The lower floor of the western building of the Torik apart-hotel on Tonky Cape in Gelendzhik is already cast in concrete and is a very long - about 260 m - foundation, stretched along the water's edge on the first line of the embankment beach, slightly protruding to the sea, with its own promenade along the water's edge.
View - directly on the water, relatively close to the airport, around pensions and private houses; the nearest cottage village has the same name "Torik" and was built by the owners of the apart-hotel a little earlier. Silence: Naberezhnaya street, which runs from the inside of the apart-hotel, leads to a cedar forest. Next to the unfinished building is the orange three-storey block of the hotel, it is built and is functioning. It remains to complete the western part, frozen at the zero mark in concrete. If the eastern block consists of two sections-buildings, then the western one, designed by Alexey Ginzburg on the existing foundations, consists of five sections.
Let us assume that if Alexey Ginzburg had designed the western building of the apart-hotel from the very beginning, he would probably have proposed a different building plan, for example, divided into several volumes. But it was required to work with a ready-made foundation, which determined the main task - to make the building visually lighter and more discrete, so that it "does not resemble the Chinese Wall." Moreover, the western building, in contrast to the three-story east one, is five-story.
The architects proposed a sectional-corridor type of layout. Small studio apartments are lined up in two rows along the sides of a corridor that runs longitudinally through the building. From the side of the sea, there are tightly lined apartments-pencil cases of 42 m2; their structure is simple - large, 10.5 m2, the loggia looks at the sea, behind it is a room, a kitchen, a door. On the opposite, city side, there are smaller apartments, mostly 33.9 m2, and oriented not transversely, but longitudinally to the axis of the building. Among them, one per section, there are apartments with a rectangular ledge 2x3 meters, each of them has a large window from the entire wall, in such ledges (and all of them are facing north) good offices could fit, there is little direct sun, and natural light will suffice.
Outside, the ledges fold into white tower-like verticals that divide the city façade of each section in half. The second division is formed by staircase-elevator blocks, also brought forward slightly, but lined with wood and covered with thin verticals of wooden lattices. It turns out that from the city side, the five sections are divided into 11 trays, which makes the building perceived not as a house-beam, a 260-meter snake, but rather as a row of houses, rhythmically similar to a street, which emphasizes the “urban” nature of the rear facade. At the same time, the main tone of the northern facade is brown wood; it is planned that it will be faced with natural veneer.
The sea façade is designed differently, in large masses: a continuous grid of deep white loggias is divided by six large wooden inserts according to the number of section entrances plus the main atrium. Moreover, the wooden verticals of the entrances - this is clearly seen when viewed from above - expand towards the sea, and if from the north side the entrances occupy one module, then their "shadow" from the sea side of the hotel corresponds to three apartments, and at the same time from the beach wooden inserts no longer mean entrances, but only become their color continuation. So the south and north facades are, to some extent, inversions of each other. From the side of the sea, white color predominates, more precisely light gray: textured plaster interspersed with stone, distantly the edges of the loggias, of which the entire marine facade consists, will resemble a layered slice of limestone - a stone wall that stretches along almost the entire Black Sea coast, if you go along water; on the floor, on the other hand, the façade will remind you of the forests we find ourselves in when we climb up the limestone slope. Two material components of the building - conventional stone and wood - reinterpret, thus, the two main themes of seaside nature, and the sea and sand, in this case bulk, are attached.
Approximately two-thirds of its length, the house-plate bends at a slight angle, echoing the direction of Naberezhnaya Street - a central vestibule will appear here, expanding with a promising bell towards the beach, literally "revealing" the view of the sea for those entering.
It has the "main" elevator and staircase, it has a direct passage to the sea and an atrium with internal balconies on each floor: balconies are strung on the corridors of each floor, for which the intersection with the atrium will be a kind of spatial culmination - from here you can enjoy views of the sea and mountains as well as up and down. The walls of the atrium on both sides are solid stained-glass windows. The roofs of the two central sections on the sides of the atrium are exploited; they are designed with terraces with sun umbrellas and landscaping; so here, too, the surrounding atrium becomes its culmination.
The main passage to the sea through the atrium is complemented by two others, in the outer buildings, the third and seventh - thus the house has become permeable and does not need to be bypassed in order to get to the beach. From the side of the sea, along the house, at first, a green park stretches on the ground at the floor level of the first floor, and then, parallel to the greenery, there is a two-tier promenade, its upper terrace is sunny, but the lower one with deep shadow; it is lit by several light wells. Moreover, the level of greenery and the terrace facing the sea is 2 meters higher than the access road from the city side - here the relief changes in a kind of "zigzag", rising between the house and the sea, which is clearly visible in the section. In the basement, the floor of which is one and a half meters above sea level, in other words, not too buried in the ground, there are 32 parking spaces and quite a lot of storage rooms - for all apartments; the plinth of the four central sections is given over to the public space.
The space turned out to be two-tier due to the 4-meter height difference; from the upper gallery down to the sea, 5 evenly spaced stairs lead. The sixth, in front of the main entrance, is more difficult - here the earthen embankment is interrupted and another, sixth, three-flight staircase with a turn appears. On the upper promenade, latticed pavilions are placed and, above the edge, the same canopies-pergolas that form the border between the sunny and shady parts - this is a frequent technique of resort and estate architecture, it reminds of the parterre terraces of Arkhangelsk and Sochi sanatoriums of Zholtovsky, and in this case it works on complication, saturation of the walk with impressions. When viewed from the beach, the hotel grows in layers: sand, a strip of granite on the lower embankment, above the pergola of the upper embankment, then greenery, above it - the loggias of the apartments. Consistently, spatially and quite airy; the building is not at all delimited from its surroundings, but is revealed to the sea like a cellular sponge.
So, despite the predetermination of many parameters, including a ready-made foundation, Alexei Ginzburg managed to saturate the house with a number of nuances: from the spatial hinge of the atrium, which forms a public nucleus in the center of each corridor with a perspective “on all four sides,” to a solarium on the roof and a two-tiered promenade; not forgetting about the permeability and connection of the inner space with the outer form. All this enlivens a rather mundane task and endows the seaside resort with the "zest" it needs so much.
