The Sputnik apartment complex, a large high-rise new formation of comfort-class apartments, is being built by the Samolet Group development company on the site of a former sandy quarry between the Moscow Ring Road and Zhivopisnaya Bay, on the border with the Lipovy Les forest park. It is located not far from the banks of the Moskva River, a 10-minute walk from here there is a paid beach, but the area around is "Rublevskaya", in the neighborhood you can find whole thickets of palace-type cottages, which peacefully coexist with large Primkadovsky shopping centers. There are also villages with modern architecture: in the eastern part of the territory of "Sputnik" it borders on the residential complex "Residences Rublevo", built by 2012 by the British PRP Architecture, a little further to the north, right at the foot of the Government of the Moscow Region, designed by Mikhail Khazanov, there is a low the six-story "Rublevo Park" by Alexander Tsimailo and Nikolai Lyashenko.
Meanwhile, large-scale development here is represented by more than one "Sputnik" - in particular, in one and a half kilometers in a straight line, on the peninsula invading the Moscow River, the PIK company is building the residential complex "Myakinino Park". So the context is rich and contrasting, if not motley, which is generally not surprising outside the Moscow Ring Road. And if the urban environment at the pedestrian level around has not yet, let's say, formed, then the views from the 30-storey houses to the floodplain of the Moskva River open up wonderful - in this sense, residents of high-rise buildings are more likely to win. The initial concept for the development of the territory was developed a few years ago by Dutch architects, but then the scale of the proposed development increased to 30-33 floors, and the design of individual sites was distributed by the customers among well-known Moscow bureaus.
The first two parts, each with three towers on the uniting stylobate, have already been built according to the designs of AB "Ostozhenka" and TPO "Reserve"; they are located closer to the Moscow Ring Road, with a distance of 160 meters from the highway. In the central part of the territory of the residential complex, the ATRIUM bureau is designing a school building.
The houses of the next two stages - complexes B3 and A5 - were designed by SK&P architects. The landscaping project was carried out by Ilya Mochalov, and the interiors of public areas were carried out by Haast.
Six towers stretch along Lipovaya Roshcha and form the southwestern border of the residential complex. This is the most advantageous location on the site, next to the forest park. Now the project is being actively implemented, all houses are erected in a monolith and are rapidly covered with fiber cement panels of the facade cladding.
One of the main difficulties in the work was not so much the scale, as a whole, familiar to this area, but the economy of construction and the predetermination of many parameters, the rigidity of the set framework. Here is what the project CEO Alexei Medvedev says:
Alexey Medvedev, AM Sergey Kiselev and Partners
“The typology of the towers, like the apartment design, were predetermined by the marketers in this case - we worked with the given, rather rigid, parameters, up to the size of the window openings. Colored facades were also among the recommendations. Initially more austere and monochrome facades acquired a red-yellow "autumn" range and accents comparable to "sun glare". Flat facades without bay windows were also part of the assignment. In such cramped conditions, however, we tried to comprehend the volumes with a contrasting pattern, to build the rhythm of the facades at the expense of colored spots and baskets for air conditioners. We thought over the structure of the first floors, entrances, double-height spaces, open "to the light".
The extended section B3, the spot of which is completely occupied by two tiers of underground parking, was originally supposed to have three houses, as in the previous phases. SK&P architects have adjusted the volumes, suggesting instead of three towers - four, with almost square bases. Two of them are united by the stylobate volume of the built-in kindergarten, two above the zero mark stand separately. The towers as a whole are almost the same, the architects arranged them in a zigzag pattern in a checkerboard pattern, which helped to avoid the window-to-window look and achieve sufficiently comfortable caesura, to ensure permeability. Note that the laconicism and repetition of the square towers gives the group the grace of simplicity, completed by a 3-meter attic floor that neatly disguises the technical structures, while the 100-meter height of the towers (106 m, 32 floors) makes them moderately slender.
On the lower floors, in addition to the stylobate two-story kindergarten, which splices the foundations of the two western towers of the B3 group, public spaces and shops are planned. The first floors are higher than the residential ones, but in the project their height was planned to be higher, later some of the spaces were built up for the notorious exit of the squares, - says Alexey Medvedev. But the entrance lobbies have retained their visual permeability and two-storey height, they are one of the spectacular elements of the complex, they look like a "combined cell of the table", are designed for perception from the pedestrian level and are good for light.
The facades of all four square towers and the stylobate are subordinated to a white grid: it outlines the volumes, including from above, emphasizing their integrity, but inside it constantly changes the width of the lines, from confidently wide lines that trace houses from bottom to top, to thin colored spots bordering the pixel pattern - asymmetrical, yet gridded and subject to rules. The drawing consists of dark gray, yellow and red spots, no more than one floor in height and no more than one pier wide. Changing width, thickening, thinning and finding support in the protrusions of the air conditioner boxes, they form a rhythm, on the one hand, predictable, on the other - a little trembling, just like autumn leaves in the wind; the color of the inserts perfectly matches the metaphor, while at the same time finding some similarities in the already built towers.
In the attic tier, the pissels turn into wide and bright stripes, folding into a kind of flat "fringe"; as we remember, she disguises the tectages. Black predominates in the volume of the kindergarten, and thin stripes replace the pixel colors, which makes it more collected, even elegant.
The second group - A5 - consists of two towers, and one of them, standing at the outer corner of the complex, is square in plan and resembles four "sisters" from the B3 complex. The plan of the second tower is an elongated trapezoidal one, one of the long walls is beveled and designed in the form of a volumetric "saw" - this SK&P technique was also tested in a building under construction
MainStreet Residential Complex on Ivan Franko Street, it allows apartments to be given many corner bay windows for the sake of natural light and views. The two A5 towers are united by a stylobate with built-in shops, and if you look at them from above, you can see that their contours fit into the outline of a right-angled triangle with a zigzag hypotenuse. Its line is continued by the boulevard square - a landscaped area that unites all six towers.
The towers of the second complex are no longer colorful, monochrome: outer red, trapezoidal gray-black-and-white. The grids of their facades are generally related to the previous ones, but they develop a little more flexibly: for example, the facade of the red tower facing the river has more windows, including corner ones. If the black-and-white house, which marks the inner border of the A5 group of towers, is rather a “wall”, then red becomes a “point”, an angular accent, it is not for nothing that the volume of the stylobate, stretched in depth, is also red; this house completes - or begins to move, as you look at.
The apartment layout in part A5, located closer to the river, is more varied, the area of apartments is on average larger than in B3, says Alexey Medvedev.
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zooming 1/4 Plan of the 1st floor. Complexes B3 and A5 of the residential area "Sputnik" © AM Sergey Kiselev and Partners
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zooming 2/4 Plan of the 3rd floor. Complexes B3 and A5 of the residential area "Sputnik" © AM Sergey Kiselev and Partners
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zooming 3/4 Plan of the 1st floor. Complexes B3 and A5 of the residential area "Sputnik" © AM Sergey Kiselev and Partners
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zooming 4/4 Complexes B3 and A5 of the residential area "Sputnik" © AM Sergey Kiselev and Partners
Thus, the houses that formed the southern, "forest" edge of the complex are built simply and rhythmically. On the one hand, it can be assumed that the laconicism of the solution is explained by the rigid framework in which the authors were placed; on the other hand, it is not so easy, following all the restrictions and wishes, to create something quite convincing and recognizable: not to “slide” into too sweeping variegation because of the request to create a bright solution, but also not to go into monotony, but to set a leitmotif and follow it. Working with such large-scale complexes is usually a challenge for architects. Here we see one of the possible, and quite worthy, answers.
P. S. In 2019, SKiP also developed a project for an office complex for a triangular section in the eastern part of the territory, on the border with Myakininskoye highway. It is higher in number of storeys and demonstrates a version of the monochrome solution, which had to be abandoned in residential towers, but, apparently, will not be implemented.
