The Vitality residential complex is located behind the front of Stalinist houses along Sharikopodshipnikovskaya Street and consists of two 15-16-storey buildings: one of them repeats the building line along the boulevard, the other is deployed at right angles to 1st Mashinostroeniya Street. The composition came from the original L-shaped volume-book, which the architects divided into two independent buildings. To close the courtyard area, a pavilion with a noise shield has also appeared along the 1st Mashinostroeniya Street. So, in the row of quarterly buildings of the middle of the XX century, the vacant place was taken by another similar "cell", in which the courtyard and the street front are clearly distinguished.
However, the relationship with the surrounding buildings is limited to this. New houses “do not hide” the modern language, demonstrate a fundamentally different scale and structure of facades. The ratio of the wall mass to the glazing is rather modernist, the glass is larger, the lintels are thin. On the other hand, ADM chooses clinker brick as the main facade material and does not spare it in volumetric plastic elements - in particular, triangular pylons of the "red" body. And this materiality is recognizable by its nature, Moscow.
The solution of both cases is based on the favorite ADM technique of a plastically articulated modular grid.
“These houses have shadows, they are not flat. In this "class" of housing, today we can afford several levels of plastic. Indeed, today the quality of architecture, including at the level of details, is becoming an important component of the so-called “product”. That is, a set of characteristics of an object that determine the class of the object and allow it to be successfully positioned in the market."
On the two buildings, the grid differs in scale and solution.
In the "white" building, wide windows are separated by wave-like interruptions: they form a kind of "wicker basket", emphasizing the horizontal line, in tune with and parallel to the flow of the street. The complicated geometry of the belts is enlivened by the different direction of the brick layout and the inhomogeneity of its light yellow hue, which, of course, can only be fully appreciated after the construction of the building. The ivory tone is complemented by the bronze color of the lattices, which with an openwork border emphasize all the horizontal lines of the "weaving".
Apartments are located on the ground floor of the "white" house, since it is located in the depths of the plot. Only they have balconies-terraces, the purpose of which is to avoid the effect of "looking through the windows". “Using the balconies on the first floor, we create a“buffer zone”: the floor of the apartment is raised relative to the ground, the person inside is separated by the depth of this terrace, neither you see him, nor he you,” explains Andrey Romanov. "This enhances privacy and serves as a kind of compensation for residents, since apartments on the first floors are usually less in demand."
In the red building, whose end faces the line of the street, the first floors, on the contrary, are public, and the glass without a base reaches the ground. Its first tier also houses the parking entrance ramp.
The red body is contrasted in relation to its neighbor: it is not only turned across the street and resolutely "stops" the smooth longitudinal movement of the white body - the vertical is emphasized in every possible way. The walls between the "French" double-leaf windows are interpreted as triangular "buttresses", resolutely stitching the strips of interfloor ceilings. Sharp edges are bifurcated, drawn with a thin deepening of the inverse triangle - both Chicago experiences and Northern European red-brick Gothic come to mind.
And at the same time, the building quite clearly echoes the now popular theme of Moscow industrial development at the turn of the 20th and 19th centuries; Moreover, the fact that the grid of the neighboring white building looks like a basket makes one think about the notorious "link between city and village" and, in general, about the complicated history of the city of Moscow, which in several periods grew from a "big village" into an industrial center, and even now experiencing serious transformations. The red and white house is like a post-industrial response to Moscow history.
This is how a paradox arises: the red body, on one side, is traditionally Moscow in color and at the same time assembled, European in shape. And white, on the contrary, is “relaxed” in Moscow, fluid, and at the same time modernist, lamellar, light and horizontal. But all allusions will, perhaps, be only partially correct - it is only important that different qualities are given by a generalized hint, the authors touch on string ideas without focusing on any leitmotif: urban and rural, Moscow and European, conservative and modernist are intertwined, as, in fact, in the city of Moscow itself. Which is interesting, because between the two, in general, similar in size and parameters of the plates, a lively dialogue arises, built on color, graphics and plastic, but rooted in context.
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zooming 1/3 Clubhouse Vitality © ADM
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zooming 2/3 Clubhouse Vitality © ADM
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zooming 3/3 Clubhouse Vitality © ADM
So, bulky plastic, both wavy and ribbed, is very important for both cases. As well as the texture of the brick - and the brick here is full-bodied, not tiles. “If you make a mesh, the material must be very good,” emphasizes Andrei Romanov. So, especially for this project, the architects, together with the German manufacturer of clinker, have developed their own mixture of shades. According to the head of the bureau, working with bricks was especially interesting, it took place directly in German production, where, together with the developer, the authors laid out and analyzed prototypes. And "in order to save on the subsystem", the facades were planned in such a way that the brick walls rest on the floor slabs. This makes it easier to carry the brick mass and makes the relief plastic of the facade more structurally reliable. In the photographs of houses under construction, the contours of the interfloor slabs cast in concrete with characteristic protrusions designed to support the relief of the facades are clearly visible.
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zooming 1/7 Vitality Clubhouse: construction, 2020 Photo: Larus Capital
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zooming 2/7 Vitality Clubhouse: construction, 2020 Photo: Larus Capital
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zooming 3/7 Vitality Clubhouse: construction, 2020 Photo: Larus Capital
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zooming 4/7 Vitality Clubhouse: construction, 2020 Photo: Larus Capital
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zooming 5/7 Clubhouse Vitality: construction, 2020 Photo © ADM
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zooming 6/7 Facade. Clubhouse Vitality © ADM
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zooming 7/7 Facade. Clubhouse Vitality © ADM
The apartment complex is quite diverse and meets modern standards: from one-room apartments about 40 m2 up to three-room 91 m2 - these are already double-sided, with through ventilation. Starting from two-room apartments, 2 bathrooms are provided. In many cases, a kitchen-living room is supposed, somewhere, especially in two-room apartments - a kitchen with a deep loggia, not too noticeable from the outside.
There are no separate reception desks in the entrance groups of the buildings; they are replaced by a single lobby located in the entrance pavilion. Its architects placed it in the street front, along with technical rooms and a glass noise shield, enclosing a full-fledged green courtyard. For the sake of preserving mature trees on the site, the pavilion is transformed, forming alcoves, "hugging" trunks and crowns.
“The trend of the last five to seven years has been high-quality landscaping of an absolutely European level. Twenty years ago, no one understood this at all, ten years ago, a customer might have thought about facades, but open sales and say nothing about a courtyard without cars and landscaping. And now, if you do not offer these things, no one simply comes to you,”says Andrey Romanov. So, in the Vitality residential complex, the territory of the courtyard rises with a hilly relief, in which two main zones are formed - a recreational and a children's playground. A sufficient amount of soil is poured over the parking lot for planting large-sized vehicles and forming hills. The square pattern of the paving becomes the motif of the courtyard that unites the space.
