A relatively small building designed by ADM architects near the Belyaevo metro station, it combines three different functions. In the underground floors there is a garage for 253 places, and in two buildings of the aboveground part there is a fitness center and offices. This situation is typical for Moscow, even banal. Most of the construction projects here are carried out according to a simple principle: something useful for the city is being built on the same site, there is a theater or fitness there, and "investment construction" is an area that is already useful for those who finance the construction. The first provides a building permit, the second brings profit to the investor.
Sometimes these parts - city and "investment", find themselves in different buildings, sometimes in one, sometimes they are mixed altogether. In this case, it is curious that the functional structure of the building on Profsoyuznaya became the basis for its plastic solution and was very visibly reflected in the image, one might even say that the house reflects its own function, diligently following the classic modernist principle “from inside to outside”.
The garage part is underground and cannot be seen. The two upper ones - fitness open to the citizens and offices intended for rent, have different entrances from different sides, so that visitors, if possible, do not meet. Structurally, they are merged into a single volume, but from the outside it is quite obvious that it consists of two stereometric shapes with different characters, set at an angle of 90 degrees in such a way as if one of them cuts through the other. The one-story fitness center spread out on the ground, the horizontalness of which is emphasized by the restrained variegation of thin stripes of dark cladding, has a "basalt" weight and certainty. It looks like a black bar of a magnet, with a confident weight lying on the ground. The second volume, office, is larger and in all respects "softer" - its light cladding consists of vertical plates, slightly varying shades of gray, and the windows, although they line up in even horizontal ribbons, but all the time change their width from narrow to wide, as if would dance a little. It is not surprising that this "soft" body is "cut" by the "harder" one, over which it hangs in a zigzag manner, imitating a large console.
But it is overhanging. The classical avant-garde in such a situation would most likely imitate literal sprouting or merging of volumes. For Andrey Romanov and Ekaterina Kuznetsova, everything happens a little differently - an intermediate zone appears between the main figures. A stripe that recedes in depth and has a radically different texture is glass, covered with thin, vertically set wooden planks of dark orange color. Most of all they resemble the image of the magnetic field lines - as if the light upper volume "hovers" over the dark "magnet" lying on the ground.
If the theme of crossed parallelepipeds, separation of functions, separation of streams and a garden planned on the roof of a fitness center refer us to the search for a "classic" avant-garde, then the materialization of the "magnetic field" between the two volumes not only returns to the present day, but also reminds of the modern " contextual modernism”. The fact is that the orange color of the middle strip recessed into the body of the building arose as a reaction of the house to its immediate surroundings. Strictly speaking, the "Profsoyuznaya" area, although green, is boring; five-storey buildings and panel plates prevail here, which are often lined up here in three, hugging the corners of avenues. A new building will be built in the courtyard of such a house - the red-orange jaws of its stairwells, in fact, prompted the architects to design their own "zone of stereometric stresses" in a similar way.
In addition, two volumes form an angle in the shape of the letter "L", turned towards the nearest plate, and thus the new house unobtrusively screens out its own courtyard in front of the fitness center - for the townspeople, complementing it with the aforementioned square on the roof - this second one is raised above the ground and therefore reserved for the office part of the building. Thus, without going beyond the framework of simple rectangular volumes, architects not only build between them a subtle plastic game based on alternating contrasts with nuances, carefully weaving it into the context of a block-panel environment, but also creating a fragment of a well-thought-out and modern urban environment.
