Ilya Mukosey:
“In addition to designing gazebos, playgrounds, lawns and flower beds, we were given the task of overcoming the “Irony of Fate” syndrome - the sameness of houses, which is difficult to navigate even for locals, not to mention guests. We came up with a story with exotic animals unexpected for the local latitudes: we assigned each of the six blocks of the district a certain color and totem - elephant and giraffe for the largest, antelope for the smallest.

At each entrance to Marfino you are greeted by a board with a map, on which the icon of the corresponding animal is marked in the middle of each quarter. Below the map there is a list of houses with addresses and the desired symbol opposite. After this, moving around the block, the guest no longer keeps in mind not a number, but, say, a giraffe, and follows the signs - special road signs and stencils on the asphalt. At the end of each house there is a huge sign of the desired color, visible from afar, with a totem and house number, and when you come across a life-size sculpture of the desired animal in the yard, you are finally sure that you are in the right place. All that remains is to find the entrance, the numbers of which are written on huge signs on each of them.
The residents, I must say, accepted everything with delight. A whole epic about animals even appeared on the neighborhood forum. In general, the townspeople who take out a mortgage are incredibly active: as soon as the giraffe was left on the playground during installation, they immediately started calling the management company - why is the animal facing the children with its butt? And, most importantly, a week after the appearance of the first sculpture - a rhinoceros - taxi drivers at the VDNKh metro station knew where to go - “to Marfino, to the rhinoceros.”

Fedor Novikov:
“A good solution with a pattern that provokes braking before an intersection. But I prefer the option when, at the approach to the intersection, the texture of the surface changes - the driver begins to shake slightly, and this, willy-nilly, attracts attention.”

Sergey Nikitin:
“They like to joke: Moscow is a big village. It would be great, but that's not the case yet. We need to generate such small neighborhoods, “villages”, where people feel comfortable and feel in their spinal cord that they need to say hello to the person they see every morning. The urban fabric grows from below; it can only be watered from above. What Vedis is doing in Marfino and its other neighborhoods is the first step towards humanizing the environment on the outskirts. And it’s psychologically nice to feel like you’ve been taken care of. Especially when, gritting your teeth, it takes a long time to get home.”

Young woman:
“These animals help me explain to my friends how to find us inside the area. I drive a car and the big signs are really easy to see. And the most important thing is that they are not scary, not vulgar and not shabby. It is clear that it is simple
but design."

Concerned parent (on the neighborhood forum):
“We live in a yard with a giraffe. I wouldn’t want children to be called that name at school.”

Young mom:
“I don’t see these sculptures as elements that can help me orient my guests. But when I tell my son: “Let’s go look at the elephant,” he knows where.”

Pensioner:
“I already know where I live.” No comments yet

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Experiments in Marfino