Chameleon Fortress

Chameleon Fortress
Chameleon Fortress

Video: Chameleon Fortress

Video: Chameleon Fortress
Video: CHAMELEON VS GOKILLA. Неубиваемые вертексы или одна ошибка и слив 2024, March
Anonim

The Paveletskaya industrial zone is rapidly changing its function. Business centers here grow like mushrooms after the rain, although some production facilities are still in operation, like the Moscow Yeast Factory. In the context of the ban on office construction in the center of the capital, the location of the territory in the immediate vicinity of the Garden Ring stimulates the process of its development by developers. Nevertheless, a high-quality architectural environment has not yet formed here: many abandoned buildings, strange alleys, little greenery and public spaces, and constant traffic jams on the main streets.

It is not surprising that in such an environment the business center, designed by the workshop "Sergey Kiselev & Partners", resembles a fortress. Four office buildings and the volume of the hotel are arranged along the perimeter around the courtyard. They look like either thick walls or towers - in any case, the courtyard looks closed - as if the architects, moving away from the uncomfortableness of the surrounding industrial zone, fenced off an office oasis here. At the end of the cartoon "Earth before the beginning of time" the main characters happily reach a safe valley, which was not destroyed by the elements - there is a lot of food, plants are blooming, and friends are waiting for them. So is this courtyard with a hill-square in the middle, canteens and shops on the ground floors, surrounded by floors designed specifically for the "white collar". It is into the courtyard that the main entrances to the buildings of the business center go, while the emergency doors are oriented towards the outer streets bordering the site, which have not yet completely cast off the image of the "working district".

The interior facades were conceived primarily of glass from the very beginning. The outer ones, on the contrary, were originally supposed to be made of light stone. They were designed to “enclose” the complex, developing a classical scheme equally close to a medieval monastery and a Renaissance palazzo: outside there is a wall, a dense “skin”, and in the courtyard there is a space of transition between “outside” and “inside”. The walls of the courtyard are usually more open and friendly - only earlier, arcades were used for this, and now - the transparency of glass bay windows.

The second challenge of using stone on external surfaces was probably more pragmatic - this material is better suited for building in the city center. Here, however, other restrictions came into force. According to the visual landscape analysis, the complex turned out to be too noticeable for this part of the city. The Moskomarkhitektura pointed out to the authors that the business center “exceeded the town planning significance” - it turned out to be too active a “second plan” both for Paveletskaya Square and for the nearby Trinity Church in Kozhevniki.

In order to reduce distortions of the historical appearance of the Paveletskaya area, the architects covered the outer facades of the complex with glass screens - giant "mirrors" designed to reflect the sky. They are brought out above the roofs - therefore, the volumes are devoid of cornices from the outside - this allows you to soften the border between buildings and the sky, as in a watercolor drawing. Thus, when viewed from the side of the river, from the 4th Derbenevsky lane, the background for the church in Kozhevniki will be not a stone giant, but the sky - not real, but reflected.

Paradoxically, with the departure of the stone, the facades have become no less, and even more closed - only now this isolation is akin not to a fortress wall, but to some kind of futuristic force field. A smooth shield appeared in front of the brick massifs - an ephemeral but impenetrable shell, lined with horizontal stripes of interfloor ceilings and a rhythmically verified grid of thin joints between the glass panes.

In some places the glass planes are suddenly "pressed through" - as if it had occurred to someone to open the transoms of very large windows (in fact, there are, of course, no vents here) - and on the facades, again very flattened, triangular in niche plan. As if someone, for greater picturesqueness, scattered watercolor shadows on the surface. The lines of the interfloor ceilings do not support this movement, but remain unchanged, forming "ribs" - and making one think that the hulls on the outside are gripped by something like rigid hoops. It is easy to see that this technique resembles the ledges and edges of a house on Savvinskaya embankment and a similar technique on the stone facades of the lower volume of the Mirax Plaza. However, here it is solved more subtly and graphically, more strictly - probably because the material is not stone, but glass. According to the chief architect of the project, Vladimir Labutin, he came up with these elements after seeing in a car magazine how the grilles were taken from the Ford Mustang.

In turn, the reflective glass surface transforms the rather massive volumes of the business center into a chameleon mimicking the environment - which is typical of those who defend themselves. Therefore, glass screens can also be understood as a kind of shields. However, here you can also recall the ideology of feng shui, according to which mirrors do not allow energy from the outside to penetrate. That is, the yard is again safe. And the dark brick finish on the lower floors lends credence to the look of old brick factory buildings. And it suggests a comparison with another building of the workshop "Sergei Kiselev and Partners" (the head of which was also Vladimir Labutin) - with the office building "Hermitage Plaza". There, the “material base” of the building is also clad in dark bricks, and in front of the courtyard facade there is a glass screen reflecting the sky. There the glass planes are inclined towards the sky - here, on Paveletskaya, the solution is stricter and more laconic - however, the similarity of the approach is still guessed. It is based on brick "matter", inside, in the courtyard, large glass bay windows protrude from the dark base, and a glass "shield-mirror" covers all this from the city.

The only "beast" from which there is "no protection" here is a car. The entrance and exit of the two-level underground garage is organized directly under the central hill. Although hardly anyone will accelerate here, given the presence of a checkpoint at the entrance and the winding paths to the courtyard, either from Kozhevnicheskaya Street or from Letnikovskaya. The isolation of the office world is disturbed, perhaps, only by the presence of the hotel building. On the other hand, it is already known that the entire center will be populated by one large foreign corporation, so that its “isolation in its shell” turns out to be quite logical.

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