The site previously occupied by the bus fleet, according to a number of parameters, was not very convenient for residential construction: near the railway station and the Transsib, a large tram junction with a depot and a traffic-loaded Kosmonavtov Avenue connecting the center of Yekaterinburg with the Uralmash district, around the industrial zone and warehouses, and also a heating main, passing through the entire territory. It seemed that it was simply impossible to comply with all sanitary requirements, noise standards and create a comfortable living environment in such an environment. But the proximity to the historic city center and excellent transport accessibility still forced the developer to develop the project and look for ways out of the situation. “We ourselves were very surprised at the beginning, why the customer was going to build residential buildings in such a place, it seemed that no one would live here,” admits the project manager, architect Yevgeny Volkov. “And now this place has become alive and even many of our bureau's employees and friends have purchased apartments in the Malevich complex. I would like to believe that this is largely our merit”.
To meet all the challenges, the architects unexpectedly abandoned the seemingly obligatory closed compositional scheme in our time and planned four high-rise pencil towers (one with 33 floors, three other towers with 26 floors), positioning them freely relative to each other. So it was possible to solve the problems of insolation and avoid the feeling of a closed well - the sky is somehow visible in the gaps from almost any point. At the same time, from the side of the railway, the territory is protected by two parking lots. Plus the wide stylobates of the towers, which house public spaces, shops, a fitness center and even the office of the PRINZIP developer company, all help to create a cozy and completely car-free courtyard with well-designed landscaping and a modern playground.
A contrasting and bright color scheme with alternating white and colored facades distinguishes the complex against the background of a rather gray environment and turns it into a city-planning accent, clearly distinguishable from the station. Colored facets, differently deployed relative to the cardinal points, make each volume stand out more clearly and make the composition dynamic, constantly changing depending on the position of the sun, lighting and weather. Facade plastic is also created with color: on the red, yellow, green and orange sides, some openings are connected by two floors and are highlighted in white, on the white - vice versa. These picturesquely scattered vertical and horizontal protrusions and depressions maximize the diversity of the image, support the freedom of the overall composition and really make one remember Suprematism. And even the balconies, which actually every apartment has, the architects did not assemble into the familiar and boring "thermometer" on the facade. Somewhere they turn out to be flush with the main plane of the wall and are practically invisible from the outside, somewhere they are drowned, and somewhere, on the contrary, they actively act, enhancing the element of plastic play. And only open transitional loggias on the northern facades set a strict vertical.
Malevich was initially positioned as a relatively affordable, inexpensive housing, hence the choice of an economical wet facade technology and an efficient division of floors into relatively small apartments. All the towers in the plan represent a regular square, which, according to the architects, is a rarity for Yekaterinburg. “For some reason, we loved to build round houses, and even if they chose a rectangular shape, they made rounded corners, balconies or something else,” admits Evgeny Volkov.- The fact is that in such point houses, when cutting apartments of a small area, problems often arise with the accessibility of corner rooms: to get into them, you need either a large corridor or a walk-through room. Both solutions are unpopular with buyers, so designers usually try to increase the area of the side apartments and reduce the area of the corner apartments, hence the “swollen” shape of the building. In our four "pencils" there is not a single curved line, only right angles, and all problems are solved with the help of a more complex, "nonlinear" layout of apartments and their competent internal zoning. " Meanwhile, the layout of the floor is as efficient as possible: a compressed staircase, separate small corridors on two sides of the elevator with evacuation through the elevator hall, and finally, a complex contour of residential cells, which, like puzzle elements, are assembled into the required regular square.
“We worked in parallel on very similar residential complexes”
Kamenny Ruchei and Malevich, says the managing director of the OSA bureau Stanislav Belykh, but they solved similar problems in completely different ways: in the first case, using a rigid orthogonal composition and the most restrained color scheme, and in the second - more expressively, with "scattered" height volumes and color as a key player. Such a versatile approach to one problem is often practiced in our bureau, it allows us to delve deeper into the situation and more accurately respond to the needs of the developer and the end consumer."