The client, the Tennis Federation, disposes of a fairly large plot on the border of the Leningradskoye highway and the spontaneous park, a green zone in front of the Khimki reservoir. Vladimir Plotkin has been working for this place since the late nineties, and as often happens if you do something for a long time, projects begin to live their own, certainly dependent on the customer and the architect, but at the same time their own life. So it happened here: one project spun off, another joined, a new building was added, and as a result, an original symbiosis arose - a tribune house, the inhabitants of which, if they wish, can watch the competitions and trainings without going down from their own balconies.
Strictly speaking, not a house, but a hotel. Its 18-storey building is a completely new part of the complex, not dating back to early ideas, the core, to which a demonstration court adjoins from the south, in other words, an open stadium for tennis competitions, with disassembled stands - at normal times you can train there. The demonstration court was originally conceived as part of the Tennis Club, designed by Plotkin in 1998-1999, which is located nearby. Seats for spectators go around the court on three sides, and from the fourth they climb under the lower tier of the hotel, facing the stadium in continuous rows of open loggias, forming a kind of "vertical stand".
On the other, on the north side, the hotel was joined by a building designed two years ago, first as a separate building. Its volume is at a distance of 20 meters from the hotel and is connected to it by a passage; recreational and business applications - shops, restaurants, offices - are supposed to go here.
All this is inscribed in a horizontal volume spread out on the ground, the leitmotif of which is the careful handling of the natural area. Most of the "useful areas" in Corbusian style are collected in the upper tier, similar to a giant "species sandwich" - at the top and bottom of the concrete plates of the floor and ceiling, between them a continuous strip of glazing, giving those who are inside views of the park, and for those who outside, lightening the mass of facades; sunbathing on the flat roof. Half of the top floor is raised above the ground, like a very long console, and rests on thin "legs", opening the way for pedestrians to the bank of the reservoir.
The hotel is the “newest” and brightest part of the complex. Its 18-storey plate decisively cuts through the horizontal, although it makes, for its part, an attempt to spare the natural landscape - the plate is turned towards the highway by its narrow end, trying to reduce the visual obstruction to the park part.
Filled with deep loggias, the south facade-tribune is lined with a proprietary Plotkin grid. The parapets of the balconies are glass, the entire volume from this side seems permeable, crystal-light, carries a kind of southern resort charge.
On the opposite, northern side, a transparent parallelepiped is covered, like a shield, by a white "sheet" of a stone facade, evenly perforated with round windows. The circles evoke many associations at once, ranging from the radio receivers of the 60s and ending with the famous house of Konstantin Melnikov with its equally evenly distributed, but rhombic windows. The latter analogy is supported by the fact that each window has one lintel located at different angles varying by 45 degrees - either longitudinal, vertical, or tilted to the left or to the right. It is the dance of window frames that removes the form from the state of calmness inherent in the circle, makes the windows different and makes one suspect a resemblance to Melnikov's masterpiece. The architect himself does not consider the resulting analogy with Melnikov to be the main one, according to him, the solution was born from the allegory of a tennis ball - as a kind of emblematic sign for the whole house, informing about the purpose of the building. One way or another, it turned out unexpectedly and interestingly, in the spirit of the most pure modernism, in the last version diluted with the asymmetry beloved by the author.
