We have already talked about the projects of the mid-rise model of the AHML competition for standard housing. Here we will consider projects of low-rise neighborhoods - there were five of them in the final of the competition. Low-rise assumes a height of up to 4 floors, the site is the largest of all, 2-4 hectares, with a maximum side of up to 300 m; The organizers say that the key feature of the quarter is its elongated shape, which makes it possible to arrange houses in a row. Target building density 4000-6000 m2 / ha, street width from 6 to 20 m, most houses according to the assignment have plots - up to 500 m2, less than six acres. Residents on the test site are planned from 100 to 320 people, parking - 1 car for 2-3 people, that is, from 37 to 120.
From the infrastructure, as in the mid-rise model, it was required to design a kindergarten. The development front was supposed to be open, permeable to pedestrians - on the other hand, one should not think that the format is completely suburban - rather, it corresponds to the historical Russian "small towns", taking into account their Soviet compaction. Actually, one of the tasks announced by the organizers is to offer a comfortable but compact type of development. Types of houses offered to the contestants: an individual house with its own plot, block houses, townhouses and a "small apartment" house with one entrance, up to 4 floors in height - in English it is called urban villa.
What are urban-type settlements and villages inherited from the Soviet era lacking? So that there was where a person should go (paraphrasing Dostoevsky with a new meaning). I had a chance to observe the villages near Moscow: a chaotic, careless environment, people are going to watch the World Cup in a pancake shop at a network gas station, which is about a kilometer from the last house. And suddenly a cafe appears with the meaningful name "Paradise", which offers business lunches for 150 rubles. One for several thousand people. But it is in demand not so much by the local population as by construction workers and traders who serve the cottage villages growing around. The local population meets and exchange news at the supermarket. ***
Grupo H d.o.o. European town
Slovenia
The goal is to form a low-density settlement as a mixture of urban and natural environments. The village quarter in the Grupo H project has a regular square shape with a side of about 300 m. It is bounded by the main automobile street and local narrower ones. The layout uses not an orthogonal grid, but a freer one to increase the naturalness and variety of the environment. All areas are irregular. There are narrow pedestrian streets leading to them, but more than 3.5 m, which corresponds to the width of fire passages.
There is a feeling of a settlement that has naturally evolved over the centuries, and more like a medieval European town than a Russian village. Houses with gable roofs are knocked together in groups, alternating with trees. The permeability of the natural and architectural environment looks good, but the question immediately arises: who will look after the mini-groves between the houses? Residents or services they hire? So far, this does not work even in the suburban area.
The human scale is set by two-story houses with pitched roofs and narrow facades. Private houses line the red line of the street, as do pretty wooden sheds. This is, among other things, an ingenious way to deal with fences, which are so loved in Russia. The house and barn block the view of the plot, so there is a hope that fences will not be required. For townhouses, there are mini-gardens in the English style on the street side. The project is characterized by modularity; different types of houses and even commercial buildings can be assembled from separate blocks. The typology of housing that was given in the competition project: private houses, block by two, townhouses and urban villas with several apartments, mixed in space to avoid the segregation of the rich and the poor.
In the center there are two squares of irregular, picturesque shape. The question arises, how will social life be formed there? Residential buildings are all around at different angles, forming very blurred boundaries. Will the place be perceived as cozy and protected from all sides, as happens in small European towns? And what functions will attract people there? Perhaps a kindergarten, as in this project. A real village usually has a supermarket, club, fairground and church. The area is spontaneously formed around these functions, more often at the supermarket. The Grupo H project has an entrance area with shops on the border with the road. Most likely, it will be she who will become the main one. The rest will be good if the landscaping is made as attractive as in the picture in the project. I would like to believe that one of them will have a cafe "Paradise" with lunches for 150 rubles. And that people will be there to watch football matches.
For interconnected houses of two, verandas look very curious, which are called sunny rooms - glass houses under pitched roofs, something between a greenhouse and a winter garden. It's not entirely clear how this thing works in winter, but it looks pretty. But the stained-glass window in the living room bordering the garden, which is in most houses, is a real thing in our climate: energy-saving double-glazed windows keep the living temperature, and everyone knows how much pleasure from such windows. The gardens next to the cluster houses are open, so interaction between residents is expected to be very close. Either friends-relatives will live here, or young people of the Western plan. The option "in a swimsuit in the garden" will not work here. On the whole, the project presupposes a rather close communal life of the European type, based on high consciousness and developed courtesy. In our country, the mentality of the population is changing slowly: courtesy grows, but remains in second place after unwillingness to greet a neighbor.
Of the layout features: each private house for a family of four has three bedrooms upstairs, two bathrooms in the same place, a living room downstairs around the staircase and a third bathroom. Three bathrooms for four - a high standard of living for Russia. Interesting layout of a one-room apartment 39 m2 in an urban villa: the bathroom is inside a closed block, and the block is in the center of a square room. This block zones the space: it blocks the view of the bed from entering the room (some degree of intimacy has been achieved) and divides the room into a dressing corner, kitchen corner, dining corner, and seating corner. ***
PPA Arquitetura. Almost what it is now
Brazil
The architects propose an environment that, at first glance, is close to the one that exists now in urban-type settlements: among the one-two-storey gable houses of IZHS, several 4-5-storey residential buildings rise, visually similar to panel buildings. But inside this scheme, a lot of things have been invented. The block has a maximum size of 4 hectares, 200 parking lots for 556 inhabitants (proportion as in the assignment).
In an explanatory note, the architects claim that they were interested in the study of collective housing in the tradition of modernism. That is, the socialization of everyday life, but, of course, not in those utopian forms that a hundred years ago. There are separate plots near private houses, but they are very small. Communal gardens are formed in an area surrounded by several houses. The territory itself looks cozy, safe, and it seems to me that it would be better used for children's games. Children on it could walk without leaving the yard, under the supervision of adults, even if the parents are looking only from the windows.
The second principle, noticeable in the project: many variations of standard elements.
“The project is dictated by the desire to create poetic and beautiful rather than simple and rational,” write the architects. Apparently, it is this desire that explains the diagonal displacements from the rectangular plan of the settlement. In my opinion, they do not give the impression of being logical and make orientation difficult. At the same time, it is in the PPA project that there are real streets with the front of the facades, although it is not quite obvious from the architectural design of the houses that they can be used for street retail. Communication within the quarter is provided by driveways and bike paths. A public space in the center with a football field and a public building is understandable and familiar, it is not urban in nature, but recreational, rather for sports than for cafes. The shopping center is located at the edge of the settlement.
Apparently, the same desire for picturesqueness as the diagonal orientation of the central square explains the departure from orthogonality in the plans of houses and apartments: for example, in an urban villa, most of the rooms are not rectangular, irregular in shape. In twin cluster houses, the pitched roof space is used for an additional mezzanine floor.
The project focuses on the environmental component. Collection of rainwater and partially green roofs, as well as a thoughtful slope of the roof in case you want to install a solar panel to heat the water - all these are signs of ecological architecture. It is logical to collect water, and green roofs in rural areas, where there are enough natural surfaces, are unlikely to be in demand. ***
T. A. R. I. Architects. Big and small
Italy
Following the competition project, the architects emphasized diversity in their project by hearing the word city in the English word diversity. As a result, the project is named Divercity and even has a corresponding logo. The essence of the idea is to move from the standardization and facelessness of Soviet mass development to houses that will help the owners of self-expression. Architecture is understood as a space of individual freedom. A modular principle is used, and a person can choose the typology of the house, shape, color, size and material himself. It looks like an automotive lineup. That is, the house may turn out to be wooden, or, judging by the visualizations, glass.
In the authors' concept, size matters. The explanation to the project shows that instead of cutting the block into large lots using driveways and filling the lots with the same plates of panel houses, as it was in Soviet times, a principle called the "tile principle" was used: each of the large lots is divided into several rectangular pieces of different size (they are marked XS, S, M, L, XL). And they already house houses, public functions, public spaces and greenery. And all this is of different sizes: for example, there is a large public park on the edge of an urban block, and there are green alleys; there is a large area with a sports ground and an amphitheater, and there is a tiny one for nearby houses; there is a large shopping street and an area of small street vendors. There is a public garden and private hortus. Etc.
The two main streets intersect at right angles, but not in the center of the block, the rest of the thoroughfares divide the urban block into large lots. And inside, indeed, many small, cozy and diverse zones are formed, the boundaries of which are created somewhere by facades, somewhere trees planted in a row, somewhere covering. That is, the design and arrangement of the environment becomes many times higher than it is characteristic of today the environment of small towns and villages. ***
Akhmadullin architects
Russia
The project has two accents. The first is modern landscaping that improves the environment in any layout. The second is modularity. The layout of the block, stretched out in length, seems rather ordinary. Streets and footpaths intersect at right angles, and the main streets are not highlighted, they are all more or less the same width, all but one are short, obviously, so that cars do not accelerate and pedestrians feel comfortable. In the center there is a square and a park, separated by an extended community center with a turret, which makes it look like a church, and on the other side of the park is a kindergarten. The landscaping is carefully thought out: soft division into car zones and paved footpaths with the help of a low sidewalk, parking pockets.
The second emphasis is modularity. An individual house can be made in four versions: with a terrace / without a terrace, with a gable / pitched roof, with / without dormers. Accordingly, when these options are interlocked in two or more houses, the required variety of the front of the facades is achieved automatically. An urban villa, on the other hand, is a single cubic block.
The renderings of houses with solid brick skin covering both the walls and roof look trendy. In Russia, you can only find this at the famous Moscow club Art House of Sergei Skuratov. On most roofs, skylights are noticeable, that is, in most houses, attic space is used, in which you can see the establishment of a new norm for the Russian climate (previously, a cold attic was needed as a buffer zone, with modern technologies this is not necessary). In most layouts, the kitchen is combined with the living room - the so-called euro-option. Hence, the feeling of two full-fledged spaces - two rooms - is created even in a one-room apartment. ***
Pioneer project group. Bakery and beehive
Russia
The authors have written a heartfelt text about small towns disappearing and suffering from the chaotic and abandoned environment created by panel buildings. The architects see the main potential in combining a private low-rise building with a personal plot and an attractive urban environment, that is, in combining the bonuses of the village and the city. “Small towns will no longer be invaded by the high-rise panel that disfigures them,” the authors write. "The small town will remain low-rise with high-rise dominants in the form of bell towers and old factory chimneys."
The landscaping is carefully ranked: along the perimeter of the quarter there are streets with separate traffic and pedestrian flows, in the center there are driveways for joint use, and the passages to public areas are strictly pedestrian. Like real urbanists, architects draw the profile of the street (internal passage) of joint, pedestrian and car use.
In drawings a la comics, the authors present a somewhat utopian, but, in general, realizable picture of provincial everyday life: the family lives in their house, breathes clean air, 7 minutes walk to work, on the way from work they go to the bakery for fresh bread, eat food with his garden, and the head of the family has a beehive on the site. Most of the parameters of this life are still in small towns, except, perhaps, bakery and landscaping.
Interestingly, in the illustrations for the project, the authors built their low-rise buildings and public spaces into a real city with Khrushchevs. And they indicated in the note that the project was prepared on the example of the city of Spokoiny. This means that architects are ready to improve the existing loose urban environment, not just build everything from scratch.
The size of the block is only 1 hectare, but there are as many as 60 parking spaces per 100 residents. This is quite a lot, in other projects there are a little more than a third of them, as in the competition task. People would like the humanity towards motorists. In Russia, especially in the provinces, it is difficult to live without a car. ***
Thus, in all projects there is flexibility, variety, modularity, gable roofs, public spaces and functions, developed landscaping. But questions remain, how to continue to work with the population. After all, it is inclined to spoil the view with fences made of profiled sheet and white double-glazed windows, and it is naive to wait for the taste to develop. People are people everywhere. For example, in the exemplary city of Poundbury in Dorset (UK), designed according to all the rules of New Urbanism, there is a special code that prohibits all materials in the construction of houses, except for local bricks of certain masonry, ugly plastic signs and all plastic in general, antennas on roofs, garbage containers from the street side. The car must be hidden behind the house, the streets are narrow so that cars do not accelerate more than 10 km per hour, and so on. Residents grumble, but they follow the rules. And the success of the venture has been proven: the city has existed since 1993, new queues are being built, the price of real estate is growing, and people from the surrounding villages specially come to Poundbury for a walk. That is, the commercial success of the aesthetic efforts invested in the environment is obvious.
