Alexei Ginzburg, known for his own modernist projects and thoughtful restoration of avant-garde monuments, including Izvestia by his great-grandfather Boris Barkhin and the House of Narkomfin, the grandfather of Moses Ginzburg, designed two resort ensembles in Gelendzhik. One is called Gelendzhik-Marina and is made in a generalized traditional Mediterranean style, which was the customer's request. It will be built, albeit without designer supervision. Another project, a resort complex on Kirov Street - clean, white, modernist, structuralist, alas, will remain on paper.
Both projects, according to the author, were a reaction to the character of the city with an attempt to improve it. In itself, the typology of southern seaside architecture stems from the nature of the climate. Houses should be protected from the sun and well ventilated, which means they should have deep loggias or terraces and anti-sun slats; in the south, there is more complex seismicity, therefore, as a rule, these are buildings of simple volumes with expansion joints. But, despite the similarity in typology, each southern city has its own face. Regarding Gelendzhik, it was necessary to understand what this person is and how to react to him. Although a settlement on this site existed both in ancient and Byzantine times, and then there was a Genoese colony and the Ottoman Empire, all traces of history were destroyed during the Second World War. But there is a natural originality. Alexey Ginzburg characterizes Gelendzhik as one of two cities on the flat Black Sea coast that have a bay (the second is Novorossiysk). The semicircle of the bay between the Tolstoy and Tonky capes forms an embankment, which has been developed in recent years into a kind of Black Sea Las Vegas. In terms of architecture, the city has a rather chaotic layout, from which the remnants of regularity disappear with distance from the sea. Gelendzhik mainly consists of private buildings - old small dachas and new three-storey cottages, rented out in season to holidaymakers and placed haphazardly relative to the red line of the street. Plus the Soviet and post-Soviet panel and brick, and a few examples of resort architecture. The only thing that ennobles this vinaigrette is the pine trees along the streets, which create shade for pedestrians.
Alexey Ginzburg's task was to build resort ensembles into this chaotic environment and, if possible, improve it, create a little more regularity. The white modernist project on Kirov Street arose like this: the customer received the territory of an abandoned stadium, located near the sea, as compensation for having built another stadium in a denser residential area.
On the shape of this stadium, Alexey Ginzburg imposes a hotel and apartments connected into a single structure, located along the perimeter of the stadium, as it were in the place of the stands. Inside, a closed territory is formed, the "arena" is a courtyard only for residents of the complex, which is thus closed from pedestrian and motor resort streams.
“The plan of the old city and the new project are superimposed on the palimpsest principle,” says the architect. "It's a single, but fractal structure." The structure is a connection of similar cells located at an offset. Each of them is a parallelepiped, but they make up something similar to picturesque natural objects: rocks or a canyon.
This combination of regularity and freedom is very promising for the future. Because between the cells, ledges are formed, where terraces can be placed on which a person will feel protected. Yes, and for the eye, such a structure is perceived more easily than a monolithic one. At the same time, the facade reflects the internal structure of the building, in which the influence of structuralism is noticeable. In the 1970s, structuralism was an important trend in architecture that did not exhaust its potential. The folding of structures on the basis of a single element is a completely legitimate formal technique.
Most of the parallelepipeds open with a glass wall to the sea - and inside they have a long, narrow studio layout adjusted for a resort type of housing. Closest to the facade is a loggia, further in order are the living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, hallway.
There is a lot of light in such long spaces, and the ratio of sun and shade is exactly what is required for the south. These long studios are successive to the living quarters of Moisey Ginzburg's Narkomfin House, although there is no level difference between the rooms, as in an avant-garde architectural monument. But on the scale of the entire ensemble, there is a relief difference, so there is a parking lot in the basement, and a spa with a swimming pool in a separate drop-shaped low building. From the stylobate floor, you can go down to ground level. A garden was supposed to be on the roof of the hotel.
In contrast to the clean, white project on Kirov Street, the Gelendzhik-Marina quarter on Tonky Mysu is the result of a compromise with the customer, whose requirements included tiled roofs and arches. The architect proposed arches in the spirit of the Toyo-Ito library, where classical forms are given in a strict and generalized concrete version with no frills. The complex is divided into two parts: a chain of apartment buildings and a hotel building fanned out along the road. The response to the demand for dense development on the part of the investor was five-story houses of various types, lined up in rows according to the principle of the Roman legion, consisting of several maniples: four intermittent chains are located so that the sea opens in the gap between the houses, respectively, from the windows of each next row of houses the sea is also it is seen.
The houses are facing the sea with terraces and loggias. Several public spaces are planned in the quarter: an embankment, which can be entered from the quarter and from the city, and a park with a playground separated from the noisy embankment by houses. The quarter has its own marina and beach. There is no city embankment on Tonky Cape, the recreational spaces of the quarter compensate for its absence, they are partially accessible to the public. When leaving the hotel territory, a common area was formed, plus a promenade with a beginning and an end was built. The common underground parking cleared the area of cars. The landscaping has features of both a classical city (a street with facades) and a modernist one (houses in a meadow).
Actually, both projects are built on the principle of fractals. A fractal is a self-free set, that is, a certain structure, a part of which is arranged in the same way as the whole. There are many such forms in nature - the crown of a tree, for example, or a snowflake - everything that branches. By the way, Malevich's architecton is structured like a fractal: a large architecton consists of architects like him, gradually decreasing towards the top of the building: a repetition of a three-dimensional three-dimensional pattern on a small scale. In the "classical" Gelendzhik-Marina, a large structure is divided into chains of buildings with voids between them, the buildings themselves are also divided into horizontal tiers and vertical "risalits" with voids between them, and the risalits also consist of arches and openings, that is, voids alternating with "Flesh." Such a structure is perceived by the eye as natural and comprehensible to a person. It is much easier to read than a huge plate or tower. In fact, it looks like a city of small two-three-storey houses on the relief. This is a good means of humanizing the environment.
The resort ensemble on Kirov Street is a purer crystalline structure (because there are no anthropomorphic pitched tiled roofs and arches), nothing "too human", but there are more eternal structures of the natural world, like crystals (which are also one of the types of fractals). To me, such structures seem very promising for architecture because they essentially imitate a traditional city that develops naturally, say, molded on the side of a mountain - and it's almost always beautiful. For some reason, our Soviet and post-Soviet IZHS do not have a structure and look garbage. And seaside Italian towns or old Russian towns look good. This is an insoluble mystery. In any case, it's nice that modern architecture, represented by Alexei Ginzburg, works with these fractal forms that are natural for nature, city and man, much more humane than purely machine mega-structures.
