A small plot for building a house was formed after the demolition of the Soviet automatic telephone exchange of the 1950s - it was located in a row with the houses along the contour of the Khavsko-Shabolovsky residential area, along Serpukhovsky Val street. The houses in the residential area are known to be turned at 45 degrees relative to the street grid, forming an original system of square and triangular courtyards. But the development around the perimeter was not completed by the architects of ASNOVA, and here in the 1960s ordinary brick eight-story buildings were lined up with their ends to the street, however, preserving the original urban planning idea. ATS stood between them, which prompted Alexei Ginzburg the main compositional move: to integrate into the existing rhythm and altitude along the cornice of the neighbors, and also end up on the boulevard. But since the rhythm of the automatic telephone exchange still knocked out due to the smaller distance to neighboring houses, and the projected house itself is from a completely different era - the author, in his words, decided to make it so that “it would differ slightly from the existing buildings in this row, but at the same time was in some way similar to them."
Despite the absolute value of the Khavsko-Shabolovsky residential area, inspired by the ideas of Nikolai Ladovsky about the role of space in architecture - this is what determined the unusual arrangement of buildings within the quarter - there are no security regulations for the territory. Nevertheless, Aleksey Ginzburg proposed a very sparing, “contextual” solution for the new volume, without making it a dominant and without disturbing the existing structure of the microdistrict, with space freely circulating between buildings. Thus, the modernist building, uncharacteristic for historical Moscow, with a rhythmic arrangement of houses with their ends to the street instead of a single front front, was left unchanged.
The slight increase in height in the depth of the site is caused by the desire of the architect to make the silhouette more active. Aleksey Ginzburg abandoned the widespread reception with a stepped end and terraces in favor of an undulating one, for which he "fought" for a long time. But it was precisely such curved lines that seemed to the authors, in their words, "the most laconic form that could complete the volume of the building, so that it was as simple as the neighboring buildings, but slightly different." In general, the volumetric-spatial solution of the house is restrained and does not stand out from the surroundings either in size, or in color, or in shape.
Trying to emphasize that the house grows organically out of its context, the architects chose the appropriate material - brick. “We didn’t want an urban-planning accent, a bright color explosion to appear in such a clear row, so our house may be a little brighter, warmer than the surrounding houses, but it grows out of the same color that has developed …”, says Alexey Ginzburg … The brick that the architects eventually took for the facades, of course, is not a poor gray-beige, silicate brick from the walls of Soviet buildings, but expensive, Belgian, hand-molded. The so-called "handbrake" slightly differs in tone and creates a feeling of a heterogeneous, living surface, accentuating the tectonics of the wall, especially in the details. “Since we are facing the house with bricks, we are showing tectonics - the way brick would work as a structural material,” explains the architect. - We, of course, understand that the wall is layered, but we still wanted to appeal to the typology of Moscow houses, with thick walls. We made the diagonal slopes of the windows, exaggerating the massiveness, with two rows of masonry under the windows showed the "work" of additional lintels."
Thus, the massive, large and laconic volume inside these thick walls turned out to be elaborated in detail in nuances: the surfaces of the walls are subordinate to the calm vertical rhythm of the faceted pylons, and the brick “bells” that open the windows give the walls a sculptural effect, constantly responding to the movement of the sun's rays; especially good in oblique light is the combination of the delicate but rough texture of the brick with the large planes of the slopes.
Having played on the analogy with the laconic shaping of the constructivist housing estate, Aleksey Ginzburg introduced a related element into the facade plastic - open balconies. Moreover, they were made as fire balconies-settling tanks with a light transparent fencing, which, according to the standards, cannot be glazed and attached to apartments. “Balconies are one of the key features by which a residential building is identified,” says the architect. - But in many houses under construction in Moscow, we are deprived of this opportunity. The very principle of calculating the total floor area and the requirements of commercial development practically level everything into a rectangular lapidary shape, with the maximum area of apartments within the permitted volume. The fact that in this case it was possible to use the balconies legally is a great success - the massive house received a light counterpoint and will be insured against mismatched glazing in the future."
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zooming 1/3 Residential complex "Happiness on Serpukhovka". Section © Ginsburg Architects
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zooming 2/3 Plan. Residential complex "Happiness on Serpukhovka" © Ginsburg Architects
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zooming 3/3 Plan. Residential complex "Happiness on Serpukhovka" © Ginsburg Architects
The inside of the house is more complicated than it might seem from the outside. The building consists of a non-residential part, a block of apartments and a residential part above them, with a rather complex communications system, since each of the functional blocks has its own evacuation system. Considering the small area of development, dictated by the desire to leave a sufficient part of the site for the territory of the yard, the layout of the building turned out to be compact and difficult.
However, outside the house remained intact, and only the entrances hint about the complexly organized filling - each part has its own: to the commercial and non-residential premises of the basement and minus the first floor - from Serpukhovsky Val street, to the residential mezzanine - from the side facade, from the other facade - the entrance to the underground parking, which is hidden under the courtyard. As a result, the first floor turns out to be built atypically for Moscow, from the side of the Serpukhov shaft it is obvious that there is a lower tier, and in the north-western corner, in front of the concierge's eyes, you can go through: the house is not as closed and predictable as usual, and this arouses interest.
The house, on the one hand, is very neatly inscribed in the context - so much so that one can ignore the novelty. In this sense, it is a real ordinary building, it does not recognize a typical modern "LCD" (even if you look at other recent buildings across the road, you can identify a new building by its nuances, by the luster of glass, by a slightly more developed structure of the surface and space of the first floors. delicacy is like a gradual introduction, "undercover work" - but perhaps this is the only way to reconcile modern buildings with historical ones, even if they are an example of early modernism.
