The residential complex "Gorki" consists of ten five-storey buildings with inexpensive apartments on the outskirts of Penza. However, this outskirts are not easy in themselves: if the north, east, south, and in some places the center are lavishly built up with microdistricts, then in the western part a significant part of the urban area is occupied by the Arbekovsky forest and the development along its edge consists of new cottage settlements interspersed with the private sector and summer cottages … One of the large cottage settlements - "Dubrava", perhaps the most successful in the city, is located on the border of the forest next to a large pond and the old SNT "Zaseka". Several years ago, the developers, the Dubrava Group of Companies, built a street of townhouses to the east of the village. Now, on the territory located closer to the shore of the pond, as a continuation of the same residential complex "Residence Gorki", it is planned to build 17 five-storey buildings (two stages: 10 and 7) with compact 1-2-room comfort-class apartments with an area of 18 to 67 m2.
The typology of houses - cubic and compact, with an elevator in the center of the volume and a staircase overlooking one of the facades - went to Sergey Popryadukhin's sp architects bureau from previous designers; the architects worked within the framework of the territory planning project approved by the city. It was necessary to improve everything that could be done: to make the houses architecturally expressive and, in general, more attractive for future tenants, to “rebrand” the project, but so that this did not affect the cost of construction.
The choice was made in favor of bright accents in the decoration of the facades.
The main cladding material is dark brick. The architects used inserts in three colors: green, red and orange, marking each house with them like stickers. The accents are arranged in strict geometric order. Trespa HPL window slopes, steel perforated baskets for air conditioners, as well as large rectangular inserts with house numbers on the ground and last floors are made in color.
"The leitmotif was the principle of the filing cabinet, where the desired cell is easily identified by the user, thanks to the unique colored tabs," - explain the authors of the project.
Only one color is used per building. At the same time, the architects tried to make sure that the houses “marked” with the same colors were removed from each other as far as possible, without forming single-colored spots. As conceived by the bureau, this will facilitate navigation around the complex.
The apartments, as we remember, are compact, and due to the excessive width of the volumes inherited from the previous authors, some of the rooms turned out to be too deep "pencil cases". But the kitchens are 12 m2, there are many storage rooms, and each apartment has a loggia: either a narrow ledge-recess, or, in two apartments - a large, 2x5 m, glazed bay window - all this, among other things, made it possible to revive the facades, on which the narrow verticals of the windows alternate with horizontal glazing and laconic "blind" planes.
Parking lots - only ground-based, located according to the PPT along the perimeter of the territory; inside the site is closed to cars and given to a through pedestrian zone without an external fence. The pedestrian zone is stenciled with repetitive landscaping elements. The rectangular geometry of the buildings is balanced by round-shaped playgrounds - for sports and for children. They are common to each pair of houses, and the boundaries of these clusters delineate walking paths, creating an endless number of “looped” walking trails. A jogging track and a bicycle track will be built separately.
The architects even planned exploited roofs with a small outdoor pool, ping-pong and barbecue areas. In a word, the attractiveness of public areas and restrained, but obviously the author's is designed to partially compensate for the compact size of the apartments. Besides -
Moscow is now literally ringing with disputes over the demolition of five-story buildings, which threatens not only to relocate residents against their will, but also to destroy the compact urban environment. Meanwhile, in the successful part of Penza, a new version of "five-story buildings" is being born.
