Neoclassical apartment building, built by the architect G. A. Gelrich at the beginning of the 20th century, located on Shchepkina Street, which runs parallel to Prospekt Mira. Later, the house received boring and devoid of decor side buildings. Neighboring houses 18 and 24, as well as 25 and 13 on Shchepkina street, and house 19 on Gilyarovskogo street are also parts of the historical development of the quarter. The preservation of the neoclassical facade during the reconstruction of the Gelrich house seemed to be the only correct solution, since it is the facade that forms the image and place of the house in its surroundings. Preserving only the facade by adding a new building with two floors of underground parking to it is not an easy engineering task. During construction, the facade will be specially reinforced, literally "suspended" above the ground.
During the reconstruction, the house completely changes its layout, the side buildings are demolished, and the yard space between them is built up. The new object will completely occupy the site and will be precisely inscribed in its boundaries, quite tightly adjacent to its neighbors. Therefore, in order not to deprive house 19 on Gilyarovskogo street of daylight, the new volume became stepped - this was the shape of its upper part and even the plan from the side of the courtyard. The height of the historical part of the building is 5 floors, and the new volume located behind it varies from 5 (on the right side) to 7 floors.
The architects made three new facades modernist, but with an obvious aftertaste of Art Deco or even rational Art Nouveau. There is a lot of glass in them, but transparent planes are drawn over the thin vertical lines of a light yellowish-pink stone. These stone strips “grow” from the flat stone base at the bottom and “grow” into the horizontal strip at the top - as if high and frequent rectangular holes were cut through the stone prism. Interfloor rods slightly balance this ode to verticalism, however, they are "recessed" in the plane of the glass - so the verticals prevail.
The thin and austere grid of the stone and glass façade may resemble Rerberg's Central Telegraph (1925-1927) or its Northern Insurance Society (1909-1911). As you can see, the technique belongs equally to the tenth and twenties of the last century - so there is every reason to understand it as a reference to the historical context of the preserved neoclassical facade. Strictly speaking, in the 1910s, the house could well have received a similar extension. It is characteristic that in the interpretation of Andrei Romanov and Yekaterina Kuznetsova, the motive acquires very modern features - an emphasized simplicity and lightness, unattainable by the means of the 1910s - 1920s.
The courtyard facade is divided into several protruding - receding forms, which also facilitates its perception in the company of the surrounding buildings. The house ceases to look like a giant solid block (which it really is) - and seems to be a group of buildings, designed in the same style.
The plan of the new building will consist of two parts - a rectangle elongated along Shchepkina Street in place of a tenement house, beveled on one side by a wall of a historical "neighbor" adjacent to it, and a completely new courtyard part, also rectangular in plan, only narrower, so that its street is practically invisible. An oval atrium is drawn between them in the center of the plan - the main innovative core of the project. This atrium has a very complex plastic, it is twisted like a tornado, permeates all the floors of the building, bends towards the lobby and, as it were, captures the person entering a huge iridescent funnel. The dynamics of its diagonal twisting does not develop deep into the building, does not spread, but is collected by a powerful bundle of lines of force penetrating the building through and through.
Generally speaking, this metaphor of a vortex at the center of an ordered structure cut through by a nonlinear rod flow looks clever. After all, where does the tornado arise? At the border of the streams of warm and cold air. Here, too, we have a border of two zones - one, relatively speaking, historical, adjoins the old facade and retains the memory of the contours of the former house. The second is modern, and it is at their junction that a vortex, a funnel, a whirlpool appears. Which, however, does not move anywhere and does not even break free, as one might think of a vortex. No, the atrium is localized, hidden in the body of the building and is perceived only in the interior. A small lantern to illuminate it will not even be visible from Shchepkina Street.
The atrium is located exactly in the middle of the building between two staircase and elevator nodes and connects four office blocks of each of the floors, the layout of which is standard. Above the first floor, where the lobby is located, it literally hangs over a huge glass "pipe". The lobby offers the main perspective of this mesmerizing structure. The authors of the project are going to use a special dichromatic glass of the German company SCHOTT in the atrium, the color of which changes depending on the angle of view, the incidence of sunlight and the background. The effect arises from a combination of low and high refractive layers - as a result, visitors can observe a rainbow inside a building or look from the first floor into a giant "kaleidoscope", refracting everything that happens around into fantastic images.
Any reconstruction with adaptation is a complex decision balancing the desire to preserve history and the possibilities of modern architecture. In this project, Andrei Romanov and Yekaterina Kuznetsova managed not only to combine one and the other, but also to artistically beat their collision by hiding its main highlight in the very middle of the building - a biomorphic well of a glass vortex.
