Architectural Therapy

In this issue, we are publishing the contest project of renovating city blocks 32, 33, 34, and 35 on the Vernadskogo Avenue by a consortium of OAO “Mosproject” and OOO “Ginsburg Architects”.

Written by:
Lara Kopylova
Translated by:
Anton Mizonov

13 March 2018

News

The pilot site of the Vernadskogo Avenue

Located in the prestigious and expensive Moscow’s southwest, the renovation site of about 125 hectares and consisting of four soviet-era “micro-districts” 32-35, starts at the “Prospect Vernadskogo” metro station and stretches along straddling both sides of the avenue down to the Lobachevskogo Street. The “sphere of influence” of this area includes the green territory of the Moscow State University of Foreign Affairs, the 50th Victory Anniversary Park and the “Udaltsovskie Ponds”. In addition the boundaries of the site also contain the park of the “Southwest” ponds near the affluent of the Samorodinka River.

zooming — Concept of reorganizing City Blocks 32-33 and 34-35 in the area of the Vernadskogo Avenue. Photofixation of the designed construction © Ginsburg Architects + Mosproject

In 1962, this micro-district (consisting of standard I-515 five-story buildings) was built on a windswept field between the village of Nikolskoe and the manor estate of Vorontsovo – the aerial footage shows the city spilling over the boundaries of the “Stalin” city blocks standing on the Marii Ulyanovoi Street (these had been built but two years earlier). Back in those days, the Vernadskogo Avenue was only roughly marked on the city plan, and finished in a dead end; the main thoroughfares of the nation’s capital being the Leninsky Avenue and the Borovskoe Highway that was still functioning back then. Today’s renovation site takes up about a half of the micro-district’s territory the way it was in 1962-1963: back then, six city blocks were built, currently three and a half are being considered for renovation, the two situated behind the Leninsky Avenue having been torn down and rebuilt still under the Mayor Luzhkov.

It must be said at this point that they started adding extra buildings almost as soon as the micro-district was built – these were 12-story houses. The 2000’s and 2010’s saw the appearance of towers standing along the banks of the ponds, a wall of 25-story buildings built along the edge of the park, and a few more houses 20-plus stories high, part of them meant today to accommodate for the first wave of repopulation.

It must also be said that today the panoramas of the area demonstrate a rather vivid contrast between the five-story affairs and the 25-story giants.

The Footprint Magnet

The main distinctive feature of the proposal by Aleksey Ginsburg and Mosproject is the fact that the architects are treating the existing architectural situation with utmost care; at the exhibition, their project was one of the most contextually respectful ones – even if at the expense of sacrificing some flashiness of the presentation. The architects retain the planning layouts and proceed from the outlines of the five-story buildings in order to avoid cutting the trees – according to estimates it will be possible to retain as much as 77% of the existing vegetation on the renovated site.

And the local residents liked that. During the public hearings, one of the local residents, worried by some issues in the projects by other authors (an automobile road running directly beneath her windows, to name but one) described the Aleksey Ginsburg project as being “more therapeutic”, because it provides for the most delicate treatment of the existing situation. And I cannot blame the local residents either because I lived for two years on the Vernadskogo Avenue in the five-story house right behind the “Zvezdny” movie theater. The trees are truly magnificent there, and another proof of that is a record number of bullfinches in winter and cats in summer (the latter would just crawl into my window on the first floor). I even had a drawing by the artist Andrew Yagubsky depicting these bullfinches and cats, made expressly for the purpose of immortalizing this peculiar urban ecosystem.

Nevertheless, the architects’ proposal does not merely boil down to building within the blueprints of the demolished houses – rather, the model that they propose can be called a hybrid one: where two five-story houses used to stand parallel to one another, seven-story houses of a shorter length appear, while between them arises a lintel of the same height that forms a semi-open urban block. The distance between the five-story houses ranged from 45 to 80 meters, the length of the block being from 60 to 90 meters, and the authors “mine” from this permanent module city blocks of different sizes: sometimes they are small, with “classic” (as might be expected for a seven-story house) yards about 50x70 meters, and sometimes they are large, encompassing not two but four five-story buildings, the latter being contextually grouped closer to the Marii Ulyanovoi Street, where “Stalin” layouts with large yards prevail.

On the corners of the city block towers appear, 14 to 18 stories high, which close the contour, although not completely. Thus, in the stead of the open “stitches” of the micro-districts, placed at different angles, the new housing appears, tied to its vectors, but this time of the city block type, yet spaced out with towers. The city blocks interpret the stitches of the five-story houses; the towers follow the “infill” construction, which, as we remember, started here, mostly on the perimeter, back in the 1970’s. The two systems overlap and form a complex form of mutual subjugation: not all of the towers belong to the city blocks at the same time belonging to the stitches running along the streets. Aleksey Ginsburg describes the end solution as “something in the middle” between historical perimeter-type planning and the open modernist type.

Streets, squares, parks, and functions

In the northwest part of the site, along the fragment of the former Borovskoe Highway, the architects built a number of towers that mark exactly the side ends of the former five-story houses. They face the street with their corners, creating (instead of the construction front that you would expect to see here) a zigzag of little triangular parks: two of them stretch northwest as small promenades, and one becomes the main square – it joins a diagonal driveway, through which it will be possible to walk from the metro station to the Moscow State University of Foreign Affairs, bypassing the busy thoroughfares. The other triangular “ledges” also play the role of mini-squares. All of the ledges have arcs or circles marked on them that bear a distant resemblance with the Catherine the Great squares of Tver and are directly resonant with a large arc-shaped “repopulation” house built on the other side of the former Borovskoe Highway.

This way, the former highway is turned into a boulevard with little parks and squares, the main public urban space, lending itself to romantic walks and cafe visits. From its south part, it borders on the narrow park stretching along the Lobachevskogo Street, and this park is in turn continued by a sports boulevard around the residential towers on the Vernadskogo Avenue – here, behind the thin array of the residential buildings, the authors of the project find room for a fitness center. What the whole thing ends up looking like is a peculiar “horseshoe” of green public spaces with different specialization. They are continued by a park spreading around the ponds on the other side of the avenue – the most peaceful place, almost a full-fledged park. However, in order to tie this whole functionally diverse framework into a single system, the architects had to improve the connection between two major parts of this area.

Building Bridges

In order to do that, the architects propose to replace the overland pedestrian crossing in the south part of the avenue with a bridge equipped with elevators – it must serve the purpose of connecting the sports boulevard with the mini-park spreading around the ponds by forming two interconnected loops of pedestrian and bicycle routes.

Solving the problem of the low transparency of the district so far seems unrealistic: too many fences have been built over the last twenty years, and “opening them up” could be quite a chore. At the same time, speaking to the local residents, the authors of the project came to a conclusion that for the elderly people who live here, the opportunity to reach some important places on foot is extremely important. That’s why they accentuated and strengthened all of the available pedestrian connections, adding, of course, driveways around the new houses.

Architecture of Moderation

As for the architecture of this project as such, the authors describe it as “deliberately conditional”; the houses neutrally look like one another, and there isn’t much of fashionable glass, either. The basic height is seven floors, which is the arithmetic average between the five-story buildings and the nearest “Stalin” houses 9-10 stories high – the latter are obviously addressed by the brownish color of the 7-story sections; it also correlates fairly well with the brick Soviet towers. The height of the towers is one third of the infill construction of recent years, which also brings the contrast to a certain average norm. The top parts of the towers are “cut away” by a glass floor; they sport the “above-clouds” white color – a psychological technique meant to make the urban giant look smaller. Underneath all the new buildings, there is a tier of an underground parking garage.

Stages

Part of the contest specifications was the requirement for calculating the period of implementation and the logic of repopulation. Seven repopulation waves are anticipated. The first wave uses the already-built “starting” houses and it will “wash away” the old housing stock in the center of the two halves of the district. The second wave is the five-story houses next to the “Zvezdny” movie theater, the ones next to Clinic 31, and so on. The residents are relocated to the nearest houses in such a way that they do not even have to change the right side of the avenue to the left side and vice versa. We will note here that the housing to be sold is chiefly situated in the separately standing towers distributed all over the area, some closer to the metro station, some farther away from it, but still, in a pretty smooth fashion. Possibly, such division of volumes into migratory and commercial type must simply the task selling the housing stock; according to the plan, the commercial housing towers will be the last to be built.

Therapy as a Principle

The Soviet town planning tradition was notable for its “surgical” approach to designing the urban environment; it was not for nothing that some of its results were aptly called “a set of false teeth”: explosions, incisions, and intrusions. Then, in the 1980’s, this approach was finally discarded, and (theoretically) the interest to context prevailed – the desire to research, respond, reflect, and fit in with the surroundings. This approach is most common in a historic city but here it is applied to a modernist heritage, which feels slightly paradoxical: the footprints of those “standardized” houses that once marched these fields are not immortalized by the tactful architects. Figuratively speaking, instead of a “second surgery”, the architects are proposing the “first therapy” of the space, built only some 55 years ago and now falling into some sort of decay. It is easy to notice that the architecture that arises in this project is essentially a cross between five-story houses and... twenty-five story houses not only in terms of planning but also in terms of their height and volume. It probably claims the part of the perfect connecting tissue because it possesses a number of features of “this” and “that” side, which accounts for its immanent winsome look, not seen at a first glance.

Just as tactfully as they did with the trees and the planning structure of the area, the architects are treating its economic realities and functions, trying not to overburden the project with anything supernatural, expensive, all-to-complex, or even potentially unpopular.

“Everything that we did together with the architects Dmitry Aleksandrov and Aleksey Bavykin as part of the expert group is based on the economic and technical calculations – shares Aleksey Ginsburg – No castles in the air, nothing fancy, just solving specific tasks: to create a public space, to keep intact the trees and the scale of construction, and to connect the two parts of the area through the Vernadskogo Avenue. Our proposal takes into account the opinion of many people living in this area. We talked to these people even before the public hearings were organized. The very fact that these people came to the public hearings and said: “Yes, you built it exactly the way we wanted” is for us a great reward in itself”.

13 March 2018

Headlines now

Object

A New Track

We took a thorough look at D_Station, a railcar repair depot dating back to 1906, recently reconstructed while preserving its century-old industrial structure, upon the project by Sergey Trukhanov and T+T Architects. Though work on the interiors – set to house restaurants and public spaces – is still underway, the building’s exterior already offers plenty to see. Visitors can explore the blend of old and new brickwork, appreciate the architect’s unique interpretation of ruin aesthetics, and enjoy the newly built pedestrian route that connects the Citydel Business Center’s arches to Kazakova Street.

Report

Four Different Surveys

The “Explore the City” competition, organized this year by the Genplan Institute of Moscow, stands out as a pretty unconventional one for the architectural field but aligns perfectly well with the character of urban planning work. The winning project analyzed contemporary residential complexes, combining urban planning insights with a realtor’s perspective to propose a hybrid approach. Other entries explored public centers, motivations for car ownership, and housing vacancy rates. A fifth participant withdrew. Here’s a closer look at the four completed works.

Report

Scheduled Evolution

ASADOV Architects unveiled the EvyCenter pavilion, a microcultural hub for fostering personal growth, organizing workshops, and doing gymnastics. Additionally, this pavilion serves as a prototype for a scalable country house, drawing inspiration from the “Loskutok” project, and constructed from CLT panels in a factory. This marks the beginning of a developer project initiated by the architectural firm (sic!), which is seeking partners to expand both small Evy settlements and even larger Evy cities, which are, according to Andrey Asadov, aimed at fostering the “evolutionary” development of the people who will inhabit them.

Object

The Golden Crown

The concept for a dental clinic in Yekaterinburg, developed by CNTR Studio, revolves around the idea of a “mouth full of gold”: pristine white porcelain stoneware walls are complemented by matte brass details. To avoid an overly literal interpretation, the architects focused on the building’s proportions, skillfully navigating between sunlight requirements and fire safety regulations.

News

Flexibility and Integration

Not long ago, we covered the project for the fourth phase of the ÁLIA residential complex, designed by APEX. Now, we’ve been shown different fence concepts they developed to enclose the complex’s private courtyards, incorporating a variety of public functions. We believe that the sheer fact that the complex’s architects were involved in such a detail as fencing speaks volumes.

Object

A Step Forward

The HIDE residential complex represents a major milestone for ADM architects and their leaders Andrey Romanov and Ekaterina Kuznetsova in their quest for a fresh high-rise aesthetic – one that is flexible and layered, capable of bringing vibrancy to mass and silhouette while shaping form. Over recent years, this approach has become ADM’s “signature style”, with the golden HIDE tower playing a pivotal role in its evolution. Here, we delve into the project’s story, explore the details of the complex’s design, and uncover its core essence.

Object

Gold in the Sands

A new office for a transcontinental company specializing in resource extraction and processing has opened in Dubai. Designed by T+T Architects, masters of creating spaces that are contemporary, diverse, flexible, and original, this project exemplifies their expertise. On the executive floor, a massive brass-clad partition dominates, while layered textures of compressed earth create a contextually resonant backdrop.

Object

Layers and Levels of Flight

This project goes way back – Reserve Union won this architectural competition at the end of 2011, and the building was completed in 2018, so it’s practically “archival”. However, despite being relatively unknown, the building can hardly be considered “dated” and remains a prime example of architectural expression, particularly in the headquarters genre. And it’s especially fitting for an aviation company office. In some ways, it resembles the Aeroflot headquarters at Sheremetyevo but with its own unique identity, following the signature style of Vladimir Plotkin. In this article, we take an in-depth look at the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) headquarters in the Moscow agglomeration town of Zhukovsky, supplemented by recent photographs from Alexey Naroditsky – a shoot that became only recently possible due to the fact that improvements were finally made in the surrounding area.

Object

Light and Shadow

In this article, we delve into the architectural design of the “Chaika” house by DNK ag architects, which was recently completed in 2023 as part of the collection of signature designs at ZILArt. As is well-known, all the buildings in this complex follow a design code, yet each one is distinct. This particular building stands out not only for its whiteness and minimalism but also for the refined use of a limited number of techniques that, together, create what can confidently be called synergy.

View

Casus Novae

A master plan was developed for a large residential area with a name of “DNS City”, but now that its implementation began, the plan has been arbitrarily reformatted and replaced with something that, while similar on the surface, is actually quite different. This is not the first time such a thing happens, but it’s always frustrating. With permission from the author, we are sharing Maria Elkina’s post.

Report

Treasure Hunting

The GAFA bureau, in collaboration with Tegola and Arkhitail, organized an expedition to the island of Kilpola in Karelia as part of Moskomarkhitektura’s “Open City” festival. There, amidst moss and rocks, the students sought answers to questions like: what is the sacred, where does it dwell, and what sustains it? Assisting the participants in this quest were landscape engineer Evgeny Levin, artist Nicholas Roerich, a moose, and the lack of cellular connection. Here’s how the story unfolded.

Object

Depths of the Earth, Streams of Water

In the Malaya Okhta district, the Akzent building, designed by Stepan Liphart, was constructed. It follows a classic tripartite structure, yet it’s what you might call “hand-drawn”: each façade is unique in its form and details, some of which aren’t immediately noticeable. In this article, we explore the context and, together with the architect, delve into how the form was developed.

Object

Fir Tree Dynamics

The “Airports of Region” holding is planning to build an airport in Karachay-Cherkessia, aiming to make the Arkhyz and Dombay resorts more accessible to travelers. The project that won in an invitation-only competition, submitted by Sergey Nikeshkin’s KPLN, blends natural imagery inspired by the shape of a conifer seed, open-air waiting spaces, majestic large trees, and a green roof elevated on needle-like columns. The result is both nature-inspired and WOW.

Object

A Brick Shell

In the process of designing a clubhouse situated among pine trees in a prestigious suburban area near Moscow, the architectural firm “A.Len” did the façade design part. The combination of different types of brick and masonry correlates with the volumetric and plastique solutions, further enhanced by the inclusion of wood-painted fragments and metal “glazing”.

Report

Word Forms

ATRIUM architects love ambitious challenges, and for the firm’s thirtieth anniversary, they boldly play a game of words with an exhibition that dives deep into a self-created vocabulary. They immerse their projects – especially art installations – into this glossary, as if plunging into a current of their own. You feel as if you’re flowing through the veins of pure art, immersed in a universe of vertical cities, educational spaces – of which the architects are true masters – and the cultural codes of various locations. But what truly captivates is the bold statement that Vera Butko and Anton Nadtochy make, both through their work and this exhibition: architecture, above all, is art – the art of working with form and space.

Object

Flexibility and Acuteness of Modernity

Luxurious, fluid, large “kokoshniks” and spiral barrel columns, as if made from colorful chewing gum: there seem to be no other mansion like this in Moscow, designed in the “Neo-Russian-Modern” style. And the “Teremok” on Malaya Kaluzhskaya, previously somewhat obscure, has “come alive with new colors” and gained visibility after its restoration for the office of the “architectural ecosystem” as the architects love to call themselves. It’s evident that Julius Borisov and the architects at UNK put their hearts into finding this new office and bringing it up to date. Let’s delve into the paradoxes of this mansion’s history and its plasticity. Spoiler: two versions of modernity meet here, both balancing on the razor’s edge of “what’s current”.

Interview

Yuri Vissarionov: “A modular house does not belong to the land”

It belongs to space, or to the air... It turns out that 3D printing is more effective when combined with a modular approach: the house is built in a workshop and then adapted to the site, including on uneven terrain. Yuri Vissarionov shares his latest experience in designing tourist complexes, both in central Russia and in the south. These include houseboats, homes printed from lightweight concrete using a 3D printer, and, of course, frame houses.

Object

Moscow’s First

“The quality of education largely depends on the quality of the educational environment”. This principle of the last decade has been realized by Sergey Skuratov in the project for the First Moscow Gymnasium on Rostovskaya Embankment in the Khamovniki district. The building seamlessly integrates into the complex urban landscape, responding both to the pedestrian flow of the city and the quiet alleyways. It skillfully takes advantage of the height differences and aligns with modern trends in educational space design. Let’s take a closer look.

Object

Looking at the Water

The site of Villa Sonata stretches from the road to the water’s edge, offering its own shoreline, pier, and a picturesque river panorama. To reveal these sweeping views, Roman Leonidov “cut” the façade diagonally parallel to the river, thus getting two main axes for the house and, consequently, “two heads”. The internal core – two double-height spaces, a living room and a conservatory, with a “bridge” above them – makes the house both “transparent” and filled with light.

Object

The White Wing

Well, it’s not exactly white. It’s more of a beige, white-stone structure that plays with the color of limestone – smoother surfaces are lighter, while rougher ones are darker. This wing unites various elements: it absorbs and interprets the surrounding themes. It responds to everything, yet maintains a cohesive expression – a challenging task! – while also incorporating recognizable features of its own, such as the dynamic cuts at the bottom, top, and middle.

Object

Urban Dunes

The XSA Ramps team designed and built a three-part sports hub for a park in Rostov-on-Don, welcoming people of all ages and fitness levels. The skate plaza, pump track, and playground are all meticulously crafted with details that attract a diverse range of visitors. The technical execution of the shapes and slopes transforms this space into a kind of sculptural composition.

Object

Proportional Growth

The project for the fourth phase of the ÁLIA residential area has been announced. The buildings are situated on an elongated plot – almost a “ray” that shoots out from the center of the area towards the river. Their layout reflects both a response to Moscow’s architectural preferences over the past 15 years, shifting “from blocks to towers”, and an interpretation of the neighboring business park designed by SOM. Additionally, the best apartments here are not located at the very top but closer to the middle, forming a glowing “waistline”.

Object

The “Staircase” Building

In designing the “Details” residential complex in New Moscow, Rais Baishev spiced up the now-popular Moscow theme of a “courtyard” building with an idea drawn from the surrealist drawings by Maurits Escher. He envisioned the stepped silhouettes and descending slopes as a metaphysical mega-staircase, creating a key void within the courtyard that gave the project an internal “spine”. This concept is felt both in the building’s silhouette and on its façades.

Object

Projection of the Quarter

No one doubted that the building that Vladimir Plotkin designed as part of the “Garden Quarters” would be the most modernist of all. And it turned out just that way: while adhering to the common design code, the building successfully combines brick and white stone, rhythmically responding to the neighboring building designed by Ostozhenka, yet tactfully and persistently making a few statements of its own. This includes the projection of the ideal urban development composition “14–9–6”, which can be found right next door, mathematical calculations, including those for various types of terraces (and perhaps the only reminder of the Soviet past of the Kauchuk rubber factory!), and the white “cross-stitch” pattern of the façade grid.

Object

Domus Aurea

In this issue, we examine the “Tessinsky-1” house, designed by Sergey Skuratov and completed in 2023. Located in the middle of the Serebryanicheskaya Embankment district, at the intersection of its main streets, this house assumes a sort of “nodal” role: it not only responds to everything around it and preserves many memories of the former EMA factory within itself, but it weaves all this into a newly directed pattern, reconciling bright “gold” and dark-colored brick, largely with the help of the new, modern-yet-archaic Columba brick, which, come to think about it, is the most precious element here.

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The Chimney of Nikola-Lenivets

In this issue, we are examining the “Obelisk House” designed by KATARSIS and built for the Arkhstoyanie 2023 festival. However, it was only finished later on, and this is why we are examining it now. It seems to us that after the “Obelisk House” appeared in Nikola-Lenivets, a dialogue and a few inner connections appeared between the temporary structures built here. These houses no longer look like “accidental neighbors”, more of which below.

Periscope by the Bay

The jury awarded the second place in the competition for a public and cultural center in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to the companies GORA (“Mountain”) and M4. In the consortium’s proposal, the building resembles a sperm whale with a calf swimming next to it or a periscope, whose lenses capture the most spectacular views from the surrounding landscape.

Contest Results

From Arcs to Dolmens

While working on the competition project for Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, ASADOV Architects prioritized the value of the natural and urban environment, aiming to preserve the balance of the location while minimizing the resemblance of the volume that they designed to a “traditional building”. The task was challenging, and the architects created three versions, one of which having been developed after the competition, where their main proposal took third place. However, the point of interest here is not the competition result but the continuity of creative thinking.

Object

Hide and Seek

The ID Moskovskiy house, designed by Stepan Liphart in St. Petersburg, in the courtyards near Moskovskiy Avenue beyond the Obvodny Canal and recently completed, is notable for several reasons. Firstly, it has been realized with considerable accuracy, which is particularly significant as this is the first building where the architect was responsible not only for the facades but also for the layouts, allowing for better integration between the two. On the other hand, this building is interesting as an example of the “germination” of new architecture in the city: it draws on the best examples from the neighborhood and becomes an improved and developed sum of ideas found by the architect in the surrounding context.

The Big Twelve

Yesterday, the winners of the Moscow Mayor’s Architecture Award were announced and honored. Let’s take a look at what was awarded and, in some cases, even critique this esteemed award. After all, there is always room for improvement, right?

​Architectural Therapy

In this issue, we are publishing the contest project of renovating city blocks 32, 33, 34, and 35 on the Vernadskogo Avenue by a consortium of OAO “Mosproject” and OOO “Ginsburg Architects”.

Architectural Therapy