Vasilisa Kozhina Street stretches along the railway to the north of Victory Park, not far from Kutuzovsky Prospekt. To the north of the avenue, a strip of apple orchard has been preserved here, behind it is the railway track of the Belarusian direction, further, beyond Kozhina Street - a district of 5-storey brick buildings interspersed with 12-storey panel houses. A strip of land approximately 100 m wide between the railway and the street was once occupied by the "private sector"; in the seventies, there were several small industrial zones, the Foreign Ministry hotel and the open stadium "Bagration". Now on the site of the stadium, inheriting its sports function, the Match Point MFC is being built according to the project of the architects of the ABV group: it will combine housing - more than 1600 apartments, a number of offices and an international volleyball arena for 3500 spectators. The arena, the largest in Europe, will become the base of the Dynamo club. The customer was Volley Grand, which is managed by the VTB Project structure of VTB Group.
The tennis name Match Point was suggested by the developer. It has nothing to do with volleyball, but yes to sports in general. Match point is the decisive moment of the match, when the won ball decides the outcome of the game, so that the name plays up not only the theme of sports as such, but also the location of the complex next to Victory Park. “One step away from victory,” says the advertising slogan on the website of the residential complex. The park border is 300 m in a straight line, to the entrance to the metro station of the same name - 12 minutes on foot.
According to the head of the ABV group, Nikita Biryukov, many architects broke their spears at this facility, since it was necessary to solve several puzzling problems at once: to combine a sports facility, a rather high density of housing and height restrictions. When the budget was partially depleted by previous unsuccessful attempts, the customer announced an unspoken competition, which was won by the ABV team of Nikita Biryukov. “The Dynamo Society wanted to build a volleyball stadium here for international games,” says Nikita Biryukov, “and for this it was necessary to build a house in order to earn money. That is, the house had to be such that it would be enough for sports. Thus, the arena has become an additional burden and challenge. Plus, because of the railway, it was required to additionally strengthen the foundation.
The entire complex, including residential buildings and a volleyball arena, is located in a three-tiered underground parking for 1609 cars. A laconic oval arena puck, decorated in the spirit of the seventies with a strict row of thin light beige ribs of vertical slats, is located in the western part of the complex - their night illumination is conceived to be spectacular, the shining shading should almost float in the air.
Again in the spirit of the seventies, the arena is surrounded by an open gallery, where symmetrical seedlings lead from the front side of Kozhina Street - they are a bit like bypassing the Olympic sports complex.
From the opposite side towards the railway, the rectangular volume of the training hall protrudes from the oval contour: it is recessed into the ground by two tiers and therefore only slightly corrects the contour of the first floor; above, the round shape is clean and laconic.
If the volleyball arena, an iconic element of the ensemble, from an architectural point of view, appeals to the seventies or even eighties with their search for a reduced order, then the contextual note becomes stronger in the volumes of residential buildings. First, they are planned with a strictly symmetrical frame and in terms of their plan sharply resemble the post-war Stalinist houses of Kutuzovsky Prospekt and the surrounding area; but the Match Point is two to three times larger. As we remember, one of the difficult tasks was the need to combine the requirements for the volume of areas with altitude restrictions and insolation requirements. From here - a silhouette of two large steps: in the southern part, facing the railway and Kutuzovsky Prospekt, there are two corner tower blocks of 28 floors, almost 100 m in height; in the northern one, facing Vasilisa Kozhina street - 13 floors, almost on a par with neighboring houses.
In order for the towers to block the sun less from the south side, a gap appeared in the middle, equal to them in width.
Meanwhile, the difference in height between the southern and northern parts is quite large - 15 floors. In order to smooth it, the architects added a small "step" of transitional sections in the alignment of the towers: 18 floors, 63 meters.
The one-hundred-meter towers - not yet skyscrapers, but already almost - will be perceived mainly from a distance and will work for the relatively long-term perspective of Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Hence the color is fawn, beige; clear division into tiers - bottom, top, middle; the combination of light verticals with visually "recessed" horizontals is a rhythmic theme of skyscrapers and their smaller younger brothers, such as, for example, the romantic forts of Zinovy Rosenfeld - houses 21 and 25, located not far from here, closer to the city center along Kutuzovsky Prospekt.
The theme of Stalin's Art Deco, however, is not absolute: having given a "bodily" classical rhythm, the architects immediately break it up, "stringing" the volumes into wide strips of verticals of glass loggias: they visually divide the towers into slender parts, turning them into a kind of tetrapilons and at the same time, it reminds one of the methods of postmodern architecture by Riccardo Bofill, since the stripes of glass noticeably reduce the materiality of the solution.
Similar glass verticals separate from the towers the low-rise buildings facing the street. Their ground floor has a deep pedestrian gallery - a relative of Rivoli Street, 18th century shopping malls and a heroine of the theories of Moscow city planners in the 1980s - it forms a comfortable zone in front of cafes and shops on the ground floor, creating protection from rain and snow for the flow of customers - people walking from the metro.
The three-part facade scheme also resembles some of the "Stalinist" buildings in the area, going back, in principle, to the formula of the Palladian palace. Unless, like the towers, it is completely devoid of decor, cleaned to linearity, and its aesthetics is formed by the delicate cut of the glass of the loggias and the inserts of greenish tinted glass that emphasize their depth.
Loggias are planned, it seems, for all apartments, and apartments, as is now customary, are moderately diverse, from one to three rooms with several exclusive options that go beyond. In particular, on the thirteenth floor from the street side there are 4-room apartments of 350 m2; but there are not so many of these "unique". In general, the size of housing is moderate, from 30 to 100 m2… The layout of all buildings is corridor-sectional: every two sections are interconnected by a corridor. The dark corners characteristic of the quarter plan, all four, are occupied by elevator shafts - the plans are no less rational than the facades.
So, the architecture of "Match Point" is strictly orthogonal, it is pure, elegant modernism, but allusions to the classics of post-war architecture, motivated by the context of Kutuzovsky, helped to move away from the standard modernist grille on the facade, added complexity, historical depth and allowed the house to "make friends" with surroundings. Perhaps, in addition to the "Stalinist Empire" style, it will be appropriate here to recall the symmetrical avant-garde at the dawn of its existence - for example, Boris Velikovsky's "Gostorg".
The elegance of the forms is supported by the materials. The budget was limited, but the architects went to great lengths to make the residential complex look expensive. There was a variant of using a material imitating wood in cladding. But we settled on the Jurassic stone in the first two tiers and painted steel cassettes - stronger and more beautiful than aluminum ones - above. The color, as already mentioned, is dominated by light beige, two tones lighter than the "Stalinist" brick and stone. It is combined with darker gray aluminum in the glazing binders, carefully selected perforated metal grilles, striped air conditioner baskets and ventilation grilles. All facades are thin-layered, beige surfaces are a little closer, dark metal and grilles are a little further; the resulting effect of a combination of slotted metal, stone and glass leads us to a strict, perhaps even high-tech version of Art Deco, however, also in tune with modern searches for ornamental architecture.
The strictest symmetry, the laws of which all these subtleties are subject, are broken - or revived - only once. Entering the courtyard through a through pylonade in the center of the gallery along Vasilisa Kozhina Street, we find ourselves vis-à-vis with a completely modern, but Baroque plastic facade of a three-story office building, set in alignment with 28-storey towers: large windows of horizontal proportions, animated by triangular bay windows, reminiscent of giant toggle switches, and this also fits into the theme of nostalgic modernism, but with some, though not too accented note of "neo". On the other hand, due to the unexpectedly local scale, this building seems a little alien, and here the game of association comes into play: it seems to have either survived from the previous time, or, on the contrary, appeared after the construction of the main frame of residential buildings.
It turns out that the emphasized external manifestation of the division into functions: arena, house, office, is also combined with stylistic or even historical: the seventies, a "refined" version of the Stalinist classics, movable bay windows of modern modernism. Thus, the arena reminds of the cult of sports in the USSR, the house is respectable in the spirit of the once elite, and now expensive Kutuzovsky Prospekt, the office is modern. Even a kindergarten is included in the game - the reeds on its wall become pure nature in this row, perhaps the future. However, the same themes can be read proceeding and only from the typology: the Stalinist house is more than a stable and appropriate phenotype, the stadium of the seventies too, the office should be a “window”, and the kindergarten is the kindergarten, the realm of natural uncertainty.
Although in addition to some very subtly outlined games with a chronology of meanings, the house is quite modern and meets many requirements: it provides parking for almost every apartment, a courtyard without cars and landscaping on the roof of the arena, public ground floors and a gallery for comfortable operation of shops. All this is being built in the area of the City and Kutuzovsky Prospekt, in an expensive and prestigious area, where large residential complexes are now being built everywhere along the Moskva River on the site of industrial zones. The area of Filey and Victory Park should soon change significantly, significantly enlarge in scale. The architect's intervention is to formalize this process, to take it into some kind of volumetric and visual framework, to find the optimal solution in conditions of rather stringent requirements, including turning dense buildings into a catalyst for a new, to some extent better quality urban life.
