The place for which the business center was designed is located not far from the Kievsky railway station, on the border between a group of various, including modern, buildings - and uniformly solid buildings of Stalin's quarters with an apotheosis in the form of Dorogomilovskaya Street. Such a stylistic duality is generally characteristic of Kutuzovka, a prestigious district of Stalin's times, which in recent years has been actively sprouting with elite office buildings headed by the City. The theme, which could be simply called “old and new”, was beautifully refracted in the architecture of the Forum-plaza business center, designed by SPeeCh.
In the middle of the trapezoidal section, there is already a newly built 8-storey office building. The Forum-plaza buildings will occupy the rest of the territory, encircling the existing building on three sides with an irregular “P” letter. Such a close proximity served as a catalyst for a plastic solution - the architects perceived the existing house as a foreign body - and reacted to its appearance, turning their complex into an “open puzzle”.
The volumes of each of the four cases have large consoles and cutouts resembling grooves of a gigantic design, because where one case has a ledge, the other, standing opposite, has a ledge. This complicates the silhouettes and creates the illusion of movement - as if in front of us is a large and incomprehensible mechanism, which began to act in some way and froze half-way. Or not frozen, but continues to transform very slowly and imperceptibly to the eye, and in a year or two will change its shape. Apparently, this latent movement is a reaction to a “foreign body” of a building standing on the site: the new complex, in an almost literal sense, “closes” around it - or, conversely, opens, allowing the “neighbor” to pass through.
The movement inherent in the architectural plot of the "puzzle" is restrained by a strict solution of the facades, lined with the same piers on the even cells of square windows. The building seems to be carved out of some special material, a kind of crystalline sponge with a very rigid geometric structure. Of course, this is not so - inside there will be ordinary, even very comfortable office premises - but from the outside, if you look closely at the building, it can appear as a mountain of gigantic pumice with a square-geometric structure.
The even mesh of the walls will be faced with stone. This is a rare example for modern Moscow of such a large-scale use of natural limestone - says the architect Sergei Kuznetsov; it will cover not only the basement, but all the facades from top to bottom. At the same time, the architects are going to use not the already well-known Jurassic limestone, but plan to certify some kind of stone that is new for Moscow.
The next chord is decorative: the stone surfaces of the walls will be covered with fine geometrized carvings. The ornament will vary, outlining the subtle differences between the cases. Its drawing is built according to the general scheme, but the filling is different: from ledged panels, reminiscent of Art Deco, and ending with small curbs, rhombuses, triangles. SPeeCH architects have a very careful approach to decor design - all the drawings are not just calculated on a computer and shown to the customer on a model of the usual size, but the authors intend to soon build another model, on a scale of one to three (i.e., only three times smaller real building), with natural stone and real glass - to finally check how everything will look. Almost supernatural conscientiousness.
The austere dryish pattern that covers all the stone surfaces of the complex leads to the achievement of several goals. Firstly, such fine detailing creates the effect of high quality finishing of the building and, in combination with natural stone, contributes to the respectability of the business center. Secondly, according to the architect Sergei Kuznetsov, the ornament adds warmth and becomes a kind of interpretation of the national theme - the Russian mentality is characterized by a craving for decorativeness. And finally, the third, inherently architectural consequence: buildings lose a hint of the traditional architectural tectonics of carrying gravity. In other words, there is no top and bottom - not that they are completely absent, in the ordinary sense they are, and in the architectural sense - almost none.
And here a collision arises, which is consonant with the theme of the genius loci we outlined at the beginning of the area adjacent to Kutuzovsky Prospekt and Kievsky railway station. The traditional solidity of a stone building and the quality of products of modern modernism, honed to the details, are intertwined here in a whimsical proportion, however, leading to a rather convincing result. The stone, by definition, is heavy and impressive both in the eyes of the customer and for a casual passer-by. He, however, is traditionally supposed to be weighty and massive. The modern stone is not like that - it does not consist of squares, but of thin plates, which cannot always be called slabs. SPeeCH architects additionally de-materialize it, covering it with ornamental carvings - thus creating the most "lightweight" image of a stone, practically reduced to a concept akin to Plato's idea - the stone denotes its presence and shines with texture, but almost completely loses its materiality and materiality. The result is predictable - a traditional material that is dear to the customer acquires the qualities inherent in modern architecture, first of all - atectonic lightness.
In contrast to the traditional-modern appearance of the buildings, the low volume of the entrance complex is designed super-modern: its walls are supposed to be made using the foiltec technology - from large translucent plastic pillows, which in foreign architecture are considered a relatively new invention (one of the vivid examples of their use is the State Swimming Pool center under construction in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games). The streamlined shapes of transparent pillows next to the strict lines of stone carving look contrasting and greatly enhance the modernist and technological component of the project, as opposed to the "conservative stone" one. In fact, apparently, there is no contradiction - or rather, it exists only in our minds, striving to distinguish between the "old-new", contextual and acute-modernist. In reality, these two concepts get along well together, as the Forum-plaza project from SPeeCH shows.
