Vorobyovskoe shosse, flowing between two rivers and two streets - Kosygin and Berezhkovskaya embankment - continues the traditions of these places: once there were princely estates, after - houses of academicians and scientists. And today those who are looking for a cozy refuge of a respectable “country house” life are settling, in fact, in the center of the metropolis. On the one hand, you have greenery and water all around, and on the other, the main postcard views of Moscow, which Napoleon and Bulgakov's Woland once admired.
The peculiarity of the site where the Vorobyov House residential complex was built, in addition to being located on the very border with the nature reserve and the descent to the Setun River, is that there were legally two sites, and their merger would have forced the project to be postponed for a long time. This partially determined the layout of the complex: on a plot of less area of 0.06 hectares, the most compact of the three, a five-storey building appeared, and on a plot of about 0.8 hectares - two more residential buildings, one with apartments, the other with apartments, 13 and 16 floors high … The union of these three buildings with a permeable canopy-stylobate outlined the plateau of the courtyard and opened it to the green massif and the river, turning the whole complex to face them.
However, the idea of taking a human-scale level of the complex under the visor allowed the architects to make a much more impressive turn of the project - from the level of ordinary multi-storey buildings to housing marked by the aforementioned nobility and aristocratic grace. They are laid down in the proportions and pattern of the location of the prop-propyls; and in a wooden paneling from the inside - where its texture is best perceived by the eye and literally covers it with warmth; and in ideally round "windows" cutting through this casing, which turn out to be either spectacular lamps or frames for trees; and in the very configuration of the visor and the organization of the entrance to the houses: the canopy repeats the contours of the turning circle, onto which the entrances of all three buildings go, and together they form the front entrance, as in expensive hotels. The driver drives up, unloads the passenger and drives off - either away or into the two-level underground parking area. Ground parking is also available, but it is very compact and paid, designed only for a short-term waiting - as near the same hotels or train stations.
Thus, the courtyard is completely free of cars, it is small in area, it is surprisingly rich and varied. The architects deliberately recreated the differences characteristic of the local relief and planted trees in the hills, and in niches that look like giant boulders from above (the authors jokingly call them "Faberge eggs") and paved with granite mosaics painstakingly matched by colors (another small-format, but without a slip triggered noble detail), arranged areas of calm and active recreation, including circular wooden benches - planters for trees and lawn, and a playground with the same streamlined shape as the rest of the niches, with a bright practical rubber coating.
Here, into the courtyard, there is a raised platform with a balustrade and another visor, which has given four apartments on the first floor of a 16-storey building a completely new quality: their residents have their own terraces - you can arrange "country" tea parties. The rest of the first floors are non-residential: there are lobbies, administrative premises, in one of the buildings there is a children's center. And if you look at the complex from the side of the forest and the Setun River, you can see a number of premises for shops that seem to have grown into a hill - and hardly anyone would guess that in this way the architects designed the facade of the underground parking.
In general, depending on the angle of view, more and more layers are revealed. With the same view from above, which is natural for most of the inhabitants of the complex, it is clearly seen that the roof of the stylobate - although it was not possible to make it green, as it was supposed at first, - has become an organic part of the landscape solution and is marked by characteristic mosaic "belts".
We turn 90 degrees and look at the facades: if the shades of granite for the landscape were chosen with such care, then what can we say about them. The materials are, as expected, exceptionally noble and in some way "originally Moscow": white stone, red brick, wood (more precisely, thin ceramic panels imitating it). However, it would be fair to include glass in the list of biasedly selected materials. For example, at the corners of a 16-storey building, from where the most magnificent views open up, the glass is curved, bending to make full-fledged panoramic windows. And they are framed from above and below, again, stone belts: to achieve this, the stone was cut out in a circle. In combination with the cornice, figuratively completing the residential floors, there appears in the appearance of this house something imperceptibly akin to it with the monumental architecture of the houses of academicians on Kosygin Street.
In the lower case, where the stone is generously diluted with bricks, the corner glasses are also difficult - not bent, but without a bridge so that nothing interferes with the view.
But the salt is in how the elements from all these materials are combined with each other. Without exaggeration, ADM can be called geniuses of facade plastics: they manage to make the surface as rich and varied, plastic and dynamic as it seems, only the landscape of some super-modern park can be (although ADM, as we can see, manages to make its mini-model and in the space of an ordinary courtyard). The beat rhythm of solid and glazed surfaces, unexpected inserts from alternative materials, niches and grille screens for air conditioners, a corrugated stone surface - this complex, but seemingly natural layering once again suggests thoughts about, on the one hand, a twisted "nest" with love and care, and on the other - about something that has been formed over the years, absorbing the features and signs of previous generations.
So the advertising slogan of the complex “The best is visible” is about architecture too. Because this is a real attraction for the eye - quite comparable in terms of entertainment, if you look closely, with the canonical panoramas of Moscow from the windows.
