"A. Len" designs a lot for the regions, but Voronezh is developing the most consistent history. With the VDK company, the St. Petersburg bureau has already implemented two complexes - the residential complex "Five capitals" and the residential complex "Russian Avangard", on the approach "Bunin" and the club house "Grand Prix", several projects are under development, there are ambitions for development social infrastructure with the involvement of foreign planners. The inspirer of the process is the developer Evgeny Khamin, whom Sergey Oreshkin describes as a passionate person who wants to change his city.
Evgeny Khamin came up with the idea to dedicate the future complex to Ivan Bunin, who was born in Voronezh. The first plastic idea was born from a simple rectangular site located at the entrance to the city from the Moscow side and surrounded by apple orchards, and the literary associations of the “Silver Age” listed by the client: stacks of books, a mahogany table, a green lamp,”says the architect. The first sketches of Sergei Oreshkin were approved, and later many of the ideas expressed were developed, "sprouted" in the final project.
Then the client invited the Dutch KCAP Architects & Planners to work. A. Len already has experience of working with this bureau, which in Russia, we note, is best known for its work on the master plan for Perm, - now, according to a joint project of A. Len, KCAP and Orange company
Residential complex Golden City on the alluvial territories of Vasilievsky Island in St. Petersburg.
Edward Schürmans, partner of KCAP Architects & Planners, says: “We agreed immediately to the invitation of our colleagues from St. Petersburg to work together on a new project - now in Voronezh. Due to a non-standard project task. Non-standard, firstly, because the size of the building adds to the architectural scale of urban planning. Secondly, it was impossible not to accept the challenge to design a dominant building at the entrance to the city. And thirdly, of course, I was intrigued by the idea of using the name and work of Ivan Bunin as the basis for the branding of the project."
After a joint brainstorming session, KCAP made about 15 layouts with a volumetric solution. The whole team, together with the client, gathered in Rotterdam and chose one and only one. When asked how the roles were distributed, Sergei Oreshkin replies that it was “parallel work, ping-pong, a creative process that is difficult to define,” but it is worth remembering that KCAP is more urbanists and planners, and A. Len mainly works with volumes.
So, the shaping is based on the theme of books: shelves, stacks, covers, pages. Hence the combination of vertically and horizontally oriented bodies, displacements, consoles, height differences from 9 to 26 floors, a combination of "hard" materials with softer ones.
"Stacks" at the edges of the complex are accent towers, another "stack" is located in the center, where the road will be laid. Due to different materials in the facade decoration, the vertical cases are divided into several narrow “volumes”. "Pages" are decorated with light plaster, "roots" and "covers" - natural stone, ceramic tiles, metal.
There are also "dust jackets" - colored inserts with pixel fragments of Boris Kustodiev's picture "Apple Orchard". It was easy to go into naive "painting" of facades, but it is difficult to balance such a number of colors and materials,”admits Sergey Oreshkin. But "Bunin" once again confirms the interest in non-standard colors, inherent, in particular, of the architects "A. Len" - they used a similar technique in the RC "Russian Avant-garde".
Thanks to indents and offsets, looking at the negative space is no less interesting than the hulls themselves - stepped arches and portals look impressive because of the scale, and the details add intimacy and drama: KCAP, for example, draw huge lanterns in their sketches, which can take the thought away as to lampshade above the table in the estate, and to the arches
Petersburg apartment buildings with the first electric lamps.
A variety of volumes and colors are united by the stylobate, which, according to the concept, embodies a "desk". The site is quite narrow, buildings occupy its entire width, forming a chain, but the complex ultimately strays far from the feeling of a “solid wall”.
Due to its complex shape, the complex received non-standard residential sections and a wide variety of layouts. For about 10 years, A. Len has been developing the Ideal Apartments program: the bureau's specialists study Russian, foreign and - especially, according to Sergei Oreshkin - Soviet layouts, choose the best ones, and refine them with an eye to the modern market. It turns out a voluminous catalog with effective ergonomic layouts - there are about 1300 options, among them there are experimental ones, like a Marseille unit or multi-level apartments, which were developed by the Construction Committee of the RSFSR section under the leadership of Moisei Ginzburg. The success of the method is confirmed by the fact that usually the developer's marketing departments agree on plans for no more than two days, - says the architect. The Ideal Apartments program is patented.
In the residential complex "Bunin" 1438 apartments are planned, among which there are unusually many corner and end, two and even three-sided. There are apartments of the typology "office-apartments", designed for those who dream of going to work "in slippers".
Among other things, landscaping works for the "Buninsky" image, which, not least due to the peculiarities of the site, was also designed to be rich. A city park will appear on the side of Moskovsky Prospekt, which will support the commercial areas of the first floor. The architects define the mood of this space as "Levitanian": the existing pine alley will be supplemented with sculptures and installations, preserving its natural naturalness. Behind the complex there is a Kustodievsky garden with playgrounds and sports grounds, brighter, more energetic and less pensive. According to Sergei Oreshkin, the improvement in Voronezh "gives a head start to St. Petersburg, not only because of the climate, but also in the quality of performance." Therefore, the authors decided to strengthen the "fifth facade" of the complex: it is planned to plant greenery on the roofs overlooking the windows of the buildings.
Edward Schürmans emphasizes: “In our opinion, in order for the project at the entrance to the city to become a landmark, it must be solved as a single ensemble, but at the same time a humane environment must be created at street level. It was a difficult period of work on different scales at the same time - over the silhouette of the entire development and over the facades of individual buildings. The first floor facades became a special focus. They will determine the quality of the pedestrian environment along the commercial front, where the entrances to residential buildings are integrated. And, of course, an important component of the work was the creation of an interface between buildings and open space: how commerce adjoins a new square from the side of Moskovsky Prospekt, like a courtyard on the other side of the ensemble opens up to apple orchards”.
Among other things, in the future, "Bunin" may become part of a circular ecological route: the city plans to unite a large number of green areas by a path - an arboretum, a botanical garden, a central park, natural and archaeological sites on the Voronezh River. ***
It must be admitted that Bunin, books and the green lamp are architecturally difficult topics, if not dangerous. Working with such strong, speaking and, to be honest, well-known prototypes, you risk coming to excessive imagery, excessive verbosity and "literary" - however, looking at the project, you can be convinced that the books are books, they can be easily recognized on the axonometry of the complex as a whole, but the international team managed to achieve the required level of generalization in working with both form and meaning. The houses on the stylobate are less reminiscent of books on the table than the search for modernism of the seventies, and somewhere they find echoes with the pattern of large volumes characteristic of Dutch architecture of the 21st century, with the language of cyclopean protrusions and depressions, sometimes reminiscent of the Critomicene origins of European culture. So, apparently, the circumstances came together, the theme successfully coincided with the architects' own views on the possibility of revitalizing a large form, and the pixel shadows - either reflections of Voronezh pines, or a reminder of the "Dark Alleys" - turned out to be in the right place, in due measure recognizable, but they are not mimetic.
In addition, it is important that the "literary" house, the name and imagery of which interprets the history of the city, can be considered a contribution to the branding of Voronezh, based on an appeal to its own history - this is not Chateau de Val on the Central Russian Upland, but a dear and beloved writer, even if and is buried at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois. The house named after Ivan Bunin, a writer in the image of a “Russian master” who was born here but died in France, is being designed in Voronezh by Russian and Dutch architects, but, unlike the writer's fate, the collision is not at all dramatic, since it belongs to the newest, reconciling international time and is based on the search for the particular in general: literary history becomes a clue for the emergence of fresh modern forms.
