Contemplative

2024 Author: David Durham | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 02:26

House with an area of about 1200 m² is located in a cottage village near Moscow, on a small plot of 0.26 hectares with a relief difference of about 4.5 m from north to south. Around, on equally small plots of land, there are two- and three-story houses, the usual cottages near Moscow, large and expensive, arranged quite tightly: a house, a little land around, a fence, and so on.

The villa, carefully designed and realized by Levon Airapetov and Valeria Preobrazhenskaya, is radically different from its neighbors. It seems to me that the house looks like a lizard, which has laid down on a slope around a small yard, putting its "tail" along the entrance, digging with its left side into the northern slope, raising its head on short legs, enjoying the view to the south - beyond the border of the site, the slope descends further, and in perspective, a church looms on the opposite hill above the forest.

Дом «Пружина» Фотография © Глеб Леонов | TOTEMENT/PAPER

There are two main differences from the neighbors: first of all, the house does not "stick out" at all and does not rise, but spreads along the ground, not blocking anyone's view. The architects say that the coordination of the proportions of the villa with the neighbors significantly influenced the project - it was necessary to reduce the height of the upper third floor, which, according to the original plan, rose above the second tier on a glass neck as another "head" - the "neck" was removed, the third floor "sat down" on the second, which made the house even more pressed to the ground, although this was not conceived. However, I will not say which turned out worse: belonging to the landscape, sprouting from the slope is one of the immanent qualities of the project, and now it is emphasized better; besides, now the house has not two heads, but one. However, he also has several "hearts", but more on that later.

The second difference from the neighbors Levon Airapetov emphasizes as the main thing. Rather than standing in the middle of the lot, the house is clustered around a patio, stretching along the boundaries, albeit at least feet away from the edge. This is the principle of a Roman villa - impluvium and atrium inside, living quarters and other premises around. But Levon Airapetov, an architect keen on Far Eastern culture, gives an example of a Japanese house arranged in a similar way - around a courtyard. Let's not argue with the author - let it be not a lizard, but a Far Eastern dragon. A dangerous creature with character, but in a state of rest, movement is not active, but potential, twisted inside, ready to unfold - the architects of TOTEMENT emphasize this very image, associating the project with a spring. Meanwhile, as often happens with architecture, potential movement turns into a real richness of perception when a person moves inside. The house is "twisted" in such a way that impressions are constantly changing, revealing a variety of spatial plots and "lumbago" up, then to the sides. “It is difficult to move from such a house to a city apartment later,” says Valeria Preobrazhenskaya. "There is a lot of space in it, both open to the outside and internal perspectives."

So, the entrance and the entrance to the garage are located on the south side. Here, along the street, from east to west, the slope gradually rises - a green roof stretched over the entrance gate, garage gates, and further, to the west - the staff quarters, where in the middle of the bedrooms and other things there is a small covered patio for relaxation. A small classroom is located between these rooms and the entrance to the garage; you can get into it both from the inside and directly from the outside.

Дом «Пружина». План 1 этажа © TOTEMENT/PAPER

There is an open sports ground on the roof of the entrance part - from it, through an open passage, you can get to the terrace of the second floor, to the barbecue stove. In the eastern part, where the “tail” fades away, a fence begins - it was conceived in the spirit of the house, diagonally lattice, but only a small fragment of this idea was preserved - a picket fence with posts in the rest follows the rules of the village.

The “tail” blocks the courtyard from views from the street - on the east side it is also covered with a small embankment and therefore is private. From the entrance through the gate we get into the courtyard, then a few steps below - into the pool. The courtyard and the pool became two centers, the cores of the house, separated and connected by a lintel of glass wall.

Since it is cold in Russia, the path through the courtyard and the passage along the top are rather summer ones; the main entrance from the garage goes to the left, along the courtyard along the gallery, whose right wall is glass, overlooking the courtyard, then a stone wall with "embrasures" overlooking the pool, then we turn right and find ourselves on a bridge thrown over the pool (since the pool area - "wet", it is covered with glass, but without binding, end-to-end, and all views are open).

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1/6 House "Spring": transition from the entrance area to the house and the pool Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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2/6 Spring House: swimming pool Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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3/6 Spring House: bridge over the pool, bottom view Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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4/6 House "Spring": a bridge on the pool Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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5/6 Spring House: view from the stairs downward Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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6/6 House "Spring": bridge over the pool, bottom view Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER

So, the bridge goes over the pool, and soon the main staircase begins behind it, connecting three floors: a spacious billiard room below, a public and guest second floor and a residential third. The staircase is a white spiral, outlined by broken, inclined planes, topped with a glass lantern, which encloses it in a light column, the softly glowing "core" of the entire building. The beginning of the spring of potential movement is located exactly here - between the pool and the glass of the lantern, where the semantic and communication core is twisted in a spiral and suspended between the water and the sky. Emphasizing the importance of the place - the crosshairs between the longitudinal, horizontal path, and the vertical axis, at the base of the stairs there is a kind of "foundation stone" made of glowing Corian with a pattern of sweeping diagonals and zigzags, symbolizing the complexity of the space of the house. Levon Airapetov calls it "heart", although he immediately says that it is apparently not one here.

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1/9 House "Spring": ornamental panel - the "core" of the house Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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2/9 House "Spring": bridge over the pool, the beginning of the stairs Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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3/9 House "Spring": staircase. Second floor Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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4/9 Spring House: staircase Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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5/9 Spring House: staircase Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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6/9 Spring House: staircase Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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7/9 House "Spring": a lantern above the stairs Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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8/9 House "Spring": a lantern over the stairs Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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9/9 Spring House: a lantern over the stairs Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER

But it's not just the structure of the movement. Putting the pool inside, arranging the entrance literally through it, over a bridge, above the water is an idea that is more than unusual for a modern home: now the "wet zone" of the spa is usually placed somewhere in the corner of the site, on the outskirts. In this case, in addition to the emotional meaning of the change of impressions and the unexpectedness of the decision, there is also a typological plot. Levon Airapetov compares, of course, a house with a Far Eastern one, but it seems to me that for some reason the architects managed to revive the ancient typology of a European villa, first of all - a Roman domus organized around an impluvium, a courtyard with a pool for collecting water. Everything, of course, is not simple and not literal: the pool is more of a piscina, because it has nothing to do with collecting water. And the staircase that invades the courtyard-pool system, since it rises immediately behind the bridge, already resembles a European palace (or a smaller palace - a city "hotel"), which, since the Gothic or earlier, was built around the courtyard, but had a spiral staircase in the corner. usually very showy. I'm not talking about a literal repetition or revival of the typology of a pre-classical house, Roman or Gothic - but rather about the "sprouting" through the creative impulse of TOTEMENT of a certain pattern of the house, as antiquity sprouts in Brodsky's poems - structurally, without stylization, although not without nostalgia for the strong to another.

But back to the stairs. It not only provides entrances to all floors, but is also equipped with small additional inclusions: between the first and second floors there is a small sofa, next to it there is a view window in the partition; a little further on the second floor - a bay window with a larger sofa, it already forms part of the living room.

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1/3 Spring House: staircase and pause platform © Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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2/3 Spring House: staircase and pause platform Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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3/3 House "Spring": view from the bridge to the lantern Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER

The second floor is divided approximately in half into a living room and a summer kitchen with an open fireplace for a barbecue, whose large chimney, covered with brownish "copper" Fundermax panels, is clearly visible from the side of the courtyard and grows into a large terrace canopy.

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1/3 Spring House: second floor terrace Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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2/3 House "Spring": chimney of the external fireplace Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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3/3 House "Spring": view from the terrace of the third floor to the courtyard Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER

In the center of this floor is the kitchen - the second core of the house after the stairs. The guest bedroom is located in the northwest corner, and a spacious winter living room with another fireplace and, next to it, an aquarium occupies the entire eastern part of the second floor. The second floor - public, that is, intended for communication, is a variant of an open space, parts of which flow into each other, being not divided, but delicately zoned. It is permeable visually and for rays of light: from the south, from the panoramic glass of the terrace - to the north, where the above-mentioned bay window with a sofa along the glass is arranged.

The permeability of a house for looking inside, from inside-out and for rays of light is a very important thing for architects, they even drew quite understandable diagrams explaining the interaction of these rays and the puzzle of all spaces. The views open up and to the sides, claustrophobia is not threatened anywhere.

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House "Spring": a sketch of the "node" of spaces © TOTEMENT / PAPER
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House "Spring": functional diagram © TOTEMENT / PAPER

Here, in the eastern part of the winter living room, the path begins to the library and the study of the owner of the house - a "head" on a long neck, facing the landscape with a church with an end stained glass window. The library is arranged like a wide corridor; it narrows slightly and rises to the south in several flights of gentle steps of the wooden floor. All the walls are given over to bookshelves, and in them the contours of the windows are inscribed in a complex drawing, subordinate to the diagonals.

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1/9 House "Spring": view of the library from the terrace of the third floor Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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6/9 House "Spring": terrace of the third floor, roof of the library, wells - "lanterns" Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER
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7/9 House "Spring": terrace of the third floor, roof of the library, wells - "lanterns" Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER

“You can take a book, sit anywhere, for example on a step by the window, and read,” the architects say. But that's not all. The library corridor is cut through by two glass wells, completely open at the top and bottom and closed from the library by glass "glasses". Sitting on the steps through these transparent caverns, you can also watch how it snows or rains.

Looking at these "glasses", you again involuntarily think about the antique campluvium: an open roof through which rainwater poured into the house. Here you can also remember a small school with an entrance from the outside: what else is this if not a tabern? And the "corridor" of the library - why not a wooden Roman gallery-tablinum? Only now the atrium, which needs to be around the hearth, "bifurcated" into spaces near the winter and summer fireplaces … However, I repeat, all these associations are rather arbitrary, they can be found not only with Roman, but also in any traditional European house (yes, a large one, but 1200 m² just right for such comparisons). Rather, it should be emphasized that there are more specialized elements of space in this house than in an ordinary modern one, even a large one.

Along with the vertical axis of the staircase, the library space is the most interesting in this house and full of emotions. The concrete "legs" supporting the library are visible through the light wells; at the level of the first floor, they are covered with wooden planks, the strips of joints are illuminated by ice in the evenings, which creates a bright striped pattern and enhances the effect of levitation of the "head" -cabinet. You can also get to the first tier to the "feet" by leaving the balcony of the second floor, along the house - there are, in principle, quite a few alternative routes that straighten and duplicate the main paths.

The third floor houses the bedrooms of the family, parents and children on two different halves. In addition, the parental balcony is separated from the nursery by a flower bed, ensuring privacy. The third nursery, the youngest child's bedroom, faces north, but is equipped with a triangular bay window that catches the light and allows a little look beyond the plane of the wall.

Дом «Пружина»: вид с севера Фотография © Глеб Леонов | TOTEMENT/PAPER

So, the house, rather large, curled up in a ball within the boundaries of the site, supporting the slope sideways, is subordinated to the principle from the inside out: the architects formed semantic and emotional “nuclei” and connected them together, weaved them into a “spring”, also taking care of energy outlets: they are, for example, the front stained glass of the library - the "head" or "tail" of the chimney. There are right angles here, but they do not play the main role - everything is complicated, space and shape flow, only crunching a little on the folds, forming a volumetric origami.

Form does not just play a major role, it is not just "unusual and modern" - it organizes emotions inside and out, sprouts according to its own logic. It is important for her to be accurate, not excessive and not overdried, alive. With this task - to make the form alive, like a beast ready to jump, full of potential movement - architects have been working for quite a long time, over and over again carrying out the task-idea through the experiments of a perfectionist. It is necessary to cope with such a form like a trainer with a wild beast, let alone dragons - not to break the line of being motivated, but to keep "life". What exactly is the task of an architect, it is gratifying that at least someone in our times of effective management sets such goals for themselves.

The implementation of such a project cannot be simple and in Europe, strictly speaking, taking on such a task must be ready, which will not be easy, something will have to be redone and corrected on the spot. For example, at the beginning of the design, it was planned to cover the facades with white plaster, but then it was decided to revet it with Jurassic limestone, and on the subsystem, the facade is ventilated, in the lower and upper ends of the walls, ventilation grilles are visible. But the house is designed for the effect of a sculptural monolith, and in order to avoid the characteristic crevices of the joints, stone plates were glued to the water panels, installed, in turn, on top of the insulation. The plates were selected according to color, making sure that the joints were not too noticeable. Many detailed drawings were made for the facades, including the library windows.

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2/8 House "Spring": Western facade. Summer kitchen wall and terrace with fireplace Photo © Gleb Leonov | TOTEMENT / PAPER

In a word, all this requires painstaking work, both pragmatic, with drawings and at the construction site, and mental - with such mobility of the form, many details must be taken into account, much more than in an "ordinary" house. It is essential that architects bring their ideas to completion, substantiate fantasy with reality, and embody without significant simplifications. Which, apparently, can also be considered a kind of Zen practice. As a result, we get an extremely modern version of the Roman domous. Well, or the Far Eastern "dragon", who lay down to contemplate the Central Russian landscapes on the slope.