The building of the carriage depot of the Kursk railway was built in 1906, removed from the list of monuments and abandoned for a long time. During the time of inactivity, it fell into a deplorable state: it was covered with writing, peeling, littered, the coating is held on props. But the walls are standing - with the exception of the transverse "transept", dismantled somewhere in the second half of the 20th century. The extended building is clearly visible from the Kazakov Street bridge leading from the Gogol Center to the Zemlyanoy Val; but few people notice it, because now the building looks more like a ruin on the outskirts of the Citydel office center and two once profitable, now office buildings built by Nirnzee when he was a young architect. Meanwhile, the route of Citydel employees passes by the depot, taking shortcuts to the metro and to the clubs of Arma - currently somewhat uncomfortable, but still quite busy.
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zooming 1/5 Depot on Kazakova street: state of the art, 2019 Courtesy of T + T architects
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zooming 2/5 Depot on Kazakova street: state of the art, 2019 Courtesy of T + T architects
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zooming 3/5 Depot on Kazakova street: state of the art, 2019 Courtesy of T + T architects
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zooming 4/5 Depot on Kazakova street: state of the art, 2019 Courtesy of T + T architects
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zooming 5/5 Depot on Kazakova street: state of the art, 2019 Courtesy of T + T architects
Actually, this route became the starting point of a project initiated by a neighboring business center in collaboration with several partners. The functional composition is diverse and modern: in addition to pavilions, there is a coworking space, a small office. Plus cafes and restaurants: there are many offices nearby and the existing ones cannot cope, it is likely that new "places to eat" will be in demand.
The route will continue, between Citydel and Depot, but it will be improved. From the side of the Kursk railway station, those walking will be greeted by a small square in front of the southern end of the Depot. Moving further along the building, we pass the main entrance and the ramp - the relief rises - and we come to another square with cafe tables, at the north end of the depot. Here the architects propose to arrange a staircase, along which it will be possible to climb the bridge, which bears the proud name "Kazakovsky overpass" - from it, we remember, one of the best views of the depot opens and people walk along it to the "Arma", but now there are no stairs and passers-by have to go a little further.
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zooming 1/5 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Design site © Т + Т Architects
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zooming 2/5 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Facades © Т + Т Architects
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zooming 3/5 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Landscaping © Т + Т Architects
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zooming 4/5 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Facades 1,2 © Т + Т Architects
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zooming 5/5 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Master plan © Т + Т Architects
The building stretches along the walking route and "accompanies" the walker, offering him a change of impressions. Therefore, the architects emphasized the length of the building: they extended the building to the north, towards Kazakova Street: they proposed to dismantle several small and dilapidated shed-type outbuildings on this side and replace them with a new volume of approximately the same scale, but solid, with laconic facades faced with dark bricks of an elongated format (Petersenkolumba) after the type of plinth used in ancient Rome, with windows to the ground and interspersed with golden bars. The new volume supports the brick theme, but with a modern interpretation, somewhere even playing on the contrast of sensations and juxtaposing the current approach with a historical building, where the brick is terracotta-red and large, typical of the early 20th century, and is subordinated to the arches of windows and rare but important details in the spirit of historicism.
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zooming 1/3 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Perspective view of the new building © T + T Architects
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zooming 2/3 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Facades © Т + Т Architects
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zooming 3/3 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Facades © Т + Т Architects
In the Depot building itself, it is planned to replace the covering, now the roof is supported by props, and to build in roof ridge skylights, about two-thirds of its length: they illuminate the food court and rental cinema halls. The brick is torn out, cleaned, covered with a hydrophobic compound; the roof is covered with black metal, the window frames are also black - everything is the same as in modern reconstruction projects.
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zooming The concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Facades © Т + Т Architects
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zooming The concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Facades © Т + Т Architects
But in addition to the basic and generally predictable techniques, the project is saturated with a number of "chips" - the components of its individual imagery, collected quite tightly here, among other things, with the aim of strengthening its differences from other projects. For example, from the Depot on Lesnaya, - says the explication.
One of the main subjects is a glass "showcase" on an extended facade from the side of the main passing stream. A dilapidated gable has been preserved here, a remnant of a disassembled transverse volume: the architects are dismantling the wall even more, revealing the view of the interior to the width of about two bars, preserving the ruined ends and placing all this, both the gap and the ruin, in a glass casing, as if "museumifying" a splinter, preserving a trace of the building's history as a reminder of its long period of neglect and of the disappeared volume. The romantic installation-ruin is one of the favorite techniques of T + T architects, largely illustrating their approach to historic buildings: the desire to emphasize their age and history of transformations. The architects used a similar approach in the competition project for the redevelopment of the water tower in Shcherbinka: part of the top of the tower was deliberately fragmented to enhance the contrast between the old and the new, or even to more clearly visualize the collision of opposites.
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zooming The concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Perspective view of the main entrance to building 1 © T + T Architects
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zooming The concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Facades © Т + Т Architects
So, the glass volume-showcase will glow in the evenings, and during the day it will demonstrate to passers-by the spaces inside and - a kind of decoration in the spirit of Hubert Robert - a fragment of a ruined wall. But the showcase is not the entrance, the entrance is to the left, marked by the "forehead" of the black metal lowered from the roof, which serves as the background for the title.
The main facade is located at the end, from the southern square, in front of the three-part "basilical" facade of the Depot, which is quite intact. There are stone steps with a cut-in ramp, on the square there are three lines of rails: on one side they "go" under the steps, on the other they break off in the grass, ending in man-made I-beams. The square is separated from the railway by a metal fence imitating concrete PO-2, but also, like the brick wall of the "showcase", deliberately ruined: some of the elements are turned into a lattice, as if formwork. In front of the fence there is a transformable amphitheater made of wooden blocks. On the opposite side, the space is separated from the pedestrian path by a technical booth decorated with elements of a Soviet cast-iron fence made of intersecting circles and a meander. Everything here, as we see, is full of memories and plots that saturate the environment to the limit. The square is separated from the outer space by a brick volume: garbage containers are hidden in it, but the lattice doors are facing outward; inside - a textured brick wall, reminiscent of the new volume of offices in the northern part of the Depot.
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zooming 1/5 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Perspective view of the end of the building 1 © Т + Т Architects
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zooming 2/5 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Landscaping © Т + Т Architects
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zooming 3/5 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Landscaping © Т + Т Architects
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zooming 4/5 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Landscaping © Т + Т Architects
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zooming 5/5 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Landscaping © Т + Т Architects
The second square, in front of Kazakova Street and the staircase planned by the architects, is smaller; from the railway it is covered with a slotted metal fence, the other two borders are the Depot building and the slope under the overpass. It is planned to plant greenery, to build benches into the edge, to arrange tables, artifacts, possibly gas lamps on the square.
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zooming 1/3 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Perspective view of the square from the new building © T + T Architects
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zooming 2/3 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Landscaping © Т + Т Architects
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zooming 3/3 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Landscaping © Т + Т Architects
This gives the building itself attractive features such as a café, coworking space and a movie set that can be used for concerts from time to time. The path along it is also full of impressions and emotions. But in the project, the Depot building acquires another facade - a view from the bridge of Kazakova Street. On this side, the section is crossed diagonally by the power line of the Russian Railways, one support stands in front of the Depot facade, the second wedges into the volume of the northern extension. “Since the supports cannot be removed, we decided to play with them as an artifact,” says Sergei Trukhanov. The northern structure is located in a yellow niche, and since the adjacent corner is cut by a window, in the evening illumination, the number 1 clearly looms, entering into rhythmic resonance with the asymmetrical end of the new building and the symmetrical contour of the historical one.
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zooming 1/3 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Perspective view from st. Kazakova © Т + Т Architects
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zooming 2/3 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Facades © Т + Т Architects
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zooming 3/3 Concept of overhaul of the former carriage depot. Facades 3,4 © T + T Architects
The lattice support niche works like a large signboard and will surely attract attention, indicating that a new interesting place has appeared here, below. Addition of Winzavod, Arma and Artpley in the industrial zone of the Kursk railway station, which in Moscow has been mastered better than many, but, as we can see, it is still not completely finished.
The project of rethinking the abandoned depot on Kurskaya is relatively small, but very attractive and “in trend”: it belongs to the post-industrial society with its theory of small matters, balancing on the verge of improvement, urbanism and reconstruction with preservation. The historical building is compared with the modern one, and both of them "grow" into the urban environment, becoming its active part. All this is not surprising for T + T architects, known for both urban specificity and projects related to the preservation and rethinking of the industrial heritage, the interest in which architects retain constantly, as well as the desire to work at the intersection of specialties and preserve versatility. It must be admitted that the combination of different topics is an important means of revitalizing the city, turning it into a place pleasant for life - through the discovery of completely unsightly-looking “pearls” with social potential.
