City In The Suburbs

2024 Author: David Durham | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 02:26

ЖК «Новокрасково». Вид сверху © АБ Остоженка

About the project of the residential complex "Novokraskovo" we have already

told: it consists of four large blocks on the Yegoryevskoe highway, 15 kilometers from the Moscow Ring Road to the east of Lyubertsy. This is a dacha place, the notorious Malakhovka is nearby, but the village is now being built up with high-rise buildings - and the work of the Ostozhenka architects has become the first example of author's architecture here. Kraskovo is famous for its quarries: they, one of the results of the work of the Korenevsky plant of building materials (founded in 1930, like Malakhovka), were flooded and turned into lakes.

The residential complex occupied the territory of a former military unit between the highway, Chekhov Street and the Novokraskovsky quarry: it seems to be dangerous to swim in it, but there is still a small beach on the opposite bank. Until recently, this place looked

abandoned: slanted trees behind the painfully familiar PO-2 concrete fence.

Now it has become completely urban - in front of the terracotta-brick facades at the crossroads, thanks to a slight bevel-turn of the corner building, a Y-shaped square has been formed: thanks to the spatial pause, the intersection of roads has become more meaningful. Even the greenery around it seemed to "tighten" and began to look almost like a park. Only the laconic volume of the sales office, saluting passing cars from the square, tells us that this was not always the case. According to the project, the office should be replaced by a sculpture with a clock - a clear indication of the urban significance of the square.

ЖК «Новокрасково». Генеральный план © АБ Остоженка

Now two out of four blocks have been built - the first and second stages, houses from the first to the fourth.

ЖК «Новокрасково». Вид от площади © АБ Остоженка

But, on the one hand, they are more voluminous than the other two, the construction of which begins to the north on the bank of the pond, and on the other hand, they are the most representative. It is these quarters that represent the complex to the city, and I must say that already now, at least for passing cars, it looks like a completed and completed object.

The bending of the facade in front of the square, albeit small on the scale of the entire complex, turns out to be an important technique: the "stroke of the pen", very delicate and restrained, reveals the plasticity of the bend in the volumes and, from some angles, the sharpness of the angular "nose", which takes on the role of the main facade of the whole complex. Therefore, the high first floor is completely glazed and deepened - the volumetric cutout is sufficient to feel the effect of the house's mass hanging over the transparent first floor.

ЖК «Новокрасково». Общий вид с Егорьевского шоссе из области © АБ Остоженка

All the first floors of the outer contour are given over to cafes, shops and public spaces; in one of the sections there is a children's clinic, which is already in demand by residents of the surrounding area. But the first floors are resolved in different ways: the theme of the modernist tape continues somewhere, somewhere comes to naught, losing height. Along the Yegoryevskoye Highway, the tape of the first floors is interrupted by three groups of pylons, capturing two floors upwards - "porticos" at the base of the volumes-towers.

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1/4 residential complex "Novokraskovo". View of the courtyard of the first quarter © Novokraskovo residential complex © AB Ostozhenka
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2/4 RC "Novokraskovo". View of the courtyard of the second quarter © AB Ostozhenka
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3/4 residential complex "Novokraskovo". View from the Yegoryevskoe highway to the first quarter © AB Ostozhenka
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4/4 RC "Novokraskovo". Fragment of the facade © AB Ostozhenka

The arrangement of the lower floors from the side of the courtyards is even more interesting: many galleries have been formed here, now on one-story, then on two-story supports. They allow you to treat yards closed to cars as internal mini-squares. The pillars are mostly white, the walls of the galleries behind them are color-coded: orange-red, cadmium-yellow - the colors are assigned to the buildings and also appear in the “arches” leading to the courtyards, lift halls with wheelchairs, floor corridors. Color casts off reflections and lends intrigue to the depths of the galleries. The architects actively used this effect in the Aquareli complex, located relatively close, in Balashikha, and completed six years earlier. With him, as well as with many other houses of "Ostozhenka", the complex structure of volumes echoes, combining "beams" with "towers" and replete with cutouts, which turn out to be a simultaneous forced measure, the result of the search for optimal insolation, but also an artistic technique that enriches plastic and silhouette. The love for white color, which easily reflects color and sunny color, seems to be related to "Aquarelle". In this case, the architects opted for white plaster, both for reasons of economy and imagery.

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1/4 residential complex "Novokraskovo". View of the courtyard of the first quarter © AB Ostozhenka
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2/4 RC "Novokraskovo". View of the building of the first quarter © AB Ostozhenka
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3/4 residential complex "Novokraskovo". Fragment of the facade © AB Ostozhenka
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4/4 RC "Novokraskovo". View of the building of the second quarter © AB Ostozhenka

However, with the listed similarities, the complexes are very different. For Novokraskovo, the theme of a fortified house, a kind of silhouette outline of an Italian castello, is much stronger - which is greatly facilitated by the brick facades and elevations of the towers on the outside, especially those three along the highway, at the base of which the pylons of the "porticos" appear. Although the matter does not go further than a contour hint: the image of the “city in general,” a certain complex, uneven-height and multi-tone structure, is no less important. White color mainly belongs to courtyards, but it also appears on the external facades, the brick "goes" inside, resembling a puzzle of complexly interconnected multi-colored and multi-textured parts or a snow iceberg thawing inside a brown "crust".

The sculptural image is dictated not least by the requirements of insolation, - the authors of the project explain, - but reinforced by "the release of white plaster fragments into the outer perimeter and vice versa - brick into the courtyards" - in order to avoid long facades of equal height around the perimeter of the complex.

“Both of these materials are natural,“warm”, undoubtedly“living”, - explain the architects, - and at the level of sensations, with a clear external difference, they are perceived as homogeneous and complement each other well. In line with this decision, dictated, not least of all, by economic considerations, the choice of the color of bricks and plaster was made and the facade surfaces were dismantled."

But the matter is not limited to this: different materials of the facades, depending on the location, receive a different rhythm of alternation of vertical and horizontal windows. On brick facades, it is strictly checkerboard, with narrow windows forming pairs, similar to eyes above the wide-open mouth of a horizontal window. In courtyards, rows of windows become more mobile and fold into intermittent ribbons. On the white ends, strict diagonal compositions of small openings appear, vaguely reminiscent of the grid of the facades of the Melnikov house. The boxes for air conditioners also maintain a strictly diagonal rhythm - on the external facades they are painted to match the walls and merge with both brick and white colors. Inside the courtyards, the boxes serve as a color-coding element. They are painted at the factory, and the selected metal with round holes helps the "balconies" to bear the required decorative load. In combination with the colored slopes and the pure white of the wall, everything looks fresh and very clean. Loggias, on the outer facades disguised as "wall", in the courtyards become glass bay windows, get a slight twist and their share of color.

Of course, the complex silhouette of the complex is determined by the balance of the areas required according to the TOR, the required insolation, altitude restrictions and urban planning logic. Therefore, the corner building facing the crossroads and the square is seven-story. It serves as a transitional link to the surrounding development, consisting of houses two to three stories behind the trees - and provides a comfortable urban scale. Further, in both directions, the volumes increase to a maximum of 17 floors. I must say that on the other side of Chekhov Street (aka Korenevskoe Highway) on the territory of the Research Institute of Construction, Vyacheslav Bogachkin's bureau designed a residential complex of the same height, so that in the process of designing the architects of Ostozhenka responded not only to the existing building, but also to this neighboring one. project; however, whether it will be built is still unknown.

One of the important themes of the project is the system of green spaces that permeate the entire neighborhood. Rows of new, still small, trees separate the complex from the highway and street, and surround it along the contour. A cruciform intersection of two boulevards is planned inside. On the one hand, they serve as internal automobile arteries, on the other, they are connected by pedestrian links with comfortable courtyards closed for cars and with the bank of the quarry. The school and elevated multi-level parking lots are currently in doubt, since their construction is planned on fill soil, and local residents are protesting against backfilling part of the quarry. Meanwhile, the construction of a kindergarten, located closer to the residential buildings, has begun.

Despite the rather complex composition of the volumes, the architects managed to avoid sharp corners in the planning solutions and obtain the necessary flat design - from small studios to spacious three-room apartments. Loggias are located behind almost all curved surfaces, allowing you to solve the problem of the correctness of the shapes of the rooms themselves, some apartments on the first, second and third floors are enlarged in order to get the required amount of light. Above, the architects unified the layouts, taking into account the economy class of the project. The corridors are quite long in places, they combine 7-8 small apartments, which is necessary for an economical layout.

The architects of Ostozhenka have long developed their own methods of creative and productive work with large residential complexes: they invariably turn out - yes, large, but recognizable, author's and interesting. At the concept stage, a variant of the tower development of the microdistrict was considered, but the result was perimeter quarters with a picturesque silhouette formed by rhythmically located tower-like volumes. The complex has become one of the logically verified versions of the idea that JSB Ostozhenka has been promoting for many years - perhaps from the very foundation of the bureau - and which is so relevant in our time. In fact, this new microdistrict is a small city itself, setting new standards of spatial organization for the now actively growing village, previously a dacha-industrial one.