A small plot of land in a block adjacent to the intersection of Nakhimovsky Prospect and Vavilova Street has been allocated for the office building. Diagonally across the crossroads - Cheremushkinsky market, in the place of which Alexander Asadov designed a large house with a media facade. The rest of the surrounding buildings - late Stalin, early Khrushchev, consists mostly of 5-7-storey brick houses, the predominant color is faded pink, sometimes yellowish. In some places, modern tower houses wedge themselves into this measured, low and green area. The closest neighbors of the ABD office building are two 24-storey towers. In such an environment, a relatively small office building turns out to be like in a forest - it is lower and smaller than its nearest neighbors.
How do you make it visible? We need some kind of formal experiment.
At first glance, the house, designed by ABD architects, appears to be wrapped in a coarse angular mesh.
The main part of the outer walls, from floor to ceiling, is glass; interfloor ceilings face the facades with green stripes. Visually, this glass and stripes form the "base" of the building, its basic matter is a translucent, coldish mass. It is easy to see that its color is directly opposite to the grayish-pink prevailing in the area, but it is one of the favorite shades of ABD - austere, businesslike and at the same time fresh, hinting at nature.
On top of this translucent mass is superimposed a light yellow grille similar in color to a Stalinist stone. It consists of thin vertical and wider horizontal stripes. Their arrangement is irregular - the lattice holes are sometimes larger, sometimes smaller; in some places "thick" lines form zigzags. The edges of the lattice are slightly thickened towards the center of the walls and thinned out at the corners. But the main thing is that the grating is superimposed on top, each of its lines protrudes significantly from the glass plane. Therefore, it looks more material than the glass base.
Thus, the building looks like it consists of a coldish, relatively speaking, "natural" mass, grasped by the edges of a grid-lattice. For this effect, "hanging gardens", arranged on the roof to compensate for the lost courtyard, also work. It is intended that the trees will literally "sprout" through the lattice sloped at the top of the main façade. All 11 floors of the building are thus transformed into a kind of "stand" for trees, which become the final chord of the theme inherent in the color scheme of the facades.
The volume of the building, in general, is almost cubic, it looks as if it was cut from different sides - somewhere from above, somewhere from below. One corner was cut obliquely, from the other a glass "cave" was cut out in the lower part. Here, however, the plastic effect follows a practical need - it helps to get the maximum volume and square meters. However, on the other hand, it maintains the lattice effect, transforming it from “stone” to “metal”, and even jewelry, golden. In this case, the lattice turns into a precious "frame" of a glass-emerald "jewel".
The plot of this building can be understood in two ways. Clearly, the glassy green theme refers to modern office architecture that is supposed to be glassy and sustainable. Lattice works in terms of context. Either modern architecture “breaks” the usual opaque plane, or a strong mesh “holds” the natural mass. But it is obvious that the architects have clashed two themes here - function and context, and made their interaction the main plot of the building.
