpting, moving, shifting volumes, dividing them into plates, left their imprints. This is a completely theatrical technique designed for "ah!" a pedestrian walking down the street and suddenly looking up; in a word, he distinguishes a house in a familiar environment, turns it into a kind of exclamation mark. Although there are also contextual notes in it: as we remember, the rear facades remotely, but echo the brick of the neighboring house; light porcelain stoneware, in turn, echoes the bank building.
In the game of finding a balance between recessed and protruding parts, one can easily guess the technique loved by the architects of Asadov's bureau. It is worth, for example, to remember a recently implemented project
residential complex on Nakhimovsky Prospekt, reminiscent of a flying ship with numerous decks shifted relative to each other. In the case of the house on Borisovskaya, the shift is not so exaggerated, but the intersection of ideas and their evolution is obvious.
The apartment complex is moderate: from 45 to 90 m2, from one to three rooms, no studios or larger apartments, although the frame structure without load-bearing internal walls allows apartments to be combined on the floor. At the same time, the mutual displacement of the buildings and their uneasy contours made it possible to arrange, for example, in the lintel, with which the street section adjoins the courtyard, a living room with through light - with windows on two opposite walls of the room. The corner south-western windows, although there are few of them, catch the whole spectrum of the sun's rays, tending towards the sunset: from the upper floors, the Vokresenskaya Church in Semyonovsky Square will probably be visible from here. Two other glass corners - the ledges of the zigzag walls of the living rooms - face the park and Izmailovsky Island with its cathedral, the neighboring tower and the already old complex of high-rise hotels. Each apartment received a glazed loggia - small, from the outside they look almost like windows, and they mainly come with external boxes for air conditioners. In the corridors - and on each floor there are 4 apartments - there are storage rooms for residents. A two-level electro-hydraulic system Liftparker Mobil of the German company Nussbaum, designed for 140 cars, is located in one, five-meter-high tier of the underground parking.
With no less attention, the architects who accompanied the project at all its stages also approached the solution of the courtyard territory. There is no courtyard as such - only free space around the towers, a little more in front of the longitudinal facades. But every meter is thoroughly thought out, and therefore, despite the fact that the house was completed only at the end of summer, the courtyard already looks habitable. At the entrances, green lawns and benches are built into the white parallelepipeds of the flower beds, which makes the flowers appear almost at eye level. Large trees along the perimeter. A wide striped paved path around the house is used for walking and, in combination, a fire passage. On the outside, benches are built into a green embankment that separates the site from its neighbors - they seem to be cut into the hillside. The playground is located in the corner, closer to the kindergarten, and is surrounded by a hedge. Even on the roof of the entrance to the underground parking, the architects arranged an alpine slide with a gazebo - a kind of second level of the courtyard.
“The client boldly supported the ideas and proposals of the architects,” says Andrey Asadov, head of the bureau and one of the authors of the project. “As a result, the project was implemented in just three years - and in strict accordance with the author's idea.”
