The Olivkovy Dom club residential complex was built in one of the most dynamic districts of Moscow: not far from the intersection of the Leningradskoye Highway with the Third Ring and at the same time, a 10-minute walk from the Belorussky railway station. The plot faces the corner to the bend of Verkhnyaya Street and is surrounded on three sides by the territory of the former Bolshevik confectionery factory, which was turned into a complex of offices and apartments with the Museum of Russian Impressionism five years ago - its reconstruction is still underway, so next to the club house right now disassemble the automatic telephone exchange built in 1989.
However, the new house is separated from the territory of "Bolshevik" not only by a formal border, but also by a difference in heights; from the northwest, its small courtyard is bordered by a retaining wall, and it is quite quiet inside.
On the opposite side in front of the house there is a small pedestrian space.
Originally, the Olive House was designed on a common plot with the Saturday Residences complex as part of the complex, but now it exists as a separate residential complex. Its much larger-scale neighbor, the Subbota residential complex, was implemented by the same customer, Donstroy, they even have a common website, although different authors: the facades of Saturday, focused on the techniques of post-war "Stalinist" architecture with pinnacles, pilasters and a motley layout of beige stone, designed by architects UNK project, "Olive House", the area of which is about 5 times smaller, was designed and fully built, including supervision, by Pavel Andreev's bureau. Between the two houses there is a semi-pedestrian street behind a barrier, a store in one and a kids club in the other "look" at each other, forming an urban space on the sides of a semi-pedestrian passage with a barrier. They look at each other with reflections.
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zooming 1/4 "Olive House" in the center, on the right "Saturday" / AM "GRAN" (Workshop of Pavel Andreev) Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 2/4 RC "Olive House", project © Architectural studio "GRAN" (Workshop of Pavel Andreev)
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zooming 3/4 "Olive House" residential complex, fragment / AM "GRAN" (Workshop of Pavel Andreev) Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 4/4 RC "Olive House" / AM "GRAN" (Workshop of Pavel Andreev) Photo: Archi.ru
The volumetric-spatial composition of two houses, a large and a small one, in general terms has something in common: both are built with "peace", forming the letter P in the plan, both rise to the crowning crossbar. Only "Olive House" is opened to the north-east, towards Leningradsky Prospekt, and "Saturday" to the north-west, towards the club house, the wings of both are stepped down. So between the two houses there is not only a social, in the form of an inner street, but also a plastic connection.
But that's where the similarities end. The Olive House has a less recognizable style; if the house "Saturday" in the sense of allusions is obvious, then it is more difficult for the club house to find analogies. He seems to be responding with some stable plasticity to the multidirectional environment: on the right there is “Stalinist” architecture of different periods, on the left there are several towers of the widespread series II-68-01, they set a strict tone, but at the same time next to the motley ornamental brick style of “Bolshevik” and neo-modern "aluminum can" of the museum. Three directions create a kind of shaped "cyclone", and in the center of the cyclone, as you know, it should be calm. Therefore, the house offers us something on the verge between pre-war American Art Deco, a direction that was not in the country of advice, and could not have been, although historians do not tire of looking for parallels and roll-overs, and some techniques of the architecture of the seventies.
For example, for the attic, composed of lamellar ribs - "flying buttresses" with very distant Gothic roots, analogies can be found both in Art Deco and among modernist experiences.
Both of them were busy looking for a latent classics, a tectonic structure "in a filmed form", without excessive decoration, but with a recognizable and even outward, visually manifested frame. The frame in this case is formed by a large mesh of inter-window walls and inter-floor rods. The modules, combining wide windows in two, are enclosed in frames with a large stepped contour, and the dark stone cut on the front plane of the facade, Norwegian Labrador Antique granite, echoes in color with the metal lintel between the windows, and the stone of the steps between them, on the contrary, is light. with a developed pattern: Brazilian granite Delicatus White. Both stones are polished, which, in a paradoxical way, makes the image not only glamorous in "interior" quality, but also hard, as if it were enclosed in a dark copper net.
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zooming 1/6 RC "Olive House" / AM "GRAN" (Workshop of Pavel Andreev) Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 2/6 RC "Olive House" / AM "GRAN" (Workshop of Pavel Andreev) Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 3/6 RC "Olive House" / AM "GRAN" (Workshop of Pavel Andreev) Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 4/6 RC "Olive House" / AM "GRAN" (Workshop of Pavel Andreev) Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 5/6 RC "Olive House" / AM "GRAN" (Workshop of Pavel Andreev) Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 6/6 RC "Olive House", view from the territory of the factory "Bolshevik" / AM "GRAN" (Workshop of Pavel Andreev) Photo: Archi.ru
At the corners, the house acquires crumbling outlines - if you look at the whole volume from the corner, you get the feeling that it is assembled like a constructor or a puzzle, the frame is inserted into the frame.
All paneled filling follows this logic of a large and laconic structure, and continues in the lobby of the first floor with the only difference that light stone prevails inside and a tree appears.
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zooming 1/4 RC "Olive House", interiors of public areas, project © Architectural studio "GRAN" (Workshop of Pavel Andreev)
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zooming 2/4 RC "Olive House", interiors of public areas, project © Architectural studio "GRAN" (Workshop of Pavel Andreev)
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zooming 3/4 "Olive House" residential complex, interiors of public areas, project © Architectural studio "GRAN" (Workshop of Pavel Andreev)
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zooming 4/4 RC "Olive House", interiors of public areas, project © Architectural studio "GRAN" (Workshop of Pavel Andreev)
The grid of the frame is not uniform, it has a basic step and there are extensions: in groups of loggias, deepened into the body of the building, but reflected on the facade by wide stripes of glass without "perspective portals" of the frames.
Pairs of loggias above the main entrance mark it with a wide strip of horizontal elements: they balance the restrained vertical proportions of the whole and at the same time subtly echo the loggias at the end of the Soviet house opposite. On the other hand, the axial symmetry of the main facade and the entire volume as a whole make it typologically similar to tenement houses of a century ago, and on a more abstract level, the "palace" composition is also read here - it's all about optics, the house is kept on the verge between representative-representative, with classic decorative techniques and a more rigid, in some ways even brutal approach, which is surprisingly combined with the polished stone of the facades.
The northeastern facade is more laconic than others, there is no point in catching light, and on this side the house is closely bordered by the Bolshevik buildings, so that the ends of the walls, covered with lush crowns of several trees reaching up to the 9th floor, are treated as firewalls; there are only two chains of bathroom windows (such bathrooms lit with natural light are one of the advantages of apartment layouts). This side opposite to the street is internal, in this direction the house lowers the height, forming a step in front of penthouses of 8 and 9 floors; their residents receive spacious terraces with wooden pergolas.
The entrance to the two-tier parking lot is to the left of the main entrance, but the entrance is on the diagonally opposite side, so a wide through passage appears in the first tier of the wings; its role is technical, but it allows a glimpse of the courtyard and makes the house less closed and more transparent, since in some way it looks like a traditional arch of the old city. There is a two-level parking lot under the entire small spot of the site.
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zooming 1/3 RC Olive House © Architectural workshop "GRAN" (Workshop of Pavel Andreev)
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zooming 2/3 RC Olive House © Architectural workshop "GRAN" (Workshop of Pavel Andreev)
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zooming 3/3 RC Olive House © Architectural workshop "GRAN" (Workshop of Pavel Andreev)
The volume of the house closes the perspective of Upper Street. If the automatic telephone exchange is dismantled and replaced with something smaller, the Olive House will be clearly visible from Skakovaya, primarily due to the large grid, which here, in a strange place where the street turns, and the houses are placed along, then across, then along diagonals - perhaps necessary. It can be understood as a kind of volumetric-spatial hinge: it draws and puts in order the multidirectional, sometimes even somewhat lopsided urban fabric around itself (by the way, note that the orange benches that united two buildings of the Saturday complex along the street still look as a continuation of the surrounding building chaos). The house seems to find orthogonal hippodamous directions among the bevels and turns. And it seems that he is not assigned the role of a traffic controller here, but he somehow takes it upon himself - for example, if you look from the territory of "Bolshevik", clearly indicates the direction of the street, which is not here yet, but probably it should be.
The above-mentioned combination of art-deco decorative glamor with large-scale plasticity, large and chopped on the verge of brutal, contributes to the complete absence of ornaments, both decorative and order, with the exception of laconic metal gratings and a natural pattern on light granite. The large scale adds an almost industrial energy to the glamorous image of the clubhouse. Which, however, does not harm, but only gives confidence and visual stability.
