According to the competition program, the complex was supposed to combine many functions: offices, housing, a hotel, as well as shopping, entertainment, recreational areas, a restaurant, etc. A very successful site was allocated for construction - in the city center, on Kirov street, next to the former regional committee and not far from the famous Novosibirsk theater.
It is obvious that the organizers of the competition are striving to offer the city as a new dominant a construction of a fundamentally new quality level for Novosibirsk, relatively speaking, made according to international standards of commercial architecture. The selection of participants in itself is quite eloquent: the Russian company ABD is known for its adherence to Western standards, Sergei Tchoban operates in Russia and Germany, and SHCA is a fundamentally international company with offices on three continents.
As a result of the competition, the project was approved for implementation by the ABD architects bureau under the leadership of Boris Levyant. All the design departments of the company were involved in this work, says the architect, and an internal competition was held between them, the winners of which were allowed to participate in the creation of the competition project.
The architects proposed to collect all the numerous functions into a single high-rise volume of a 40-storey tower, balanced by a horizontal branch of the entrance retail complex. The tower shines with glass edges and tapers upwards; its base in the plan approaches a rhombus. The vertical planes that rise upward are mostly glass, but the floors are separated by jagged, wavy stripes that look like graphic stylized algae images. These opaque stripes enhance the materiality of the façade surfaces, creating the effect of a “skin,” an outer shell. Further: the sharp corners of the "rhombic" tower are boldly cut off, as if they were hewn from both sides by something very sharp - which is why the tower begins to radically narrow upwards. There are no stripes on the “cuts”, their smooth glass surfaces perceptibly belong to the inner matter - as if someone began to shave off a huge wooden stake with an ax, and, having made the first two movements, decided that was enough. There is nothing strange about these associations - moreover, it seems that the authors deliberately incorporated the "Siberian" story into the glossy Westernizing program of an expensive commercial IFC - as a "highlight". It is not for nothing that Boris Levyant admits that the restaurant block located at the very top, rotated by 45 degrees, looks like a "hat on one side". The combination of artistic boldness with sophisticated quality standards adds up to an interesting, even somewhat mesmerizing experience, and also leads to some useful consequences.
The silhouette of the tower is significantly thinner at the top to help it flexibly fit into its surroundings. The “cuts” are made obliquely and narrow the tower upward, give the volume a certain degree of pyramidality - this is how, according to Boris Levyant, “the effect of additional perspective” arises, visually reinforcing the dynamics of the upward movement of the lines. In addition, the "cuts" are made at different angles, which makes the silhouette of the tower very diverse and constantly changes when walking around from wherever we look. Regardless of where you look at the tower, it constantly changes its configuration, plays with edges, creates a feeling of "living" plastic. Even if you move along the straight axes of Kirov and Shevchenko Streets, to which the building is oriented, due to the different shape and angle of inclination of the edges, each meter of approximation gives changes. The 15 points of view of the object recorded in the project are 15 angles, among which there is no better or worse. The tower "spins" as if dancing, each time appearing in a new configuration and in a different silhouette.
A separate difficulty was the declared rich multifunctionality of the complex - according to Boris Levyant, whose experience allows him to act as an expert in the subsequent operation of modern commercial structures, the building is “overloaded” with functions. The architect suggested that the customers abandon at least one of them - for example, not to combine housing and a hotel in one complex.
The rest of the division of functions is solved in a standard way: the tower is divided into tiers for different purposes, office, residential, hotel. Each tier is equipped with its own group of lifts in order to separate the flow of visitors. Recreational additions are collected in a stylobate, with which the tower, by the way, merges very organically, as if the base is its giant “foot”.
Unlike ABD architects, who connected various groups of premises in the vertical volume of a free-standing tower, two other projects - the SPeeCH workshops of Sergei Tchoban and SHCA - divided the complex into blocks of different heights, dividing numerous functions between them. The main buildings are interconnected by a reduced volume with an atrium and recreational areas. However, the similarity ends with typological kinship.
Sergei Tchoban, probably proceeding from a logical analysis of the context of the modernist science city of Novosibirsk, proposed an uncharacteristic "rectangular" project inspired by the images of "horizontal skyscrapers". The main office tower consists of a strict "stone" parallelepiped with a rigid grid of square windows. L-shaped glass volume “sticks” to it from the side and from above, the upper horizontal bar of which, “lying on the roof” of the stone parallelepiped, is carried far beyond its limits and rests on the glass column of the elevator shaft standing “outside”. The glass volume hanging at a 25-storey height is intended for a restaurant, and a glass elevator brought out to the outside should deliver visitors directly to the top.
Cubic pieces were removed from the body of the checkered stone volume, in place of which glazed zones of the winter garden were arranged, connected by passages to the elevator shaft.
The central and smallest volume, located in the center of the complex, is also stone and checkered, connected to the tower by a glass atrium, and a garden is laid out on its flat roof of this building. The third block, slightly larger and also referring to the themes of the architecture of classical modernism, is intended for the hotel and apartments.
The SHCA project unites two themes - an allusion to modernist primary sources in the form of dotted ribbon windows and a "bionic" ambiguity of the silhouette, which looks differently from different angles. True, here the silhouette does not narrow, but expands slightly upward. The SHCA complex consists of a plate tower that grows out of a massive multi-storey base, like a “head” from a “body”. At the base, which, if desired, can be compared with an enlarged stylobate, there are offices. The rest of the functions are compressed in layers in the tower and completed - like everyone else - by a restaurant with panoramic views.
The specificity of a custom competition is such that often architects of approximately the same level are invited to participate in it. Each participant in one way or another has already been selected by the organizers and is able to meet the customer's requirements. Therefore, the results that support the overall quality bar are largely similar. The differences manifest themselves in the imagery and in the original idea that defines the emotional side of the building. For Boris Levyant, it is plastic-sculptural and very solid, for Sergei Tchoban, on the contrary, it is dry-strict, avant-garde in the spirit of classical modernism projects and a little more fractional, and SHCA combines these two moves, each of which is interesting in its own way and can be explained based on Novosibirsk context. Another thing is obvious - the tower of ABD architects claims to become a new city-accent of the Siberian city, in which architecture of this kind has not yet been built.
