Fitting a multi-storey building into the existing historical development is a deliberately ungrateful task. New buildings rarely manage to look as respectable as their neighbors, which have occupied their places for centuries. Surrounded by old buildings, they seem nouveau riche and subtly annoying with their redundancy.
In this respect, the position of the Novosibirsk residential complex MilkHouse, at first glance, was unenviable. Not far from it there are two architectural monuments of regional significance at once. On the neighboring Chaplygin street is the building of the former women's gymnasium P. A. Smirnova - two-story, with a brick first floor and a wooden rickety second. And very close, at a distance of twenty meters from the force, is a luxurious, almost Baroque, carved merchant mansion of the beginning of the last century, known as the house of Konstantin Buzolin.
MilkHouse itself grew up on the site of a former dairy plant, which explains its name. The plant was old, built in the twenties of the twentieth century, but served regularly until recently, until its owners, Danone, decided to transfer all production to Kemerovo. Then the plant was sold, the new owners did not begin to reconstruct it, but demolished and began to design a residential complex on this site, which eventually took first place in the ranking of new buildings in the city.
The Milkhouse residential complex was supposed to be large: it consists of two houses, an eight-story building with 63 apartments and a nine-story building with 104 apartments. This size does not imply delicacy in the volumetric-spatial solution - all the hope was in the materials of the facade.
For the cladding of the MilkHouse residential complex, we chose Hagemeister clinker bricks of the Gent variety. It is not monochromatic, interspersed with brown and dark gray are added to the base yellow to create special shades. However, Milkhouse architects went even further and chose not the classic Gent, but an individual sorting, developed by the Hagemeister plant specifically for several Moscow objects. The brick of a rich complex color looks thoroughbred, and the noble tan marks and textured cracks seem to confirm its pedigree and lived a long life.
MilkHouse designers combined Gent Hagemeister brick with light Russian clinker. However, where the residential complex can be visually compared with the one-story building of Buzolin, that is, at the level of the first floor, only Hagemeister is used.
Thanks to the different thicknesses of the Gent bricks, a three-dimensional effect was achieved on the facade without additional effort. For the residential complex MilkHouse, the Hagemeister plant produced two different clinker formats: the Russian format 250 * 120 * 65 mm with a thickened front wall of 3 cm and the format 250 * 85 * 65 mm. Their combination creates the appearance that individual rows of masonry are "recessed" deep into the wall.
Siberian architecture has always had its own design and planning features. It was distinguished by rather simple volumes, medium-sized window openings, as a rule, slightly elongated in length, the absence of small details on the facade, high plinths and roofs without parapets. All this was due to harsh climatic conditions, harsh long and snowy winters. Due to weather conditions, the choice of material is of particular importance here. The frost resistance indicators of Gent bricks are designed for difficult operational and climatic conditions in Russia. It is able to withstand easily and large temperature drops, and long transportation.
Andrei Kryachkov, one of the most famous architects who worked in Novosibirsk, insisted and explained that for facing the facades of buildings in Siberia, it is necessary to use either brick or stone, and not plaster, which was popular at the beginning of the last century. Perhaps that is why brick occupies a special place in the architecture of Novosibirsk. With its aesthetic and performance characteristics, the Gent Hagemeister clinker has proven itself to be the right place.
The supply of Gent Hagemeister bricks for the construction of the MilkHouse residential complex was provided by Firm KIRILL JSC.
