The Khoroshevskaya gymnasium is the second part of the Khoroshkola educational project. The first was opened in 2013 in the 82nd quarter of Khoroshevo-Mnevnikov and is a kindergarten with a gymnasium. The project was so successful that the customer decided to continue it with a secondary school for grades 5-11. The new building is located in the neighborhood, in the Wellton park residential complex between the Karamyshevskaya embankment of the Moskva River and Marshal Zhukov Avenue. A school designed by Krost's architectural division - A Project - has just opened; but excursions are still conducted into it, since the building is distinguished by innovations both architectural and construction, and pedagogical - the gymnasium, according to the plan of its creators, should become a model of an ideal environment for the formation of a person of the future. Its architecture attracted attention even at the project stage: in 2016, Khoroshkola -2 entered the WAF short-list in the category "Project of an educational institution", in 2017 - took first place in the category "Concept of educational institutions" at the international competition of innovative projects Re-thinking The Future.
What made the project, designed and implemented in just two and a half years, so successful and attractive?
Firstly, teachers and psychologists actively participated in the design process: in many countries this is an indispensable part of the process, while in Russia it is still an innovation. The educational concept is based on three key principles: IQ - intellectual skills, EQ - emotional development and VQ - vital energy. Working on the project, the architects used the experience of leading schools in Finland, a recognized flagship in the field of creative search for educational innovations; they visited and researched Finnish schools personally, as well as the well-known
UWC school in Dilijan, built by Tim Flynn architects for the RD Group. We also took into account the experience of "Khoroshkola" -1, built with the participation of the Norwegian bureau 70ºN arkitektur as.
Transparency and spaciousness
The result of the study of current trends and the response to the wishes of teachers was visual permeability and openness, the openness of most of the spaces. From one part of the building, you can see the other "through", thanks to which people in the building are constantly in the zone of visual contact. The high Schorghuber glass doors are also transparent, in addition, vertical stained glass windows from floor to ceiling are arranged between the offices. The permeability provides unobtrusive oversight: “Such an arrangement of space is one of the most valuable effects that we have received in this building,” say the architects of A-Project. - On the one hand, it is beautiful, but on the other, it creates a feeling of security, since, being anywhere, the student will not feel isolated. This passive oversight also makes a person keep fit all the time, feel that he is in sight. An important skill for children is to understand that they are in society."
The building is transparent on the inside, transparent on the outside: many stained-glass windows and windows provide an abundance of natural light. Glass is durable tempered triplex. The school is ventilated, as it should be when using stained-glass glazing, using slot valves - but not ordinary ones, but increased in height: Schuko, commissioned by Krost, has developed valves with a height of 3.6 m for windows with a height of 4 m.
Transparency complements the spaciousness: the architects provided a margin for the height of the floors and the width of the corridors in the project, deviating from the standards by about a meter to the greater side - students should not feel a lack of light or space.
Denis Kapralov, Deputy General Director of KROST Concern and Head of A-Project Bureau:
“It all started with a kindergarten project combined with an elementary school. It was an experiment of a group of enthusiasts who believed in their idea and strove to create a completely new concept of the educational object,”says Denis Kapralov, Deputy General Director of the KROST Concern and head of the A-Project bureau.
The school was supposed to become a model of some ideal environment for the formation of the person of the future. At the same time, our goal was to accommodate all the premises necessary for a modern educational process, meet the standards, meet the budget - and do it all beautifully."
Soaring stairs
Since the main building is wide and square in plan, it needed an atrium for illumination, which should become the main public space and communication core of the school. It is covered with an anti-aircraft stained-glass window 24x12 m at a four-story height - more than 20 m from the floor, and is surrounded by high - 1.35 m - transparent and safe glass fences made of no-impedance glass.
The atrium is crossed, connecting the floors and reminding of Hogwarts, three long (16 m) and unusually thin (only half a meter thick) stairs. They easily float in space, transforming from a communication hub into the main visual accent, a spectacular core of space, almost an attraction.
To achieve such a thin silhouette: if the stairs were metal, the thickness of their stringers would be more than a meter, and here half a meter - the architects were able to thanks to the use of fiber-reinforced concrete "Fibrol", the domestic analogue of the French material Ductal, which, in particular, Zaha Hadid used in London"
Soaring staircase ). In terms of strength, this material is equal to steel, and its wear resistance is 6–8 times higher than that of ordinary concrete. In addition to excellent physical and aesthetic properties: subtlety, plasticity and the possibility of different colors, traditional reinforcement is not used in the structures - its role is played by the fibers that make up the composite material.
The graceful staircases in the atrium will be complemented by three large living trees ranging in height from 8 to 12 meters. For their root system in the semi-underground floor there is an irrigation system and concrete "tubs" suspended on ceilings without support on the foundation: 2 m deep and 2.5 m in diameter, as well as an irrigation and drainage system. “It was not easy to choose trees,” says architect Yulia Soldatenkova, “the atrium will have a positive temperature all the time, and trees in the middle zone and even Mediterranean trees need a period with temperatures of at least about 0 ° throughout the year. We could only choose from equatorial rocks, but decided to do without palm trees - we wanted to see something more traditional. Therefore, we stopped at ficuses."
Multifunctionality
In addition to classrooms located along the southern and eastern facades, best illuminated by the sun, the school has everything you need for harmonious learning: the 4-storey square volume of the main building accommodates a two-story gym and a two-story theater hall with a balcony and a large stage. There is a dining room under the theater hall on the ground floor, and a kitchen under it in the semi-basement floor. The technical premises, as well as the administration offices - in general, all the spaces “for adults”, even the director's office - were moved underground here, leaving the above-ground floors for children. However, minus ground floor does not mean dark: it gets enough natural light through wide pits so large that the term “patio” suits them better. The upper floor is given to high school students: there is a forum for their studies, as well as a scientific cluster that combines a biological, physical and chemical laboratory, classes for robotics, 3D modeling, and digital technologies.
A glass passage connects the main building with an extended extension: it houses a 25-meter swimming pool, a wrestling hall, a choreographic and a gym. Outside of school hours, this part of the building will be available for children and adults from the surrounding houses, for which there will be a separate entrance, lobby and cloakroom. This kind of sharing is also a current trend: the building is open in the evenings and on weekends, almost never idle.
“It is very important that the school was originally planned not as an isolated building, but as a social and cultural center of the quarter. By dividing it into classes proper and public spaces, you can develop scenarios for using the latter after lessons. The building works as much as possible even at the moment when its main “users” are already resting at home,”says Denis Kapralov.
Vanguard and neutrality
Through the double-height stained-glass window of the pool, a reproduction of the painting "Flight" by Marc Chagall, installed on its inner end wall, will be visible from the outside. In this he echoes the progymnasium swimming pool, decorated with Petrov-Vodkin's "Bathing the Red Horse", and continues the theme of avant-garde paintings, which is important for Wellton Park as a whole - the residential complex has its own gallery of 1920s works.
But the inclusion of a bright picture is becoming more the exception than the rule - the interiors of the school are deliberately restrained in color, and this is also one of the new trends, it replaced the boring rainbow multicolored school buildings that were so popular in the 2000s. A single color scheme was chosen for the entire building: shades of gray and light wood, plus a lot of glass. Although the "Finnish" reception of concrete walls and floors had to be abandoned for technical reasons, the solution to the interiors remained emphatically neutral: the walls were plastered and painted in light gray, the floors were finished with a gray Nora coating with increased wear resistance; natural wood (fire regulations prohibit the use of real wood), in classrooms - Gyrodesign acoustic ceilings made of non-combustible fibrous material of light wood color. "When the building starts to live, it will be filled with color: furniture, children's work …" - say the architects.
Concrete wood
If the architects failed to work with the texture of concrete in the interiors, then the facades are entirely subject to the interaction of glass and concrete surfaces. Here, glass-fiber-reinforced concrete was used, produced at the own plant of the company "Krost" -"
Concrete 224 . It is a plastic material that allows you to create durable structures of any shape, size, texture and color. The Khoroshkola building combines two types of textures: one, restrained gray, imitates travertine - for it the builders used German-made formwork. Some of these panels retained their natural color, they were only covered with a hydrophobic compound, and some were tinted with a darker shade.
The second texture is brownish and imitates wood, since it was impossible to use natural wood cladding due to the fire resistance requirements of facade materials. Own production allowed A. Proekt to experiment with options. Rejecting the standard formliner, the architects used natural wood with a deep - brushed - texture to create the formwork, and as a result, they got the effect of a varied, almost living "wood from concrete". The tinted surface is almost indistinguishable from natural wood even at close range.
Meanwhile, the combination of "stone" and "wooden" surfaces plays only a subordinate role in the external image of the school building. The main violin is played by the motive, which architects, with a degree of convention, call "brushwood" - a large lattice of thin concrete beams crossed at different angles, similar to an enlarged stylized image of tree branches. The architects placed it in front of the panoramic stained-glass windows and subordinated the contours of the windows to the inclined lines, and in some places even the inclination of the supports behind the glass, thus setting a common dancing rhythm for the facades.
Most of the openwork "brushwood" is on the western facade, in front of the stained-glass window of the sports hall - from this side the pattern seems almost a real forest - this is how the forest was drawn in the best cartoons of the 1970s, in general, but recognizable. The interweaving of lines completely covers the glass facades of the halls of choreography and wrestling.
Openwork concrete lattices are made at the factory"
Maginot , which is also part of the Krost concern. On the basis of architectural drawings, the designers developed a system for fastening parts: the main difficulty in the development of these elements was the future installation of an extensive stained-glass window behind them and the ability to dismantle it if necessary (for example, if the window breaks). The elements are plastered and painted white. ***
Light, spaciousness, transparency, the silhouette of an openwork forest on the facade and trees inside - the building of the gymnasium definitely contradicts everything that we are used to considering "schoolboy". At the same time, it is not redundant, does not "shout", avoids catchy, working with space and light. An ambitious goal is declared - the school should become "a model of an ideal environment for the formation of a person of the future." Architecture, perhaps, corresponds to the task in its today's understanding - now it's up to the teachers; the gymnasium accepted its first students on Friday, September 1st.
