The office building on Krasin Street can be seen from a car driving along the outer side of the Garden Ring opposite the Patriarchs: the graphic grille of the facade is well, although fleeting, read in the alignment of the street. Its appearance was preceded by a closed competition held by the customer and disputes regarding the demolition of a constructivist warehouse building, built by the architect Nikolai Tikhomirov, author of a guide to Russian estates, in 1930 for the Soyuz factory. The question was twice brought up to the Moscow commissions, and in 2013, with a slight margin of 10 to 7, the decision to demolish it was adopted. “When I was invited to participate in the competition, I immediately refused, because I knew that there was a constructivist house on the site,” says Vladimir Plotkin. - But then I was shown a list of participants, where there were many respected colleagues, and a permit for demolition, signed, among other things, by city rights activists. In the end, we decided to take part in the competition, proposed a project and somehow quickly won. I can’t even say that I’m happy about that, since I got the accusations for the destruction of the building in the 1930s, although I didn’t sign the protocols”. It is difficult to adhere to any position here: on the one hand, the Tikhomirov building was made of cinder blocks, besides, it was a warehouse, and a carbon copy was produced in it, and this, according to the investor, was hazardous production. It is quite obvious that the monument of constructivism was not its most prominent representative, although constructivism itself is valuable; on the other hand, to blame only architects for everything is somehow very straightforward, or something. In addition, this is not the first competition for a plot with a constructivist house: there was, for example, a competition for Belorusskaya Square, many eminent architects participated in it. And the new building fit into the context quite well, and we are now considering what happened, and not the previous plot.
The plot is similar in plan to the silhouette of a rag scoop: a thin short leg goes deep into the quarter, and a triangular "flag" pointed at the end is stretched along the street. In the courtyard "under the flag", almost close to the borders, there are two residential buildings that were profitable at the beginning of the 20th century - therefore, the parameters of insolation and the requirements of fire passages have rather rigidly defined the boundaries of the building patch: they are also L-shaped, with a ledge at the corner outside and a slight thickening in his bosom inside the yard.
For the competition arranged by the customer, the architects of TPO "Reserve" proposed several very different options, but the very first, simple, strict and clear one won and was eventually implemented almost unchanged. The building consists of two volumes: one, eight-story and definitely the main one, stretched along the street. The double rhythm of its windows turns the facade into a four-tier one, thus conventionally inheriting the rhythm of a constructivist building - and it was four-story - and at the same time echoing the two-part windows of the neighboring house on the corner of Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya, built in 1997, but interpreting the neighboring facade of the early XX century.
The main theme of the street facade is a relief, 30 centimeters deep, drawing of thin inter-window walls and equally thin horizontal lines of inter-floor rods. The openings turn out to be very vertical, narrow - so that in the perspective of the street we hardly even see the glass between the stone edges. The three-dimensional drawing of these edges, on the one hand, reveals, or rather, draws, depicts the depth of the windows, pleasing to the eyes of our contemporaries tortured by flat facades and falling into resonance with the depth adopted in neighboring houses a century ago. But here - on the one hand, the thickness of the wall is real and voluminous, and on the other hand, all the lintels are thin-boned, there are almost no walls as such, but there is a frequent picket fence with a very rigid, almost Iofan-style, if you will forgive me this comparison, geometry. The strict shading of the stone edges forces one to gather, to concentrate even when looking at it - not like the unusual liberty of Moscow plastic art, this facade bears the strongest disciplining potential. As if tracing the air in front of him into slender, strict cells. Three other facades are subordinate to the same proportions: two front and rear, but they are not so voluminous and maintain the same rhythm in a simpler and more graphic way, emphasizing their subordinate position.
But, having asked the strictest module, Vladimir Plotkin would not have been himself if he had not started a lively conversation within its framework. Firstly, the tape of the upper tier is higher than the rest, it covers both the floor of the seventh floor and the ceiling of the eighth - this is calculated from below, the attic should be higher than the rest of the floors, so as not to seem small due to the perspective reduction. Further, not the entire facade mesh is uniform. Some of the windows are combined in two - this is how spots appear b about better permeability; three vertical openings are deaf - as if three keys were pressed on a piano, or even more precisely - three characters are stamped on a punched card. A deep, albeit narrow cut above the entrance becomes the main accent in the laconic revitalization of the facade.
Not the last though. The facade is designed in two colors of stone: light, almost ivory white - and dark, whose color the architects, by their own admission, planned to be deeper and more contrasting than the resulting gray. The lattice of the central part of the facade is dark, and the main corner of the building, facing the Garden Ring, is light, from its wide vertical a framing tape begins, which encircles a dark spot, surrounds it like a flat frame, wrapping itself over the entrance into an angular question mark, similar to a pixel element graphics.
Further. The grating of the main facade is strict, but not straight. Krasin Street before the southeastern corner of the building turns slightly to the east: the architects "caught" the angle of rotation - 8 degrees, and turned the southern part of the main facade at the same angle, responding to the peculiarity of the environment, or rather even sprouting it into the volume of the building. Of course, this could not have been done - but these are the features of architecture that reacts to the context: it traces all possible "strings" of the environment, making them the subject of thought, growing out of them its own plastic. The house may well have been straight, but it has become a house on the bend. Now, even a fleeting glance from the Garden Ring side is enough to understand: the street turns here, and the building makes the turn like a curtain.
But it also turns not evenly. The first seven meters from the corner are lined up along the axis leading to Sadovoye, to the full height. The light stone of the lower floor forms a blank wall - a plinth, perhaps somewhat similar to the white-stone plinths of the Moscow Empire style; Or maybe not. We look further along the street: the entire upper part of the facade turns and lines up along the next axis, but the two lower, basement floors do not, they continue to deepen obliquely, smoothly cutting into the volume, and a row of slender pylons forms on the cut - the surface is more permeable, since glass between the pillars, and at the same time leading us to the entrance, offering to roll along the pillars to the left. Since the upper floors already follow a different axis, a smoothly expanding triangular console is formed over the head of the walker: it cannot protect from rain, but the subtle effect of security, the belonging of this small area to a building or even a micro-area in front of it, gives. In addition, a shadow of a recess is formed under the console, which then grows upward with a loggia cut above the entrance.
The row of pylons of light stone, leading us to the entrance, has a pair on the opposite side, in the courtyard: here the volume is rounded and forms a sharp nose for practical purposes in the lower floors: it widens the bell for the exit of cars. This "nose" for passers-by will be almost invisible, but it forms a beautiful petal on the plan, suggests constructivist prototypes, and makes this part of the building, as a whole, apparently, very light inside due to the abundance of windows, almost transparent on clearance.
But let's go back and go further along the main facade. Behind the narrow and high, like everything else, the niche of the entrance begins the most interesting: here along the sidewalk there is a pedestrian gallery, which rests on a row of flat metal pillars, lined with green glass. The pillars are wide and narrow, their axes are directed perpendicular to the facade, and it turns out that inside the gallery we are walking behind a wide curtain of grassy green - the color of good lawn grass is very accurate - glass. The street behind a series of green plates is almost not felt, although you can go outside at any time. Moreover. On the other hand, there is the glass of the vestibule, which reflects the glass of the columns, and even the granite squares of the pavement. Because of the reflection, the gallery seems wider, in any case, the feeling of constraint disappears.
The idea of a street gallery, similar to the antique portico and the Parisian Rue de Rivoli, is not new - moreover, it is one of the painful themes of architecture, and not only in Moscow, since about the 1980s, "after Bofill." However, not everywhere and not everyone succeeds in doing it well. It happens that it turns out dark, low and you can't get out everywhere, because outside, sometimes, a parapet is installed. And if the shops do not move in and the windows do not light up, this is generally a disaster. Everything is different here - being barely built and without illumination, this gallery is high, light, transparent and spacious. A look from the opposite side, conditionally speaking, from the side of Zoological Street, allows one to assess a promising intrigue: the rows of glass columns end with white, stone pylons, whose row turns to the left, closing the distance, but allowing one to appreciate the graphic rhythm of many verticals, similar to stretched strings.
The green gallery is the main accent, a fresh touch, redeeming the neutrality of gray and the harshness of the rhythm. She is like a stone on a ring: maybe, maybe not, but it's better with him. Of course, a gallery is an urbanist device. But here's what's interesting: the site is small and the project has almost no additional landscaping: benches, lanterns, planted trees and bushes. But here is a small detail - a piece of the portico along the street, not even the entire length of the facade - closes the topic; the pylonade and gallery are enough for the building to interact with the city at the pedestrian level. In addition, the green glass perfectly echoes the square along the street opposite and with the lawn next door, connects them into a single semantic knot.
Something similar, and at the same time, we observe something else, turning the corner. Here, in the depths of the quarter, not an eight-but a three-story building goes. In contrast to the main façade, whose verticalism, double windows and urbanistic touches are clearly visible trends of modernity, this long body sharply reminds of the classics of modernism, especially the 1980s. There is more glass here, divided by verticals of triangular cross-section from a dark variety of stone, which for some reason takes on a warm shade here. Such ribs, a bit like the teeth of a mechanism or light, thin buttresses, are a favorite technique of modernism, for some reason suggesting a building
INION. But the structure of the gallery-pylon of the main facade also resembles the solution of the lower floor of the building of the Institute of Information. Have you gotten used to it in the news during the design period? Mmm … or did the authors encrypt the memory of INION in their building, and the same question mark on the facade works with the key? However, the techniques are basic, they can be found in different buildings of the 1980s, and they are generally characteristic of Vladimir Plotkin's projects.
The upper floors of the long building repeat the plot with the console of the main facade, but for the entire length: the extension expands inward, leaving a long, non-snowy triangle on the pavement. The angles vary slightly: the angle of the stone verticals is greater than on the main facade - 15º, and the angle of the console is quite small - 2.5º, although its projection reaches about two meters, which is almost equal to the protrusion above the main entrance. A game with perspective and reflections also appears on the side facade: when viewed from the street, the pointed stone verticals merge into a monolith, which, when moving along, vividly opens up, splits into thin strips. If you go from the depths of the courtyard, then the triangular shape of the console enhances the perspective, and the glass of the first floor in the snowless time reflects the grass of the lawns - as bright as the glass of the gallery; between living grass and grassy glass, there is not only a color, but also an unexpected looking-glass connection, like a theater of shadows. In addition, the glass of the long hull reflects the sloppy, but stylistically related windows of Biomed. It is as if we are entering the space of a modernist city, while the space along the street has more traditional characteristics.
At first, the building looks austere and simple, but contains many nuances. The play of perspectives, lines, planes and reflections, all these subtleties, are definitely the main part of the project, endowed with watercolor ephemerality, fluidity of readings, intended for those who are ready to notice and examine. Maybe even the rigidity of the front lattice of the main building is needed in order to keep all these nuanced plots within the framework. The grid and rows of bevels, transparency, flatness and volume, serious gray color and frivolous living greens interact like "raw and boiled", giving the architecture of an office building a plastic meaning that it does not need from a pragmatic point of view, but is aesthetically useful.
