The historical center of Lviv is relatively small - about 120 hectares. One of the prominences of the urban area, which touches the ring, stretches to the south and adjoins Stryiskaya Street, a busy city highway. At the very beginning, near the park of the same name, this street boasts eclectic plaster facades and small "Roman" paving stones. To the south, almost immediately, workers' settlements begin, and further - microdistricts and industrial zones.
The territory of the new residential complex "Leopol Town" (see the project site) is located between the plant and the hippodrome, not far from the bypass road. Three hectares occupy the corner of an abandoned urban tree nursery that has been transformed into a kind of forest. The surroundings are quite promising: a five-minute walk - the main city bus station, next to the hippodrome, a little further, two kilometers to the south - the football "Arena Lviv", built for the European championship 2012. There are several parks nearby and small villages outside the city: from the east and from the west. Now the urban area between the villages to the east of the bus station is actively being built up with new residential complexes, counting on the proximity of the Arena and the city's plans to update two highways: Vernadsky Street should turn into a highway chord, and the unnamed appendix directed to the north - into Krasnaya Kalina Avenue. Leopol Town has at least four more neighbors of varying degrees of completion, from 5 to 10 floors.
The complex, designed by "Archimatika", is inscribed in the same high-rise marks; it does not grow either over the Soviet nine-story buildings, or over the new residential complexes in the neighborhood. Extensive - three hectares, a plot and not too large volume of the required housing area - only 43 300 m2, allowed not to exceed a reasonable scale. At the same time, it is quite noticeably different from its neighbors, and not only from typical ones.
First, the authors paid a lot of attention to the study of the context, the site and reacted vividly to all their features. The rectangular area of the former plant nursery, cut off at the northeast corner, forms a triangle. Future busy streets are suitable along the legs of the site - therefore, spacious ground parking lots are located on this side (there are no underground ones). Houses in the place of greenhouses form a contour-frame of a quarter type, as if protecting the site from the city, but their front is torn into three sections, providing free passages inside and avoiding the effect of a house-wall. On the outside of the hypotenuse, of course, there are no parking lots - there is a pedestrian boulevard here, which should connect the bus station and the bus stop on Vernadsky Street with the future Krasnaya Kalina Street, leading to the hippodrome and the Arena. The boulevard is also one of the rules of good form for modern residential complexes, and at the same time, the fact that it is not inside, but outside, makes Leopol Town more open to both the city and the forest. It is designed not only for residents - the transit flow of pedestrians could also feed cafes and shops on the ground floors.
Inside, the architects tried to preserve the old lindens and aspens as much as possible: they carefully looked for free places for sports and playgrounds, minimized fire passages to acceptable limits. Only emergency services and people with limited mobility will be allowed to enter the courtyard, and the courtyard is a landscaped park-forest. In addition, for residents of the first floors, small, about 3 m2, front gardens in the inner contour. This extremely relevant technique of modern architecture - a piece of personal space in public improvement, which allows people to be brought out into the courtyard in their different capacities - in this case unexpectedly echoes the rural environment of a fragment of a growing new city. In a fifteen-minute walk, people, relatively speaking, sit on the heap of their own private houses, or drink tea on the terraces, and here they will master the fashionable front garden. The first floors of the outer contour are planned to be given to cafes, shops and other retail.
Speaking about the preservation of old trees and the resulting inner forest, the architects mention the principle of 'invite nature in' - and indeed, if you look at the surroundings, here the “forest” is not only preserved by fencing: it “enters”, since the border between the complex and the outer part the authors made the feral nursery as permeable as possible. The easiest way was to enclose the territory on all sides with a house-wall, having received a closed quarter, the authors say; but they approached the solution flexibly and from the side of the forest they replaced the house-walls with towers oriented strictly to the cardinal points, which means that angles facing the border-hypotenuse, wide open the passages inward and outward. So both people and, relatively speaking, trees "enter" the courtyard: the border between it and the forest is transparent and it looks like some of the variants of a garden city; as well as to a sanatorium or a university campus, where the buildings are located among the thickets. However, the buildings here are denser and the trees are not only pleasant, but also useful: they help to avoid the gaze of window-in-window. The typology turned out to be mixed: three sectional 7-storey buildings along the outer contours and four 10-storey towers inside.
I must say that the authors not only paid attention to the permeability, or porosity of their quarter - the ability to freely cross it on foot in any direction - they also substantiated this feature theoretically, referring to the prototypes of the city center. The architects analyzed the historical part of Lviv by two parameters: "the ratio of building density to street space" and the number of through passages from one street to another, allowing the city to pass through through arches, gateways and alleys. And they applied the obtained characteristics to the layout of their own, completely new complex. It turns out that the project responds not only to the current and future features of the territory - the architects also instill in the new complex the immanent rules of the old city, similar to the urban genocode, transplanting them from the center to the outskirts. Calculated and borrowed from the UNESCO-protected, famous historical center of Lviv, the features of the volumetric-spatial construction make the new complex, being built on the other side of the Soviet micro-districts, part of the old city in some hidden way. Genocode in this case is a good word, since architects, speaking of the use of an urbanistic basis, turn their residential complex in a sense into a new relative of the historic city.
However, the parallels are drawn not only by the hidden text. Parceling of buildings also has something in common with the old town: no more than 20 m from the entrance to the entrance, a variety of heights and facades of the quarter-sectional part. The facades of the sections, which will be built at the same time, imitate the dense natural development of the city center - also a modern technique that allows, by crushing the front of the facade, to make it proportionate to a person. “We wanted to create a kind of fine-dispersed system, which would partly resemble historical buildings and would be co-scale, fractional and small, but at the same time modern,” says the chief architect of the project, Dmitry Vasiliev.
But the authors go beyond the actual method, building a whole chain of allusions to the imagery of historical Lviv. For example, the easy variations in the height of the sections - half a floor - resemble the silhouette of the buildings framing the Rynok tourist square, where the roof slopes are also oriented longitudinally, and the steps formed by small variations in the height of houses on neighboring estates are close in proportion to what we see in “Leopol Towne . It's not that there are no such steps in other places and cities - but in this case the similarity with Lviv is emphasized by the little things: the drawing of the dormer windows resembles the dormer windows of the Market Square. The cool green of copper oxide and the dark beige limestone of the façades with striped wooden shutters are also reminiscent of the city center. Light facades add a coloristic note, which in this case completes the theme, reminding that in the old town dark stone facades alternate with light stucco ones. One of the finishing touches is the pipes, or rather the elongated outlets of the ventilation shafts deliberately similar to them. Together with small paving stones, they complete the mise-en-scène of parallels with the historical Lviv, carefully balancing on the verge of recognizability of the prototype, without crossing the verge of stylization.
Many topical techniques bring us back to reality and modernity: the double rhythm of the floors, the picturesque composition of windows gravitating towards the holland wall, the "wrapping" of the towers with a shell of a pitched silhouette, as well as inserts of grassy green panels and horizontal stripes of dark stone reminiscent of a tree - they establish figurative connections no longer with the Old Town, but with the nearest vegetation environment. And of course, a sign of modernity is the forward-facing verticals of staircase-elevator blocks with flat roofs, as well as the planes of terraces in front of penthouses - unlike historical buildings, where under the slopes there were attics, which are known to retain heat, here are the triangles of the upper volumes are occupied by two-storey apartments.
The preliminary design options included both flat and pitched roofs. But when the customers showed their projects to the focus group, almost 99% of the respondents supported the gabled silhouettes as more comfortable and “like home”. “This is not the first time we have built buildings with pitched roofs. But for the first time I saw how differently people react to modern shapes and pitched roofs,”sums up Dmitry Vasiliev. Another, almost completed project of "Archimatika" with pitched roofs is the cheerfully painted "Comfort Town" in Kiev.
The similarities between him and Lviv's Leopol Town are quite tangible. At the same time, if the architecture of the Kiev complex is emotionally designed for the image of “Europe in general”, then Lvovsky draws contextual clues from the topic, binds his romantic mood to the genius of the place, while simultaneously preserving some “Christmastide” of the whole - not for nothing that all pictures are winter. The architects see this project as an attempt to offer the city not only another new residential complex, but also a certain strategy for the development of the environment for a full life. It's time for sleeping areas to wake up, in the 21st century they can compete with the quality of architecture with the historical center of the city.
