We have already talked about the projects of mid-rise and low-rise buildings that reached the final of the AHML standard housing competition, as well as about the competition task. We remind you that the second round of online voting, in which you can express your preference for projects while their authors are busy with revision, is open on the Strelka website - choose, choose … In the meantime, let's study the projects of the so-called “central” model.
Its name is the most mysterious, but there are two reasons. Firstly, it is obvious that the organizers did not want to accentuate the word "high-rise", so discredited by Moscow and Zamadovo construction projects, and secondly, according to the assignment, the parameters are not so off-scale and more than delicate: no 25 floors. The number of storeys in the main building in this model is up to nine, only 2 floors higher than the maximum height of the "average" model, and, in general, corresponds to the Soviet microdistricts of the early 1970s. Accent towers - up to 18 floors, more than modest in the minds of a modern Muscovite. The recommended density according to the standard is 18,000-25,000 m2/ ha, which directly corresponds to most of the pilot renovation projects. From which we conclude: the fact that according to the standards offered to the whole country is a model for building a center, for Moscow there is not much, Moscow is all, if we argue in these categories, in some way a center, and 25,000 m2/ ha for her is rather little than a lot.
From the projects of the central model, according to the assignment, it was required to create a closed contour of the perimeter building of the quarter, because in the center of the city, as one could understand, it is not too safe, there are many functions and people. Design a school instead of a kindergarten. Distribute the functions as vertically as possible. Use roofs for landscaping and, in particular, for walking areas in schools: all this is a little discordant with a given height of 9 floors and sounds like a task to compact Manhattan; the feeling is that the authors of the assignment either say "nine", but keep "nineteen" in mind, or - we will not develop conspiracy theories - they are simply reinsured. It is recommended to give priority here to walking, there are very few car places in the assignment - one for 6 people, that is, for 2-3 families with one child or without children. Or one car for a family of 5-6 people. Very Singaporean for 9 stories high. However, you can always assume an overhead multi-storey parking in the next block.
Here, the “low-rise building”, the so-called urban villa, which is present in the other two models, was removed from the typological series, a “tower” appeared in its place, the difference is in the height of up to 18 floors.
Let's consider projects, there are seven of them in the "central" model.
DA Project: puzzle
Russia
The privacy of the two courtyards is ensured by single-tiered lintels between the houses with terraces on their roofs. The eight-story high arches leading to the courtyards seem to be inverted lintels and part of a volumetric puzzle; a pedestrian can easily enter them, but you can always put bars from "strangers". The windows are connected vertically by 2 and 4 by a fashionable technique. The sixteen-storey tower looks like a donjon: it is somewhat thicker than sectional and gallery houses, which is why it invades its courtyard at a corner. Two blocks of approximately the same proportions are separated by an internal passage and shifted, making room for a school, a playground for schoolchildren and a ground parking lot at the outer edge. Under the school playground, there is an underground parking lot for 50 spaces, plus 65 ground ones along the perimeter, 115 in total, less than 150 indicated in the assignment.
The project involves a number of "tricks", for example, lighting the courtyards with lanterns suspended from guy lines between the houses - they look pretty cozy, as well as: private roof terraces for some reason, only one of the houses, and buried garbage containers.
ARD Bureau: South Quarter
Russia
According to the architects, their project is based on the study of cities in the Southern Federal District, designed for their conditions and climate, and thus opposed to the indifference of both Soviet standard and later commercial design. The authors propose a number of modules related to different functions - their different layout should provide variety. ARD has also taken care of maximum comfort for the apartments on the first and last floors, for which front gardens and roof terraces are planned; the same approach forced all volumes to be divided into three parts in height.
The rectangular section is here also longitudinally divided into two halves; at one end of the territory there is a tower, standing as far away as possible, that is, separated from neighboring houses by a square and a square, and a school with a courtyard. The local tower has 18 maximum floors and 70 m height; it looks like a slender dominant, not a donjon; the five lower floors are glass, at the top of the tower are decorated with deep balconies. Gallery houses here are 5-storey, in sectional - 9 storeys; however, the sections dock only once - with the gallery houses, for the most part they are placed separately, with aisles between them, and there is no closed "safety loop" (or fear?) here. In addition to the school, there was a place for a preschool educational institution. There are underground parking lots under all the houses, under the tower there are even 2 tiers. Courtyards - terraced, on several levels.
BOLD Collective: timber frame module
Netherlands
The Dutch project Bold is called superframe: superframe, it is based on a wireframe module. All facades are united by a grid of fine checkered cut, exactly the same, but suggesting variety within the cells. Which is quite elegant and involves a lot of glass, which means double-glazed windows, which means that the project cannot be budgetary, -
comments by users of the Strelka website. The square-cubic module is inherent in the project as a whole: they are built on it, making it quite flexible, and the volumes with their wavy height. It is assumed that the facade modules will be manufactured at the factory.
Two quarters are completely enclosed - as requested in the assignment, inside are private courtyards, outside along the contour of the first floors of premises for commercial lease. There are a lot of cafes on the ground floors. The school is built into the first floor of a larger block. All roofs are green, except for the terraces there are solar panels. Inside each section, there are places for communication of residents - "communal apartments", however, the Dutch write in a mistake - "komunelka", which is forgivable for those who did not live in the USSR, and even charmingly literary. These public spaces are equipped with a large window - 4 modules, and are similar to the holes that MVRDV often makes in the body of their buildings.
The tower is a kind of mushroom of different heights, 5-12-15-18 floors, 18 on the outer corner, 5 inside, - as in the previous project, at the far corner, separated by a passage and an area. Its facades are subordinated to the same modular-square grid as in the quarters. The square is emphatically urban, and in general this project presents itself as distinctly urban, it has a sense of the urban environment without attempts to plant the surroundings with feigned greenery, which impresses. In addition, the project is beautiful in itself - emphasized by the modularity of the cubes, the obvious flexibility of solutions, transparency, light contours, clear logic. Looking at him, you sharply feel the contrast with the works of Russian colleagues, more, forgive me, constrained in the visual part.
And yes: the authors offer the frame of the houses - all, including the tower - made of laminated veneer lumber. Every cubic meter of glued wood we build from is a ton of CO2, Bold architects say. Remembering the wooden past of Russian cities, they point to the possibility of an advanced, sustainable future for its construction, since our country also has the largest reserves of wood. By their mouths. But this is not the only project with a timber frame proposed in the competition: in particular, the Boustany – Suphasidh – Desfonds + A2OM team also proposed a laminated veneer lumber construct in the mid-rise model. In parentheses, we note that houses with a timber frame are the past of half-timbered Holland rather than log Russia, but oh well.
In addition to the frame, facade and planning module, the authors offer, as in the previous project, a functional module, fitting it into the cubes of their frame.
Another feature: for some reason, foreign participants are more eager to explain their project and persistently describe their concept on tablets. Our fellow citizens are apparently convinced that "in our time no one will read", and get by with pictures. And yet they shouldn't have such an opinion about their viewers. ***
Sara Simoska: a practical neighborhood with a supermarket
Macedonia
Unlike the Dutch, the Macedonian architects chose not to describe their project. The site here is not divided into two or three subordinate sites, but is interpreted as a single whole: 4 buildings surround the courtyard, rather far away from the contour of the territory planted with a system of trees and turned into a boulevard. Here everything is somehow to the maximum: in the tower there are 18 floors, in the rest of the buildings there are 9 floors. The horseshoe-shaped underground space provides parking for houses and a supermarket - yes, it is a supermarket that is planned here, and not shops on the first floors. All this is convenient and practical, although not very fashionable; it seems that the project is different from other b about more realism, so I would like to suspect that the authors have brought to the competition some of their works that have not gone into business. Quite unexpectedly, the prevalence of gallery houses: there are two out of four, which gives the offer, as well as the stone facades, a "southern" flavor.
Luis Eduardo Calderón García: Aztec Park
Colombia
Colombian architects call their neighborhood "parks" and emphasize a network of large and small parks. However, impressed by the Russian winter, they paint their parks with snow, and even at night, one must think, somewhere in early January - this is a non-southern option, the glass upper floors look like blocks of snow and ice, and everything is generally somewhat gloomy, calculated to the harsh Russian souls - which, in contrast to the light futuristic "wooden cities" of the Dutch, is especially brutal. But here there are warm internal passages at the level of the first floor and public spaces with winter gardens - for us, the unfortunate, forced to live all the time in the winter.
It is captivating that Calderón García consider their quarter as part of a modular whole and immediately plan a large fragment of the city with a subordination of spaces, streets, squares, somewhat going beyond the scope of the competition task, which involves one quarter. Unlike other participants, the architects immediately draw their urban block as part of a symmetrical composition of four of these, dividing, or, as they say now, sharing one common square. Their block has no rigid street contours.
The layouts are similar to Aztec symbols, the architecture of the houses tends to the ponderousness of classic post-war modernism. The towers in such an array are barely readable.
Pole Design: the city is wooden and modular
Russia
Residential buildings of Ekaterina Shornikova and Vladimir Kuzmin are designed for wooden structures using CLT panels: frame, ceilings, partitions. According to the information that the architects cite with reference to the Association of Wooden Housing Construction, new standards allowing the construction of buildings from laminated veneer lumber are planned to be approved in Russia in July 2018. Among the advantages of wood construction, in addition to limiting CO2 emissions and renewable resource, the authors call: the ability to manufacture more elements in the factory and assembled at any time of the year, less weight of the building, an increase in the assembly speed by 3-4 times, a decrease in the construction site and the number of people at the construction site. The facades are planned to be ventilated from almost any material: from fiber cement, ceramic, glass - to actually wooden.
The modularity of the apartments in the project is based on the 6.6 x 3.3 m support spacing, which allows you to vary and "recruit" the necessary apartment layouts.
In addition, just like the Colombians, Pole-Design does not view their quarter autonomously, but as part of a larger entity - the urban block of the quarter, to use the new Moscow terminology. It turns out 6 basic blocks with a minimum area of 0.6 hectares, they can be combined, and the set in each quarter can also be different - from the most complete, with a school and retail, to limited only to housing and using the infrastructure of the neighboring quarter. Somewhere in the middle of the list of elements of the set, a parking lot appears - not underground, but in the stylobate under the yard. Yards, of course, but what about, without cars, with "micro-gardens", small.
The "basic modules" are joined by a pedestrian-bicycle "boulevard-park" - here, in a relatively safe, but at the same time, open space, schools, kindergartens, playgrounds for children and sports and public spaces are taken out. They are crossed by "living streets" - internal thoroughfares with little traffic. Outward, to the city highways, the blocks are facing the front of the red line.
Thus, the project is designed for a broad understanding of modularity, from the internal, related to the frame and options for apartment layouts, to urban. His view is somewhat broader than the actual show jumping task, which allows the authors to overcome the tightness of the site proposed by the "model". We observed a similar modular approach in the mid-rise model in the proposal for DNA ar, and I must say, despite the fact that modularity and variability were among the requirements of the test task, this topic, apparently, turned out to be one of the most complex and was not developed in all projects. The Field-Design project is one of them.
Archifellows ("Comrades Architects")
Russia
Comrades with the motto "Live brightly" propose a quarter with a rather diverse, recognizable architecture: an "avant-garde" gallery house, "Stalinist" projections and bricks, a "Chicago" tower, modernist glass arches and cylinders, and other style hints and delights designed to create a city of seeming difference in time. On the one hand, it may seem like stylization, but on the other hand, the attention to the architectural component and its “typological” motivation is rather captivating.
The private courtyard is separated by a lintel of glass; spacious terraces appear on the roof of the second floors of the sectional section. But the upper roofs are not exploited, but solar panels appear on them. There is no rigidly closed loop here, but two courtyards are divided into a private one - where you can enter only through a small gap in the development front, and the city square, or square, between residential buildings and the school. The second city square on the corner is even more open - thus creating a rather harmonious hierarchy of three public spaces.
