The Alta-Bank building entirely occupies a small area allotted to it - 20 meters along the street and 18 meters deep in the quarter, and, of course, squeezes out a maximum of square meters from the meager territory burdened with various borders: 9 floors with an attic up, 4 underground floors down. But here's what is interesting: fulfilling its commercial duty, and despite the bay window protruding beyond the building line, the house very delicately fits into the structure of the street.
To the right of it is a low, light gray "Stalinist" building with a characteristic of the 1930s. ledged verticals and thin, almost neoclassical rustic. On the left, from the side of B. Gruzinskaya, two new houses are under construction, which will only slightly give way to the growth of Alta-Bank.
All together they form a row along the street, the main violin of which is now played by a new bank building. This is surprising because the façade is emphatically modest. We can say that it combines three characteristic features: firstly, it is honest high-tech modernism, and secondly, this modernism is contextually “quiet” and helpful - nothing flashy. And thirdly, there is a paradox: the modest contains a certain emotional charge, which he spreads to his small - within sight - sphere of influence. It has a special approach to the urban environment, characteristic of tenement houses (and bank buildings) of the 19th or early 20th century. This house can easily be imagined as one of the modernist inserts in the front of the building blocks of Paris. He seems to have been transplanted from there (or from Berlin) - here and now he is working to improve the Moscow atmosphere.
The facades of the building are made of glass, metal and porcelain stoneware in a soft yellowish color. All glass is grouped on one "front" corner - looking towards Mayakovsky Square and the Moscow City Architecture Committee. Everything that is opaque forms a semblance of a shell: it covers the rear courtyard walls, and from the side and top on the main facades it forms a semblance of a frame that forms the main plot. One might think that this frame protects a more fragile and mobile glass-metal substance, within which the main plot is played out. From the shiny plane of the tinted glass, embracing the corner and hanging over the ground, a glass bay window protrudes, bristling with horizontal stripes of metal gratings. These grilles from Reinars are actually sun-protection, however, in this case, they play more of a decorative role. Indeed, this is the main decoration of the building. Matte grayish stripes are fractionally mixed with different shades of the color of the sky and with spots of lamps glowing inside into a cool geometrically picturesque composition, which, completing the effect, is reflected in the plane of the background glass. At some point, it may seem that the lattices are duplicated inside.
The surface of porcelain stoneware slabs looks very material next to this play of metallic sheen and glass reflections. At the corners, it is cut through by neo-constructivist corner windows, which are covered with bars at the top, echoing the main theme of thin horizontal stripes. The color and proportions of the cladding plates are a bit like the rustic drawing of the neighboring Stalinist building - between the two houses there is a slight effect of resonance, distant kinship. At the same time, horizontal rather than vertical prevails on the facades of the new bank, sending us back a little earlier, to the 1920s. The image of the epoch of constructivism no, no, yes, and will slip in front of the viewer examining these facades.
However, all these plots are given only as a hint - they are not striking and therefore hi-tech, non-constructivism and environmental approach peacefully coexist here, creating a dull but attractive image - the embryo of a pleasant city.
