Electric Columns

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

The club house "Kutuzovskiy, 12" was built at the beginning of the avenue, if you go from the center - to the right, shortly after the hotel "Ukraine". The red line is held here by two houses flanking the new building: they were built shortly after Stalin's death, at the time of laying this part of the avenue - so they are true to the classical proportions, but have already been affected by the reduction of the facade decor. The elite house, designed and implemented by the architectural bureau Tsimailo and Lyashenko, fills a gap in the structure of the street, but significantly recedes from the red line into the depth of the site, right to the border of the territory of the Badaevsky brewery, which was talked about so much last year. The developer at Badaevskiy and Kutuzovskiy 12 has one developer - Capital Group.

Генеральный план. ЖК «Кутузовский XII» © Цимайло Ляшенко и Партнеры

Главный фасад. ЖК «Кутузовский XII» © Цимайло Ляшенко и Партнеры

The buildings of Kutuzovsky here are generally arranged like this: there are many quarters overlooking the red lines, not that strict and slender, but uniform, and several lacunae, where the buildings recede to the Taras Shevchenko embankment, leaving squares in front of them: one of them is the English school No. 1232, another tower "Bagration", and the third became the club house (the architects also mention the clinic of the Administrative Department, a total of four buildings, but its town-planning significance is somewhat less).

Концепция. ЖК «Кутузовский XII» © Цимайло Ляшенко и Партнеры

Initially, taking into account all the restrictions, a volume of a slightly lower height loomed on the site along Kutuzovsky Prospect, 12, on a par with its 10-storey neighbors, b about Larger width and thickness, that is, somewhat kurguz. The architects "collected" the permitted density into a 13-storey plate and moved it to the farthest edge.

Формообразование. ЖК «Кутузовский XII» © Цимайло Ляшенко и Партнеры

As a result, a view of the tower of the hotel "Ukraine" opened up along the facade.

Клубный дом «Кутузовский, XII» Фотография © Илья Иванов / Цимайло Ляшенко и Партнеры

Thus, when viewed from the avenue, thanks to the perspective distortion, the house is built into a common line, although the square-courdoner with the Lamborghini shop gives it a somewhat palatial appearance: as if there are wings on the sides, but inside, behind the trees, there is a real palace.

In fact, it is. The house looks like a palace at least in the sense that, unlike its neighbors, it is covered not with plaster and not with motley unreliable ceramic tiles - Stalin's palaces, with all their desire, could rarely afford more, but with expensive dense limestone of contextual beige, but a little a cooler hue, which in turn provides a certain degree of aristocratic distance between expensive housing and the old Soviet elite. Note that at some point a dark purple stone was planned.

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1/7 RC "Kutuzovsky XII" Photo © Ilya Ivanov / Tsimailo Lyashenko & Partners
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2/7 RC "Kutuzovsky XII". Project 2016 © Tsimailo Lyashenko and Partners
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3/7 RC "Kutuzovsky XII". Project 2016 © Tsimailo Lyashenko and Partners
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4/7 RC "Kutuzovsky XII". Project 2016 © Tsimailo Lyashenko and Partners
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5/7 RC "Kutuzovsky XII". Project 2016 © Tsimailo Lyashenko and Partners
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6/7 RC "Kutuzovsky XII". Project 2016 © Tsimailo Lyashenko and Partners
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7/7 RC "Kutuzovsky XII". Project 2016 © Tsimailo Lyashenko and Partners

In the side and upper walls, the stone made it possible to create a decorative "frame". Its structure is similar to the weaving of fabric and reminds both of the plasticity of the Kutuzovka reliefs, among which there are, for example, the rich waves of stucco sheaves on building 23, and of the experiences of European Art Deco, often less figurative and more ornamental than the simple-minded sculpture of Stalin's 1940 -x. One way or another, a uniform pattern of triangular protrusions enriches the surface and stops the eye.

But the main feature of the palace is, of course, the columns. The architects, with dignified thoroughness, counted examples of the order manifestation on this side of the avenue right up to the Third Ring, thereby emphasizing that the columns are appropriate as a manifestation of context.

But no matter how you count, there are the most columns in the house of Tsimailo and Lyashenko. No classics covered the house with columns so abundantly. In addition, they are not exactly columns, there are no bases or capitals, not to mention the frieze, and even more so the pediment - rather, they are glass tubes boldly stitching the facade through the protrusions of the interfloor dies from bottom to top. Personally, they reminded me of pneumatic tubes and the naked insides of the Pompidou center, deconstruction and high-tech - the latter is logical in the vicinity of the glass City, clearly visible from the side opposite to the hotel "Ukraine". [UPD: readers suggested an excellent analogy, and maybe even a prototype -

column of Alexei Kozyr, installation at Arch Moscow]

At some point you think - yes, these are not columns. A column, even in the not too truthful tradition of ancient Rome and the Italian Renaissance, is in any case an element of tectonics, it carries something and, as a rule, it is clear what. These do not carry anything, but multiply uncontrollably along the facades, forcing us to assume the intonation of postmodernism in the general design. In principle, they can be understood as a variant of the blades on Art Deco high-rise buildings, only the blades separated from the plane and returned to their original round shape in cross-section.

And at the same time, the series of columns and interfloor friezes are akin to the arcades of the Renaissance courtyards, an internal space by definition. And we see that the house stands inside, in the depths of the block and frames the courtyard-square. But if so, this is a tough version of such a courtyard, projected for the "iron" XXI century.

ЖК «Кутузовский XII» Фотография © Александр Цимайло

The columns are glowing. They cast a pattern of rays of light onto the walls and friezes, clearly dividing all floors and showing the relief of stone ledges. The facade shines to the fullest, with incredible power, I would even say, dedication. The hyperillumination effect is unexpected and quite enchanting.

ЖК «Кутузовский XII» Фотография © Илья Иванов / Цимайло Ляшенко и Партнеры

We, of course, are accustomed to the windows of houses at night and to the illumination, which in recent years, through the efforts of the chief architect of Moscow, has acquired classical priorities in the city, emphasizing the horizontal lines of the cornices and the verticals on the walls even where they are not there. This house does not need illumination, it decides everything for itself: not only creates a regular grid of verticals and horizontals, but also generously “shares” the light with the city. In general, he himself is like a huge lantern. Which makes you think of the "columns" more like light tubes.

And yet they are still columns, since, having lost such primary features as the base and the capital, they have retained a number of secondary ones - first of all, flutes, which are solved here in an interesting way. Inside the column there is a supporting metal tube, around it, star-shaped, with seven rays, bent metal is laid - in the terminology of the authors of the project, a reflector, it forms a backlight, because of it the light is not even, but radiant. He is wearing hoops of gold-colored metal that hold cylinders of curved glass, three per floor. Stripes are applied to the glass, which enhance the effect of flutes and the radiance of light.

It is understandable with flutes, but the gold hoops, which resonate with the golden lattices of the balconies, work not only to indicate the high cost and premium status of the house and look like not only fingers studded with rings.

They also keep the classical idea in our minds, reminiscent of the bronze and iron hoops of fastenings on antique columns. One of the types of architectural jewels in antiquity was a column made of valuable stone - they were given to churches one by one, they, of course, were used to decorate houses, and those who could not assess the proportions of the portico certainly did not remain deaf to the value of the material from which the trunk was made. "Crystal" columns, filled with delight in front of the electric light that has not been lost by our civilization over the past 150 years, are akin to a precious column, only in a new, let's say, light.

The house is three-section, the entrances are from the back, from Badaevsky. Apartments start on the 2nd floor and grow towards the upper floors; most of the apartments are through, but the smallest are fully facing the southern facade, as expected. The house is advertised as changing the attitude towards apartmentography, according to the realtor's website, "it has not apartments, but spaces." There are at least duplex penthouses here and the ability to combine apartments on a floor up to a "family residence" that will take up the entire floor. Prices are about 700,000 rubles per m2²… And, surprisingly these days, it is reported that most of the apartments have already been sold.