In fact, says Dmitry Alexandrov, the main prototype of this project was Geode - the glass sphere of the technopark La Villette in Paris, built by Adrian Fansilbert and Gerard Chamayou and opened in 1985. The French Geode accommodates the Palais des Sports, ours was supposed to have a congress center with restaurants. For the French, the glass sphere most of all resembles a spaceship that has landed in the vicinity of a technopark, it is very independent and self-sufficient, if not to say - closed in itself.
In Dmitry Aleksandrov's project, a glass sphere is surrounded by a giant eight-story red wall without a single window and is similar to its scale and resembles a hinge or some other element of a gigantic mechanism. The ball is not at all isolated, but, on the contrary, is actively included in the composition, consisting of equally strict and laconic volumes. The sphere is connected to the surrounding ring by three travelators, which also play a role in this mechanic.
The ring is not a wall at all, as one might think from the outside. It is a ring-shaped building that arose out of the need to support a tall 60-story tower. The site is located in a bend of the Moskva River and, as a result, it is very damp; groundwater is close here. That, on the one hand, necessitated the creation of a support for the high-rise volume, and on the other hand, did not allow the parking lots to be buried in the ground. It was decided to place the parking spaces in a ring-shaped building along the outer contour. Cars do not need windows - this is how a solid “fortress wall” arose. The inner contour of the ring is occupied by a shopping center - its walls, by contrast, are entirely glass. Thus, the shopping complex is illuminated from the inside of the ring. A complex play of glare and reflections should have arisen here - the curved glass of the ring-shaped "fort" would be reflected in Geode's spherical mirror and vice versa.
The sphere is not located at all in the center of the resulting circular square, but is shifted towards the river, as if starting from the third element of the composition - a 60-storey tower, standing in the opposite part of the ring. A four-star hotel and business center are conceived in the tower. The walls of the hotel are brick, the business center is made of glass, and the separation of the two functions inside the tower is clearly visible on the facades. The upper part of the tower is designed in the form of a characteristic Kremlin "dovetail". This "speaking" form, again - like everything else - of very large dimensions, meets cars entering Moscow along the Leningradskoye Highway from Sheremetyevo. And unambiguously indicates to those passing by where they are going - ahead of the Kremlin. In this light, the fortress laconicism of the ring wall and the supposed choice of red terracotta for the facades add up to a completely obvious image, just as touristy as it is a government image.
