Business parks have become more and more popular in recent years, and not only because the construction of offices in the center of Moscow is now prohibited by the mayor. This typology, reminiscent of a "business town", is intended for large tenants - reputable companies that can afford to buy out an entire building and place their representative office in it. The best of them are surrounded by greenery and boast a well-developed infrastructure - in other words, from the point of view of employees, a good business park combines comfortable conditions with an environmentally friendly environment. This type of office construction is just beginning to develop in our country - we have already written about one of the first Moscow complexes of this kind, the Krylatskie Hills business park, designed and built by ABD architects.
Now Dmitry Alexandrov's workshop is designing a new business park not far from Krylatskiye Hills and for the same customer - CMI Development. The closest neighbor is the future Rublyovo-Arkhangelskoye residential area near Moscow, the former City of Millionaires, which recently received the status of a federal housing program, the first stage of which is now also being designed by Dmitry Alexandrov. At some distance, there is a complex of buildings for the government of the Moscow region, built by Mikhail Khazanov. Thus, the new business park with the beautiful name “Baltia” will turn out to be a “business buffer” between the residential area and the administrative center of the Moscow region.
A month ago, the Alexandrov & Partners workshop presented to the customer three variants of the concept project of the future business park - and to the surprise of the architects, the most daring one was chosen. In it, rectangular glass cases are scattered across a vast territory of more than 6 hectares with seeming chaos at different oblique angles. The extreme corner points of the territory are "fixed" by two towers - the highest, 25-storey one, will meet cars going to Moscow from the region. On the other - the northern - part and from the side of the capital, a smaller tower is conceived (21 floors).
I must say that initially one of the wishes of the customer was a low number of storeys of buildings: in this case, the complex turned out to be denser and more evenly distributed over the territory. The appearance of the towers made it possible to collect the necessary square meters in them and make room for more greenery - the "park zone" itself.
And the park here is a real one. A cascade of four artificial ponds will stretch diagonally through it. Their presence, and even in such a “cascading” volume, gives the office town an unexpected resemblance to a mansion near Moscow. As if it was being built on the site of an old park - but no, the ponds will be completely new, nothing but a simple roadside meadow and forest has never been here. The existing fragment of the forest, with a triangular "wedge" intruding into the boundaries of the site, will be preserved and improved; lawns with new trees will be added to it - in total, green areas will occupy at least a third of the entire territory. This obvious ecological luxury (quite logical for suburban construction) has at least two explanations: firstly, the already mentioned towers took over a significant amount of space and made it possible to free up a maximum of space. Secondly, two high and medium pressure gas pipelines pass through the site, which cannot be built over.
The lines of the highways, coupled with visual connections, influenced the plan of the future business center, the freedom of composition noted above, in fact, is not at all arbitrary. The layout is determined by the intersection of two grids superimposed on one another - say the co-authors of the project Ksenia Kanunnikova and Anna Vartapetova. One "grid" consists of internal highways, it is strictly perpendicular to the highway and divides the site into four large rectangles. The second, superimposed diagonally on top of it, echoes the lines of artificial ponds, park paths - and it also traces the lines of the walls of most of the glass buildings. Where both plan grids are included in the work, the outlines of buildings acquire the actual asymmetric irregularity: for example, the plan of the largest 25-storey tower becomes pentagonal.
All glass buildings will be interconnected by stylobates, which will house parking lots and various public areas: cafes, fitness, shops, etc. The outer walls of the stylobates are supposed to be made in places closed, and in places where parking lots are - permeable and ventilated, covered with metal gratings. On the roofs of the stylobates, squares with trees are supposed - in addition to the main green massif grouped around the ponds.
The volumes of stylobates fulfill another important task: in the northwestern part of the territory, their volumes line up in one broken line, but almost a continuous line, fencing off the business center from the variegated beauty of the neighboring cottage village near Moscow. It is assumed that the workers and visitors of the "Baltia" will see only wood, ponds and glass with metal of modern architecture. And they will apparently live in "Rublevo-Arkhangelsk".
