The building consists of two buildings, one is a place for the daily work of judges, it is larger and stands in the back of the site, and the second is public, it is located closer to the street and contains courtrooms. Between the buildings there is a small open courtyard, above it there are two passages, and everything is arranged so that the judges enter the halls without meeting with random petitioners.
The composition is based on the juxtaposition of two cases: one is large, rectangular and shines with the even surfaces of large, from floor to ceiling, glass. Another is short, curved oval in shape and is pubescent on the outside with white thin metal plates of lamellas, external blinds. These rows of graceful vertical plates facing passers-by turn out to be the main component of the architectural image. Their appearance is motivated by the need to protect the interiors of public spaces from direct sunlight, but in this practical explanation one cannot fail to see a certain amount of slyness.
The fact is that, firstly, it is cheaper to save yourself from the sun with simple internal blinds, which are also available. And secondly, the front plates are motionless. At first, says Vladimir Plotkin, they were going to make them manageable from the inside, but then it turned out that this was not very effective and very expensive - the sun is rare in our country, but there is a long winter, during which complex mechanical structures deteriorate. Therefore, we settled on fixed lamellas. This reasoning is quite fair. However, let us imagine what would have happened to the facade if the lamellas were controlled at the whim of the people inside, in places folding into an impenetrable white plane, and in places bristling. Probably, this solution would look very humanistic from the outside - technology serves a person, but the facade would be ruined. Therefore, it seems that lamellas are not so much a technical device as an artistic device - and in this capacity they perfectly “work”, creating an image of amazing purity and ephemerality.
The plates are facing the viewer with a thin end and if you look at them from the front, they hide nothing. But in the future, they add up to a kind of flat, but inherently unsteady surface. This barrier is akin to a lattice, it is even more open than glass, although it manages to create a second shell around the facade with very peculiar properties - quite thick, but very loose, albeit metallic, but open. Thus, the facades facing the street and passers-by are composed of three successive parts, different in structure and character, but equally ephemeral. First, the sharp edges of the lamellas, constituting an air-permeable outer layer, then - coldly shiny, but transparent glass, behind it - again white cloth stripes of internal blinds. All three "layers" look thin, permeable in different ways, although, if desired, they can be remarkably fenced off from the outside world. However, the house completely loses its massiveness and materiality, because instead of the material of the walls, it has the lightness of the shells, supported by the bright whiteness of everything that is opaque.
The building looks like paper, it is so light. As if it had not been cast from concrete for several years, but it was woven here from the air - a materialized visualization, frozen somewhere on the verge of final embodiment. House-geometry, embodying different abstract principles - colors, light, space, lines - and with such an appearance as if all this is part of a formal experiment.
The second feature of lamella plates is that they are generated by curved surfaces and are present only on them. Here, too, there are two explanations, one very common: the architect thus creates a tangible difference in textures, straight planes shine with glass, and curved planes bulge with gratings of white verticals. The second also lies in the sense of form, but more specific - Vladimir Plotkin never uses curved glass in his houses, paying attention to the fact that from the outside they look impressive and cost the same as straight ones, but inside they give distorted reflections like a room of laughter … Therefore, if in his houses there are curved surfaces, always along a compass, then the rows of windows in them are broken lines, made up of a number of planes. Therefore, there are rows of lamellas in front of the straight glass - which perfectly keep the roundness of the shape, and despite all the transparency of this peculiar lattice, without special efforts it is impossible to discern what kind of glass there is behind them - the volume is perceived as a whole, sculpturally and very whole.
The bends of the walls, which are so rare in Plotkin's works, in the volume of the public building are not accidental. He found himself in the zone of strict visual landscape restrictions associated with the proximity of two monuments, the Pimen Church and the fire tower - and he got out of this situation remarkably, combining uncompromising modernism with an attentive attitude to the environment. Curved walls open up views and perspectives of urban belle-vues never seen before, and glass is skillfully used as mirrors that reflect monuments. at the crossroads with Pimenovskiy lane there is a wonderful viewpoint that connects the view of the tower with the reflection of the church bell tower. Note that the reflections are not only not random, but they have all been programmed and designed and can be seen in the design visualizations.
So, the smaller building fell into the zones of influence of the monuments and was forced to round up, and from the side of Krasnoproletarskaya Street it ends with a characteristic "nose". It is a very famous form, loved by Russian constructivism and reborn among the best examples of modern Russian architecture - where it acts both as a sign of reverence for the avant-garde and a sign of passion for fashionable biological flexibility. Vladimir Plotkin is skeptical of frank biology and curved forms take root in his projects with difficulty. Therefore, the oval "nose" on Seleznevka has a number of features.
First of all, if you look at the plan, you can see that it is very clearly and rationally drawn based on the features of the terrain, but without neglecting the correct geometry. Constructivist noses usually complete a rectangle, while non-linear ones tend to be crooked and unpredictable. Plotkin's form consists of the conjugation of three arcs and one straight line, folded into a kind of triangle. Two arcs are wide, one is steep, with a small diameter, this is a rounded corner, the "nose" itself. A spiral staircase is hidden inside it, the spiral of which seems to be the quintessence of a rounded body. Nearby, on the opposite side of the courtyard, there is a plastic representative of the second building, a rectangular visor, which, if you look at it from below, turns out to be very clearly lined up into large and small cells. They were going to place ventilation in the visor, but changed their minds, and it remained the only frankly non-functional form of the building, the basis for a representative and noticeable sign.
All these very formal and abstract juxtapositions in the spirit of pure art, successfully grafted into modern technology, add up to a clear and pure image that has one, but a very remarkable feature. The main impressions of the architecture of this building are cleanliness and openness, permeability, lightness and rationalism, as well as respect for everything, and for the monuments around and for the people inside - all this revolves around the image of an ideal court, humane, reasonable, open, around all those qualities which we are used to associating with an open society and the European path of development. There was no order for the image, there were only practical recommendations - the concept entirely belongs to the author. And in the existing context, where the courthouse is usually gloomy-representative, overly solid and scary, the resulting building looks either a reflection of the process of humanization of the country, or - which seems more objective - an attempt to push it with artistic means. I would not like to discuss how idealistic this dream of the architect is, and to what extent such an active life-building is possible by means of pure art. But it is quite obvious that this idealistic approach persisted in the architecture of the 20th century, and in this case, gave rise to a courthouse that is attractive on the outside and comfortable on the inside.
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