The volume of the building is very simple - a 23-storey white parallelepiped. One of the facades rests on thin metal "legs" set at different angles, creating a kind of covered gallery that can shelter passers-by walking along the street. In modern Moscow architecture, such galleries are gradually becoming a characteristic technique - captivated by the charms of the Parisian Rivoli street, the capital's residents welcome them, and for developers this is a reason to increase the area of the building, "hanging" it over the street.
Otherwise, the facades of the office building combine two ideas. Most of the surfaces are white. The rhythm and frequency of the placement of openings within the horizontal rows changes smoothly, thickening towards the corners and thinning towards the middle. The authors compare this motif with a fabric, somewhere stretched, and somewhere dazzling with folds, as well as with a punch card - both of these comparisons have their own truth. However, this is only the background for the main idea.
The main theme can be defined as follows: before us is a collection of various textures used in our time in office buildings. The white perforated fabric of the main planes is cut through by chaotic large ledges and ledges, each of which can be understood as a fragment of the facade of another office building and transplanted to the iCube building as a result of an architectural and surgical operation. Here you can find glass consoles-bay windows, both shiny and smooth, and lined with diamond-shaped metal frames. Some inserts, due to the alternation of transparent and dark glasses, resemble giant plasma screens - and, accordingly, evoke "media" associations. There are also brick insets, reminiscent of the numerous Moscow buildings, which are now increasingly sheathed with plastic panels - as if there was a brick building, "dressed" it, and left a few fragments.
Facade inserts have a practical meaning - pieces of "special" facades mark the public areas located inside - all of them, thus, turn out to be three-story high. All together it looks a bit like an archaeological museum, where fragments of original masonry, graffiti and other things are exhibited under glass of various shapes and sizes. But only here is the "museum" of modern office facades, fragments of different architectural solutions, framed in a calm white frame.
As a result, the usual facade of an office building in the iCube project turned into a cheerful postmodern cocktail of elements of rationalism, digital architecture and author's imagination. But some pieces of the familiar glazing were nevertheless left here as a reminder or, rather, as an element of the game.
