www.abdcom.ru
Fish are floating on the screen. They float from right to left, that is, towards the usual movement of the reading eyes, which makes it seem that they are against the current. This is how fish of the salmon family, chinook salmon, salmon, trout, taimen and others behave, going up the rivers to spawn; on "large" specimens, it is easy to see the characteristic humped nose and the sadly lowered corners of the fish mouth. The similarity is almost photographic, but the orange color and transparency of the silhouettes remove unnecessary realism from the picture. The impression created by this voyage, even in the eyes of a modern Internet user, accustomed to any seemingly oddities, is rather unusual. You begin to feel like you are in an aquarium reading an underwater editorial, stylized in the spirit of the classics of avant-garde primary sources. Although the descent under the water is undoubtedly an allegory, the symbolic abstraction of the fish is quite obvious and does not interfere with reading.
Following the meditativeness of the first page - as expected, there follows a rationally restrained, informative website, presenting the fifteen-year history of ABD architects' work, from the ABC news studio in the early 1990s to the currently topical Metropolis complex on Leningradskoye Shosse and the 674-675 quarter near Belorusskaya area. All together - an impressive list of designed buildings and interiors, accompanied by an impressive list of customers and partners, deliberately "hidden" behind the letters of the alphabet. This section is especially scrupulous - it’s difficult to name another site of an architectural company right off the bat, where customer recommendations would be presented as a separate subsection; each can be downloaded and read. Let's add a full list of publications - you can look at the spreads, or you can download the full version. Among them is the recently published in two volumes (interiors and buildings) book "ABD: Within the Range of Architecture", published by the prestigious Austrian publishing house SpringerWienNewYork, which we have already written about earlier.
Inside, this site is the correct, well-functioning tool, which should be the site of any good company. It allows you to effortlessly get all the information you need, download what you need, and look at the rest; answers all the questions of a client, partner, or just a curious one, puts everything on the shelves, from A to Z, like a periodic table - there is no doubt that if some square is suddenly empty, it is only because the element is unknown to science.
An unknown or non-descriptive element - in this case, lives not inside, but paradoxically outside. Surprisingly passing by the fish to the content part, we return to them, to the first page of the site, to think: in a clearly organized structure of data presentation - what would that mean? In response to a question from the correspondent of the Architectural News Agency, we find out: it turns out that Boris Levyant is fond of fishing, and it is the salmonidae family. A very specific and clear explanation: the site demonstrates not only the work of the company, its portfolio and everything that traditionally accompanies it, but also one of the leisure activities of one of the founders of ABD. This approach has something in common with the already mentioned Book of ABD, where pictures of buildings and projects are interspersed with photographs of employees at work in the office and Moscow scenes outside its windows (note, some of these photographs ended up on the first page of the site).
And yet the fish are so good that they cannot do without speculation - what if they mean something else? For example, like this: all fish swim with the flow, trout - against, that is, not like everyone else. In the world of sudden insights and tedious agreements, a well-organized creative process that consistently produces a product of "western quality" is something amazing, it is not like everyone else, it means swimming against the tide. But it would be strange to talk about it directly, because this is not an element of the Mendleyev table, but our guesses arising from amazement at the sight of orange salmon floating over a newspaper page.
