The project won first place in a closed competition for the best residential complex, which will be named "Red Square". 29 teams took part, the results were summed up last year.
The site with which the contestants worked is a large vacant lot in the form of a jagged square, located in the very center of the city. It is separated from the park and the Izhevsky pond promenade only by Maxim Gorky Street with a strip of historical buildings of two to four floors. On the opposite side there is a busy Karl Marx Street, with trams and rather steep terrain. Sovetskaya Street separates the site from the oldest part of the city, where, mixed with modern buildings, there are still wooden and stone houses from the beginning of the 20th century.
The difference in relief from north to south here is 8 m, and the authors divided the site into three "high-altitude" zones, within which four rectangular blocks appeared, gathered around a small area.
The cross of the inner streets turns out to be somewhat asymmetrical, or rather, it is given a torque according to the principle of a solar sign: half of the current Krasnaya Street route remains, the second “moves” a little to the east, two cross streets behave the same, in a word, all streets come to the corners of the square.
All these circumstances, as well as a small, slightly turned building on the border of the site gave the master plan a kind of "torque", which the architects decided to develop and strengthen. They put on the center of the complex, over the square, a conditional square, the side of which is about a third of the width of the site.
And turned it at an angle of 15 °.
The square captured the nearest thickness of the houses, and "turned" the first floors, turning their corners inside out, so that intrusion corners formed in the courtyards, and in the square there were triangular depressions, porticoes covered with pylonades.
All this gave the regular quarter space unpredictability: “everything strives to jump out of the usual coordinates,” writes Liza Brilliantova, “starting with the suddenly changing angle of rotation of the pylon facades, exposing the flesh and blood of walls, window frames, balconies, paving and even glass, ending with the sudden appearance a long-lost sculpture of an elephant”.
Why the elephant was lost is difficult to say, and the author does not explain this, but a version can be offered. Recently, sculptures in public spaces of residential complexes have become more of a rule, but, alas, they often turn out to be quite commonplace, if not vulgar. Here, the architects take as a basis the well-known, albeit half-forgotten symbol of vulgarity - "bourgeois elephants" on the cupboards - one of them fell, rolled under the table, and lies there upside down. The elephant is large, Gulliver's - in this sense, it becomes a defamiliarized banality, possibly passing through enlargement into anti-banality, but retaining the original perceptions. The main thing is that everyone will walk by in the yard and think what kind of elephant is, why is it turned over? - And we found him under the table at my grandmother, where we went on foot.
The elephant is an artifact of the inner square. She, like the point from which everything comes, is filled with capacious archetypal images. The steps of the amphitheater end at the foot of the houses, but continue in the drawings of the facades. Rare apple trees, combined with thin walls and an inverted elephant, unexpectedly evoke the Alhambra's lions' courtyard. This space, into which you find yourself after the familiar world of Karl Marx Street, is like looking through the looking glass. Is it a labyrinth, a garden, a puzzle, or a sanctuary? Perhaps the authors of the project were striving for this, distorting the usual rectangular coordinates: to knock the city dweller out of his usual rut, make him ask questions.
The combination of orderliness and unpredictability extends to the facades of houses. On the one hand, there is the traditional rhythm of elongated windows, verified proportions of the walls and a harmonious three-part composition. On the other hand, the entire shell of the house is entwined with a honeycomb ornament in the spirit of Maurits Escher's turned-out volumes - the pattern is about to fold into an understandable figure, but at the last moment it flows into something else. This is an architectural expression of another concept of the authors: “for all man's daring attempts to bring order to the world, there will always be a force a hundred times larger. She is reckless, she exists outside of logic and is hopelessly trying to save each of us."
The flesh and blood of buildings is also an embodied metaphor: the white almost scaly “skin” in the places of the cutouts-pilonades becomes red “flesh”, the body of buildings, treating a cut as a cut - honestly and somewhat even brutal, if you think about it. However, comfort and coziness are provided here, it is unlikely that many residents will ponder the underlying meaning.
Liza Brilliantova opened her own practice some time ago, and before that she worked at Studio 44, and I must say, the school's handwriting is felt: the desire for stereometry, playing with a laconic and large form on the verge of a puzzle, and equally tough, confident prototypes and meanings without a hint of stylization. What can I say, a worthy continuation and development.
