At the end of July it was announced that TPO "Reserve" became the winner of the competition for the concept of a new building for the Russian Olympic Committee. Seven workshops took part in the competition (projects of other participants can be seen here).
The new building is planned to be built on the site of the old one, erected for the 1980 Olympics - its low parallelepiped is now stretched along Novoluzhnetsky passage, from the overpass of Komsomolsky Prospekt towards the river. The new ROC will completely occupy a rectangular area, but will be higher than its predecessor: instead of four floors - ten, the total area is 80,000 m2… The building is planned to be built with the money of an investor who will receive half of the working premises, so it was logically divided into two buildings, which determined at least two features. One is the planning one: the committee prefers a corridor-cabinet system, so the architects, according to the TOR, divided its premises into fairly spacious offices, on average 18 m2 each; and the layout of the investor's areas was decided in the spirit of the popular open space. Meanwhile, the terms of reference required to make the committee and investor corps, on the one hand, "equal and independent", and on the other, to combine them into a "single corps with a common space." The architects, rightly assessing this task as contradictory (see the author's description), coped with it, meanwhile, quite successfully.
Both buildings are inscribed in the contours of a simple figure, close to a parallelepiped, and are separated by a spacious courtyard-square, the wide bell of the golden walls of which is opened towards the Moscow River and the Moscow State University skyscraper on Vorobyovy Gory - the asymmetrical bevels of the walls were carefully calculated by the authors in order to achieve the best panorama … The courtyard both divides and unites the buildings, and the coherence and unity of the volume as a whole is emphasized by the lattice roof-sign: five rings built into its plane will glow at night.
The module of the thin white grid of facades is emphatically simple: the cells on the end walls are square, on the longitudinal ones they are divided in half vertically - it turns out quite fractionally, but evenly and calmly, as a tribute to classical modernism and, therefore, to the memory of the old building. Oddly enough, a clean floor cage in its simplicity looks fresh: in recent years in Moscow it has become fashionable to hide the scale of buildings, combining floors of two or three, but here everything is unexpectedly honest, like a notebook sheet. Although one optical technique is still present: the division of cells into two parts vertically makes our eye think that there are twice as many modular steps, and the “bar” of the building is longer and thinner than it actually is.
All together add up to a simple and light image with several meanings. The first one is easy and clear to read: before us is an ingot of Olympic gold, enclosed in the structural material of white facades, like an amethyst brush in a shell of limestone. The outside is simple and rational, inside - it glitters intriguingly, reveals the preciousness of the contents. The lattice of facades can be understood as a visual embodiment of the administrative work of the committee: papers, offices, accounting, a routine but strictly organized process. The golden courtyard, carved in a checkered volume, expresses its essence and purpose, hinting at the winners' awards. However, I must say that Vladimir Plotkin would not be himself if the gold of the court looked like a melted ingot - the shine consists of discrete lamellas strung on vertical axes and turned, like conventionally drawn medal flags, at different angles. Close up, a volumetric shading is obtained, a drawing image of plastic gold: light, shine, shadow; and from a distance, for example, if you look through binoculars from the Observation Deck, it will merge into a golden cave. However, the building is conceived as transparent, permeable, practically without gravity, as a complex but rationally planned figure in volume - this structured lightness, which makes the building an almost molecular lattice with rare revitalizing impregnations of mass, is one of the signature features of Vladimir Plotkin's architecture.
The second topic is contextual. If you look along Novoluzhnetskiy Proezd, then in the future you will see the skyscraper of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences, built by Yuri Platonov in the seventies: a white tower with a golden top, clearly visible in the landscape. The ROC building in the project of Vladimir Plotkin echoes the Academy, enters into a dialogue, creating,
according to the authors, "a gold massif of a similar scale", in some ways, however, alternative - a horizontal instead of a vertical, a depression instead of a volume. Between the buildings, and the distance between them is large enough, there is a longitudinal, meaningful urban planning axis.
And finally, the triangular courtyard between the buildings plays not only the role of a spectacular frame for contemplating the Sparrow Hills, but also creates a new perpendicular axis parallel to Komsomolsky Prospect: a narrow gorge formed by the funnel of the courtyard in the northeast will become a passage towards the territory, where after a while a new construction is planned on the site of the Helium Institute - the new district will thus receive access to the Luzhniki Stadium.
"Golden Square" should become a public, urban space: on the first floors, the authors planned shops and cafes. Moreover, appealing to the openness and unifying role of the Olympic movement as such, the architects proposed to connect the two buildings with a "pedestrian path" of a series of ramps: it runs along the street facade in the first floor of the investor building, turns right, crosses the courtyard, and, gradually rising, continues along the facades of the ROC at the level of the second floor, ending with a small console - a kind of observation deck facing the Luzhniki stadium. The trail is a plot of the author's addition, according to the plan, the route of study tours dedicated to the activities of the committee can pass along it.
The observation console on the front facade is echoed by a golden niche - a ledge in a pandanus ledge, it once again emphasizes that any cut in the lattice fabric of the facades reveals a gold filling. The northwestern facade is the second main one, here is the entrance to the metro station, leading to the ROC conference hall, light accents and graceful details are also collected here: a console, a niche, and four thin supports in rainbow colors. The best view of the building, therefore, from the side of Komsomolsky Prospekt and Novoluzhnetskiy Proezd, allows you to see two main facades at the same time.
Inside, both buildings are permeated with atriums - however, it has not yet been decided whether they will be glazed or remain open. The central part of the ROC building is occupied by a large congress hall, the roof of which is supposed to be greened by arranging a large courtyard on it, a rhombic atrium is located behind the stage, and then a triangular atrium with lifts. The multi-scale, multi-tiered space is laced with hinged bridges; on the other hand, the atrium of the investor's part is equipped with a wide entrance lobby facing the “Golden Square”, and a staircase - not quite spiral, but nevertheless it turns and “twists” the courtyard around itself. The atriums of the buildings, as well as the laconic grid of facades, are reminiscent of the old ROC building: a simple parallelepiped with two square courtyards - and therefore build another level of connections, placing the building no longer in an urban planning, but in a historical context. However, if we compare the proposal of the "Reserve" with the simple regular courtyards of an old building, it becomes obvious that although modern architecture inherited the inevitability of atriums from the modernism of the seventies, the directing of plastic interior space has now become much more complicated, emotional and plastic. This inner, spatial layer of the project is filled with architectural scenography, from the excursion trail to the clerk's trails in the multi-tiered courtyards. Unlike graphic facades and picturesque gold, it is plastic and mobile: for a person moving around the inner space of buildings with their bridges, staircases and internal voids, now vertical, now spacious, alternating all known types of angles - it, presumably, will seem to be dynamic, and theatrical.
Meanwhile, the described layering of architectural ideas and impressions is supposed to be realized by modest means. “Understanding the economic difficulties of our time, we thoroughly studied the topic of import substitution,” says Vladimir Plotkin, “in particular, we found a number of Russian stone manufacturers that could be suitable for facing facades.”
Thus, the project is precisely placed in the context, and in the broadest sense: from the economic, with an eye to the time of crisis, to the historical and urban, appealing to the former building of the ROC of the seventies, to the Presidium of the Yuri Platonov Academy, and ending with the most important context, and more precisely, the function of the building as an office: the almost tangible gold of victories, which was hung out in front of the entrance with conventional flags, also reminds of the Olympic movement, but there are also more abstract allusions, such as, for example, the role of the movement as a social, unifying, peaceful one. The main, "golden" Olympic theme, dangerous in its obviousness, is brought to that edge of plastic purity and lightness, where its clarity does not frighten, but pleases, and the whole building even from a distance becomes a sign of itself. If everything works out with the construction, then in a couple of years, standing on the observation deck, it will be possible to say in the most wonderful way: in-it is the Academy, but, to the right of the Big Sports Arena, the Olympic Committee gleams. Not a bad company.
