An original object has appeared on the Garden Ring, not far from the puppet theater and the Museum of Applied Arts. Something oval-curved, shiny with the spectacular surface of expensive structural glazing. In the vicinity of the classicist wing of the museum and the corner building reconstructed six or seven years ago, the new building looks ultra-modern and certainly attracts attention.
Thus, fulfilling its main task - after all, this is the facade of the new office center, a part designed to indicate its presence on the Garden Ring. Inside, there are four floors of free space, which can be the ideal space for presentations and ceremonies. Outside, there is a building stretched into the courtyard, faced with noble dark bricks, which sharpens from Sadovoe's side in the form of an asymmetric "nose" covered with a flexible glass screen. As if the house was "melted" from the car bustle on the main thoroughfare of the Moscow center. The glass screen really protects against noise. It also provides the space inside with daylight and views of the opposite side of Sadovaya-Karetnaya and the Hermitage garden, from which the name of the new office complex comes from.
The corner building, located at the intersection of Krasnoproletarskaya and Sadovaya-Karetnaya, was built in the 1930s, the first 4 floors at the beginning and the upper tier at the end of the decade. Some time ago, the building was reconstructed, acquiring features that bring it closer to the postmodern architecture of Moscow in the 90s, primarily due to the coloring. This building also became part of the Hermitage Plaza, surrounded by two new buildings by Sergei Kiselev.
The resulting facade is beautiful and modern, a godsend for the center of Moscow. One of the most successful options for embedding a modern building in a historical building without loss for both sides. When the building does not lose its integrity, and the new building - the relevance of forms. According to Sergei Kiselev, the volume arose from the need to reconcile the office building under construction with the neighboring Osterman-Tolstoy estate (it houses the Museum of Applied Arts "on Delegatskaya"). In other words, the appearance of this building was the result of a method of “blurring” the silhouette of a new building, which has become traditional for the Moscow center, the edges of which are gradually lowered, “dissolved” in the historical environment. Surprisingly, the mechanism designed to obscure and hide the new structure in this case has turned into its own opposite, into an attention-grabbing accent. At the same time, the estate did not suffer, but rather won - it became better visible.
Standing next to the outbuilding of the museum on Delegatskaya, the new "plaza" demonstrates the type of facade, almost all the articles opposite to the historical one. Firstly, in relation to the office complex, this is not a facade, but rather a courtyard wing, but once it is in a winning place, it becomes the center of attention. Secondly, here, instead of the frontal surface, there is a convex nose that does not reach the "red line" of the street, instead of a solemn portico there are glass reflections, crushing reflection, instead of the order tectonics of carrying - a hi-tech curved screen hanging on something incomprehensible. This is a very spectacular, albeit small, part of the complex.
The rectangular volume of the second, main building stretches along Krasnoproletarskaya (Pimenovskaya) street, to which it faces with a long six-story facade. The street facade of the building is designed for two points of view - a pedestrian and a passing car. Accordingly, the three lower floors are slightly moved away from the "red line", freeing the sidewalk, small rectangular bay windows protrude from their glass-metal surface at the level of the second floor in a measured rhythm. The lower tier includes two facades left over from small houses of the early 20th century: their light tiles resonate with the smooth dark brick of the new surface, from which they protrude like precious inclusions. All together creates for the walker a feeling of a city street space that is diverse and commensurate with a person, as if the architects deliberately read D. S.'s texts. Likhachev.
The upper part of the building, "intended" for viewing from cars, is faced with noble Jurassic stone, the light plane protrudes forward from the dark, brick-glass base. Its scale is enlarged, four floors are interpreted as two tiers, the rhythm of thin window verticals (2 floors behind each) is deliberately knocked down, but not too much, in order to introduce a little variety, nothing more.
The opposite courtyard facade has a completely different design. Its task, according to Sergei Kiselev, is to smooth out the neighborhood of the new office complex for the historic Osterman-Tolstoy estate, to “hide” the new building. The usual contextual task here received a beautiful and unusual solution. The five upper tiers are covered with horizontal ribbons of glass, the planes are turned at a perceptible angle, turned upward - to reflect "… the sky, a lot of sky", which becomes the "background" for the perception of the historical estate.
The office complex of Sergei Kiselev got a winning, but not very comfortable place, the corner of which was already occupied. The long facade along Krasnoproletarskaya Street and the minimum "exit" to the Garden Ring, the neighborhood of architectural monuments and not the best, to put it mildly, houses of the last decade - all this created a lot of restrictions and difficulties, and the result was an elegant and delicate ensemble, one of the features of which - a variety of facade solutions with a lot of associations, but without any hints of stylization.
