Three towers of the business class residential complex "Sky", which was just commissioned in November 2020, are located in the "very middle" of the prestigious Moscow south-west, between the Michurinsky Prospekt and Ramenki metro stations, 388 meters in a straight line from the Michurinsky Prospect highway and on the border of the green zone, in the bend of the Ramenki river. A 10-minute drive - Moscow State University and several large parks. In short, he is very well located. To the east of the complex, a multifunctional medical center is being built according to the project of another bureau.
The plot - 2.7 hectares at the extreme western corner of the 23rd microdistrict Ramenok, was empty before the start of construction. To the east of it, as part of the Soviet microdistrict, brick five-storey buildings of the late 1950s, panel 12-storey buildings and 14-storey "towers" of the early 1970s alternate. In the center of the microdistrict and a stone's throw from both the new complex and the avenue is the Ramenki pond, which is quite large and surrounded by neat grassy ramparts. The microdistrict is formed and generally quiet, and the river with high overgrown banks, which turns at an angle, outlining the natural natural border from the south- and north-west, creates the feeling of meeting the urban development with some other world, as if Moscow suddenly ends here. On this border, in the corner of the river, the Nebo residential complex was erected. Moscow Yandex. Maps - search for places and addresses, city transport
The new complex, designed and implemented by Vladimir Plotkin and TPO "Reserve", is of a different scale. If you look at it as a whole, it is about 5 times higher than its neighborhood environment. Two towers have 52 floors, the third has 51, the height is 176 meters, which is only 3 meters less than the height restrictions for visual landscape analysis.
“Sky” is a distinct accent, clearly visible from a distance, from the Aminevskoye Highway and Lobachevsky Street, and especially from the flyover of General Dorokhov Avenue, where it rises above the trees, industrial zones not yet mastered by development and the fields of city garages. Hence, its symmetrical composition is read very clearly.
The Southwest, as you know, has long been familiar with high-rise residential construction. Several high-rise complexes are being built nearby within a radius of 1-2 kilometers. However, the Ramenki-23 area itself is filled with residential buildings and, in addition, is fenced off by the river, so it can be assumed that the Nebo residential complex will remain the only dominant here, the flagship. Which is good, because at a sufficiently high altitude (not 250 and not 400, but still almost 200 m), it does not "press" either when viewed from a distance or close - except that it makes you look up. Which, definitely, is the merit of slender proportions, an abundance of glass and white, a thin light grid of facades.
Three residential towers are assembled in a symmetrical composition on an almost square two-tiered stylobate: two are built over the river along the edge of the northwestern facade, the third is placed perpendicular to them along the axis of symmetry of the base. The result is a strict T-shaped composition based on the juxtaposition of such figures, with free space in the center. The solution characteristic of the work of Vladimir Plotkin, whose experiments with the laconic geometry of rotation and mirroring, as well as the arrangement of such figures within the ensemble, are quite well known (for example, through the rotation of such figures, but at an angle not 90 °, but 180 °, solved
composition of the Aeroflot office in Sheremetyevo).
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zooming Residential complex "Sky" Photo © Alexey Naroditsky / provided by TPO "Reserve"
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zooming Building 1-3. Typical floor © TPO "Reserve"
Each of the towers in the plan is not a square, but a rectangle of calm proportions 8/10, with small ledges - "waists" in the center of the narrow sides. The ends are glass, and the extended sides are subject to a white grid of vertical proportions. Lines growing out of the same grid emphasize the risalits of the ends with thin white outlines, which makes the volumes seem to be composed of two plates glued together, "like cookies", with a glass layer.
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zooming Residential complex "Nebo" from the side of Ramenskoye pond Photo © Alexey Naroditsky / provided by TPO "Reserve"
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zooming LCD "Sky" from the street. Lobachevsky Photo © Alexey Naroditsky / provided by TPO "Reserve"
“Lamellar” makes the towers slimmer and emphasizes the length of their volumes, but not only. A small digression is required here: the fact is that if you look at the context of the development of the entire Moscow south-west as a whole, it is easy to notice a sparse, but connected by common approaches, network of accent buildings of Soviet modernism, the seventies and eighties of the XX century. Among them are the Tourist House on Leninsky Prospect, the towers of the architect Yevgeny Rozanov on Vernadsky Prospekt and the buildings of the Moscow State University dormitories in the same place. All of them are high-rise, point, tower; many experiment with two-part lamellar, using the ledge between narrow projections as a thin slender vertical. They pay a lot of attention to stylobates, which sometimes grow out of developed underground structures. Many of them are cruciform in plan and almost all, except perhaps the meridian towers of the Tourist House, echo the diagonal lines of the avenues of the southwest, marking the local expanses as a kind of version of the Voisin plan. These buildings form the modernist backbone of the southwest, points of power, whose energetics did not develop later, and in many respects was even overgrown with chaotically multiplied "mushrooms" (in the terminology of Daria Paramonova) - but it is still felt.
So, many of the properties of the modernist dominants of the south-west of Moscow are captured and interpreted in the towers of the Nebo residential complex. It has already been said about the lamellarity and harmony of the towers, but the arrangement of the wings resembles a cross, with the only difference that in the center of the intersection of the lines there is not volume, but space, and, in addition, the northern "wing of the cross" is absent. The characteristic composition here seems to have been disassembled element by element, while retaining, however, the main approaches and directions, so that the Nebo residential complex becomes another accent of the southwestern network.
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zooming Residential complex "Sky" Photo © Alexey Naroditsky / provided by TPO "Reserve"
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zooming Residential complex "Sky" © TPO "Reserve", GC "Olimproekt"
The gesture thus appears to be contextual on a gigantic scale of several kilometers rather than the nearest hundreds of meters. Although a certain "anchor" is present nearby - a cruciform house of 1980 on Michurinsky Prospect: if viewed from the south, the three towers look like an enlarged version of it, divided in space.
Here you can see that the strictly diagonal orientation of the site and, as a result, of the houses, is supported not only by the line of the avenue and the urban planning grid of the South-West Administrative District, but also by the bend of the Ramenka River, drawn by nature almost along a ruler.
The 45 ° turn to the meridian turned out to be convenient for natural lighting of the apartments: there are no walls facing directly to the north, and the light contour of the towers is used with maximum efficiency. In addition, the arrangement of the buildings in a triangle with a significant space between them excludes a direct view of the window-in-window, which is also correct for a residential complex.
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The apartments are grouped according to a light contour around a powerful staircase and lift core: two staircases, five lifts. The range of offers is varied, up to 4-room apartments, which corresponds to the business class of housing. Ceiling height 3.3 m, on the ground floors 4.5 m. In front of the entrance there is a loggia, behind it there is a double-height lobby with a reception, on the side there is a public area with Wi-Fi.
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zooming 1/4 1st floor. Building 2 © TPO "Reserve", GK "Olympproekt"
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zooming 2/4 Typical floor. Building 2 © TPO "Reserve", GK "Olympproekt"
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zooming 3/4 52 floor. Building 2 © TPO "Reserve", GK "Olympproekt"
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zooming 4/4 Stylobate at -5.42. Residential complex "Sky" © TPO "Reserve", GC "Olimproekt"
But let's turn to the stylobate. It is inscribed in a slope with a height difference of 8 meters from the south-east to the north-west, from the residential area to the river. Therefore, from the side of the microdistrict, the stylobate rises only one and a half meters above the ground level, and you can enter the first parking level from the sides in a straight line, without a ramp. But because the courtyard is elevated, it naturally makes it safe and free of cars.
A steep slope to the river begins from the northwestern edge of the stylobate, that is, the house, when viewed from this side of the river, practically rises out of the slope, like a kind of fort, with two northern towers, whose facades continue the plane of the stylobate. On this side, in two tiers of the stylobate there is a line of office premises stretched along the north-western façade. In front of them in the lower tier there is an extended platform, in the upper tier there is a gallery-balcony, to which open stairs lead. Thus, here, on the back side of the complex, above the river there are not backyards, but a fragment of a business urban space with its own recreational zone, access to the air and even to the open space, since the view of the river and the "semi-industrial half-city" beyond it is not bad in Moscow, here at least a lot of trees.
A short-term kindergarten is built into the lower floors of two towers, the central and the eastern one, developing groups for 75 people. Between the towers there is a kindergarten playground, and the open eastern corner of the stylobate is occupied by a circular structure with an amphitheater oriented to the northeast: a view of the Ramenskiy pond opens from it along the slope.
The roofing of the stylobate, which serves as a private courtyard of houses, is modern, with playgrounds and sports grounds, workout, geoplastics, various plants, including large trees from lindens to pines in special depressions with drainage. You can climb the stylobate by stairs and ramps, along which special equipment also drives into the yard. Along the edges of the ramps and the courtyard, there are white concrete fences, in some places with glass inserts. The shadows of the trees on them are a separate subject for admiring the combination of natural forms and laconic modern design of a new fragment of urban space.
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zooming 1/6 RC "Sky" Photo © Alexey Naroditsky / provided by TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 2/6 RC "Sky" Photo © Alexey Naroditsky / provided by TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 3/6 RC "Sky" Photo © Alexey Naroditsky / courtesy of TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 4/6 RC "Sky" Photo © Alexey Naroditsky / provided by TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 5/6 RC "Sky" Photo © Alexey Naroditsky / provided by TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 6/6 RC "Sky" Photo © Alexey Naroditsky / provided by TPO "Reserve"
The courtyard is zoned both with rows of plants and concrete pylonades, whose very simple design echoes the grid of facades and looks like its logical continuation in space.
The eighteen lower floors in all three towers are combined vertically by two, so that the grid of white lines at the level of a pedestrian, or rather a walking resident, looks uniformly slender and predictable. But above it is stretched with a gradient step, although not that smoothly: nine floors are combined into three groups of three, the next ten into two of five, and finally, the top 15 are solid verticals. Penthouses on the upper floors recede from the edge with terraces, straight grid lines continue without filling, forming a pergola that covers both penthouses and ventilation exits, masking the technical floor and giving the volumes the correct shape. The same lines frame the ends, visually forming, as we saw above, the two-part volumes. As if glass towers of the "Misovsky" type are organized by a thin but rigid lattice, which largely determines their perception, especially from a distance.
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zooming Residential complex "Sky" Photo © Alexey Naroditsky / provided by TPO "Reserve"
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zooming Residential complex "Sky" Photo © Alexey Naroditsky / provided by TPO "Reserve"
The vertically oriented lattice of facades is generally characteristic of Moscow in the last decade; we have already seen many of its variants, both classical and modernist. Vladimir Plotkin's buildings have developed their own laconic version of the grid: usually white or monochrome with occasional splashes of bright color. Let us compare, for example, the facades of the Prefecture of the Troitsky and Novomoskovsky administrative areas, an office building on Krasin Street and two buildings within VTB Arena Park. In this interpretation, the grid helps not only to give the volume a visual harmony, to stretch and "pick up" the mass - but also to clearly position the shape in space, controlling perception at the optical level: the clearly manifested lines of the facade accentuate all vibrations, pauses and turns, "lead" the eye behind themselves and help to read the statement. From time to time, the grid recedes from the volume and forms airy structures: galleries in the first floors and pergolas in the upper ones.
All these techniques work on a common plastic plot in the "Nebo" residential complex. But here, the facade mesh has two features. The first is that it is stretched vertically. The easiest way to explain this is by the effect of perception: if you look from the bottom up, the height of the cells in perspective will decrease and from a certain angle, from the yard, the grid may appear uniform. But if you look at the facades en face, the mesh seems to be stretched from top to bottom, either under the influence of gravity, or as an effect of melting: as if the sun heated the upper floors, and they “floated”, but the cells at the bottom had not melted yet. In addition, the resulting effect, when viewed as a whole, resembles the growth of cells in the central building of the WineHouse LCD.
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zooming Residential complex "Sky" Photo © Alexey Naroditsky / provided by TPO "Reserve"
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zooming Residential complex "Sky" Photo © Alexey Naroditsky / provided by TPO "Reserve"
One way or another, and the stretched grid, on the one hand, contradicts the rules of the classical tectonics of the middle, top and bottom, while the method of vertical unification of windows in itself is more likely to be classified as a classic one (however, perhaps, the belief that the vertical is a classic, horizontal modernism is a matter of habit, because already in the 1970s this statement was repeatedly refuted or at least experimented with this antithesis). On the other hand, the transformation of the facade lattice makes it “not just a cage”, but an instrument of dialogue with the urban environment, or perhaps, given the real estate name of the complex, and “with the sky” - it was impossible not to respond to the neighborhood with such a name and such a height heaven.
The second feature is that the glass surface is formed not only by a grayish stemalite in the interfloor lintels, - a relief white mesh in each cell is outlined by an insert of black glass, similar to a sun's shadow. Moreover, in the through vertical ledges at the ends of the towers, a wide black stripe, similar to a shadow, arises from the niches of the central air conditioning, but from a distance it is perceived as part of the general plot, echoing the “underscores” in the windows, as a “large” shadow with “small” ones. (Here in parentheses it should be noted that the dark glass inserts are translucent and do not reduce the width of the skylight when viewed from the inside; black glass in the windows corresponds to the vents).
The technique could be understood as an illusionistic element of grisaille supergraphics, like stripes that form a hint of vertical niches on the facades of the residential complex"
Chertanovo”2008 - if the black inserts did not alternate in a checkerboard pattern, floor by floor, then on the left, then on the right.
The alternation, especially in some angles, where the "underline" is perceived as part of the relief, creates the impression of a paradox: the tiers seem to "look" in different directions (a similar effect occurs in the 5th building of VTB Arena Park), or they seem to be stitched along the contour with a zigzag stitching, or maybe a little "wiggle", vibrate - approximately like a mirage, especially when viewed from afar. Which, of course, resembles op-art experiments, especially the well-known false zigzag picture.
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zooming 1/4 RC "Sky" Photo © Alexey Naroditsky / courtesy of TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 2/4 RC "Sky" Photo © Alexey Naroditsky / provided by TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 3/4 RC "Sky" Photo © Alexey Naroditsky / courtesy of TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 4/4 RC "Sky" Photo © Alexey Naroditsky / courtesy of TPO "Reserve"
The drawing is not always visible - in direct light it is almost invisible, but in oblique, evening light, it is noticeable well - and the towers, with all the brevity of the solution, look different not only when walking around, more precisely, a detour, but also change depending on the time of day … The zigzag pattern also brings us back to the metaphor of melting: the lines of the facade grid, which at first glance seem straight and very clear, if not harsh, white on dark, but in fact are so straight they are in fact - all of a sudden they start to seem a little zigzag from the perspective, as if an iceberg began to melt. It's a pretty interesting effect, albeit very subtly presented.
Another option for changing the image - at sunset, when the white color “disappears”, the towers also look like Chicago skyscrapers: verticals are clearer, and pergolas turn into “classic” attics.
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zooming Residential complex "Sky" © TPO "Reserve", GC "Olimproekt"
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zooming Residential complex "Sky" © TPO "Reserve", GC "Olimproekt"
The facades are steel and modular, manufactured at the factory, which ensured the quality of workmanship, good fire safety and quick assembly. The solution corresponds to both the height and the business class of the houses.
In the context of modern Moscow construction, the Nebo residential complex is high-rise, higher than the usual 25-35 floors, which have become the norm for large Moscow residential complexes, in particular those that are being built nearby. In terms of height, it gravitates towards the complexes in the zone of influence of the "Big City" - but not a skyscraper. There are also higher. Strictly speaking, the arguments of visual analysis are not very clear, whose limitations are observed here, and why it was impossible to build higher towers, making the emphasis more noticeable. Houses, of course, have become the dominant feature of the neighborhood, but at the same time, they balance on the verge between a skyscraper with steel facades and simply high Moscow buildings. But it is obvious that if the same volume of areas would fit into more stringent altitude restrictions on the same site, it would not work out so effectively. Here, "to the sky", perhaps, managed to reach. As well as integrate into the urban framework of the southwest, outlined by the authors of the seventies.
