Southwest of the railway from St. Petersburg to Moscow, Tver consists of a private sector interspersed with microdistricts. Sometimes a microdistrict with the same name is attached to the border of the village - this happened with the village of Mamulino, located within the city limits - its second half was three quarters of old five-story buildings. The environment is contrasting: it is fractional, rural, then industrial, and a little to the east, Mamulino-2 is being built - an array of 17-storey buildings in the fields. The place is flat and not entirely built up; the gridded orthogonal structure, to which the urban development of both imperial and Soviet Tver is completely subordinated, disappears on the border of the city, giving way to an irregular rural structure. But Tver remains Tver - not far away, across the Tmakaya River, the Zheltikov Monastery is being restored.
The village of Palkino is located outside the border of Tver, but adjoins it. Behind it there is a triangular territory, the southern hypotenuse of which is formed by a street of large-scale private cottages. The northern corner of the village adjacent to the city is completely empty and planned for development; the land here is divided between three owners, one of them - Nikulino LLC, owns 9.9 hectares in the western part. In 2016, the company held a competition for the concept of building this site; Arseniy Leonovich's PANAKOM bureau took part in it with two options. Subsequently, this project, named by the authors "Dreams of the City", was shown at the "Golden Section" 2017, where he received an honorary diploma.
So, a triangular plot with an area of almost 10 hectares adjoins the border of Tver with a hypotenuse - here it is formed by a highway without a name, it is a projected highway, behind it is a dump (presumably, after the area is built up, it will be removed), further the meadows - to the river Darkness. PZZ divided the territory of the future complex into two parts: closer to the village, along the southern border of the residential complex, buildings with a height of up to four floors are allowed; in the main, northern half of the triangle - from four to nine. In both designs, the architects, of course, adhere strictly to these constraints; the normative number of storeys has become one of the main streets.
In both versions, the PANAKOM architects offer a developed structure of public spaces, cafes, shops and other functions on the ground floors, a car-free courtyard on the roof of a bunded half-underground parking lot buried 0.5 m into the ground, and the square is the center of the town, since the resulting residential complex is perceived just like a town, not too high, no more than 28 m at the highest points.
The layout of the first version is stricter, the gable roofs of the current "enveloping" profile give it a retrospective nostalgic note. The architects define the town-planning idea of this variant as “the interaction of the regular and the picturesque”. The low-rise part is lined with lines of townhouses along the curved southern border, indented from the road-separator of the standard height, in front of the houses there is a public boulevard with bicycle paths. The lines alternate between a strip of "base" of two-storey height and transverse four-storey volumes with pitched roofs, forming a romantic-urban gabled silhouette.
On the contrary, along the border of the northern part, similar houses are built - they form a wide small-scale street along the sides of the boulevard and create a smooth transition between the parts of the complex. The boulevard becomes the core of a low city. At the entrance from the highway, on the left at the beginning of the boulevard - the building of the sports complex.
The houses in the northern part are lined up orthogonally around semi-enclosed courtyards; here, too, flat and pitched roofs alternate, but there are more flat ones. The average height ranges from 5 to 7 floors, with only 9 floors in one building. There is a kindergarten in the southern corner, to the left is a public, I would say, a city square, with cafes and shops. It is open for cars - for loading retail and even for residents to enter the parking lot, but traffic is strictly limited. The roadway pavement is the same as for the entire square, but it is slightly recessed and separated by a triangular border. In the other two inter-quarter spaces there are squares - dotted extensions of the boulevard. Thus, recreation is strictly divided into private courtyards, where residents enter from the second floors, and public - three green areas and an area.
The architects characterize the second option as a completely public space-oriented "medieval" city square, and the absence of a hippodamous grid and free arrangement of blocks - as an illustration of "stochasticity, randomness of urban form, characteristic of a naturally developing city." The roofs in this version, however, are all flat; the quarters are more closed and tend to the pentagonal contours of the “quality mark”.
The sports complex at the entrance in the second version gives way to a shopping and entertainment center, where, however, the authors have included many functions; fitness is distributed on the first floors of houses. The public square takes up more space and is connected by a wide isthmus in the mall square. Public green spaces are losing the aspiring composure of the boulevard and are turning into greenery between houses, however, quite abundant. The facades, as in the first version, combine the pixel layout of long strokes of "Petrovsky" bricks with stucco whiteness and restrained color.
Recall that the comfortable scale of this project was set by the PZZ. But the scale can be solved in different ways, a good example is just the five-story buildings of the neighboring Mamulino. Arseny Leonovich managed to turn the given scale into a detailed, multifaceted, but clearly structured, graded urban space with - which is important - its own local center. Such a project is the embryo of a comfortable city. I wonder how many more such "embryos" need to be scattered over the tender proposal for a comfortable city - as a phenomenon - to begin to grow.
