A modern city, wherever it is, in Europe, America or Asia, is multi-layered, each era that it has experienced contributes to its appearance. In Russia, once manor houses were replaced by squares with monuments to Lenin and commune houses, now they are being replaced by iconic buildings of "market" modernity - huge shopping centers, malls, as they are called in America, the ancestor of their typology. A relatively new trend is to make them part of multifunctional complexes, combining them with public spaces - shops, cafes, cinemas, as well as with office towers and hotels. I must admit that now this typology is a hit, Moscow architects and developers are actively developing it. A. Asadov's workshop, commissioned by the DVI Group, has developed two projects of shopping centers combined into one ensemble with an office tower for Tyumen and Lipetsk. Both complexes claim to be a new urban dominant, a kind of "lighthouse" visible from afar from everywhere and attracting residents. The complexes are similar in typology - and even in color - but differ in their architectural solutions.
The complex in Tyumen is part of an extensive concept of reconstruction of the territory of the former factory, which was also proposed by the architects of A. Asadov's studio. In addition to the retail and office building, there should be a large sports complex with a water park and several residential towers rising from the artificial landscape of the roof of another one-story volume. The realization of this concept begins with a shopping center project.
Its main part is an extended one-story volume, at the end of which a huge screen-bridge coils like a snake, partially raised on its legs and diving under the tower with offices. The V-shaped office building rises above the entire complex and surrounding buildings. The drawing of its facades reminds for a second of a theatrical curtain ajar, where a curved bridge managed to slip - as if in order to get behind the scenes of this whole performance. In front of the aforementioned bridge-screen, the authors proposed to arrange a small square and an amphitheater - a place for city festivals. The new square is conceived to resonate with the interiors of the complex, the design of which - curved streets with shifted store cells - simulates for visitors the feeling of movement in the old city when you don't know what awaits around the corner. As conceived by the architects, the outer and inner cities interact with each other, creating a semblance of community. And from the outside, the complex looks pointed, mobile, harshly energetic, as if it consists of copper-glass strips that grow together into buildings with the help of some unknown hidden mechanism.
The architectural solution of the shopping and office complex for Lipetsk is different - here the building looks like a submarine with streamlined and exfoliated surfaces. The "boat" floats into the urban space, and the high-rise tower serves as a "periscope" rising higher to see everything around.
In order to visually unite the retail space and the office tower, the architects covered them with a common roof of a fluid form that “hugs” the buildings from above, and somewhere from the side. The warm orange color is reminiscent of copper, and the rounded corners emphasize this metallic resemblance - wrapped in such a shell, the giant complex looks rather compact, at least solid. The “wrapper” is stratified in places, as if it had been cut into ribbons, and the general striping of the colors supports this game. According to Andrey Asadov, a local legend helped the architects in developing the silhouette of the complex - “it is known that there is a huge metallurgical plant in Lipetsk. We imagined that our cover was a piece of metal that was rolled out and wrapped around the building."
Given the rather large roof area, the architects tried to find a useful use for it, arranging there areas for outdoor cafes and additional green areas. The wrapped up main volume breaks through a spectacular visor in front of the entrance - it is pulled out far and literally cuts the parking area into two parts, inviting potential visitors.
I must say that both complexes use the theme of metal in combination with glass. This brownish-orange metal creates a common color between them, but it also defines the difference. In Tyumen, glass facades are covered with stripes resembling a sculpture carved from rusty iron (a very popular and expensive material now). It is characterized by sharp corners, wide slits, a certain touch of romantic brutality. In Lipetsk, the metal-imitating parts are more like copper - flexible, malleable, warm. The comparison, of course, is more than arbitrary - but nevertheless it allows you to make an idea of the "difference in character" of these similar buildings.
A multifunctional complex in a modern city is an important public space, one might say it is a city within a city. In two projects of multifunctional centers, A. Asadov's workshop made an attempt to create just such a holistic urban formation, which would become a new dominant of the cities of Tyumen and Lipetsk.
