The multifunctional complex is to be built at the intersection of Nakhimovsky Prospect and Odessa Street, on the site of a former laundry factory. The area with the old patrimonial estate name Zyuzino is now built up with five-storey buildings interspersed with newer panel houses and industrial zones. However, by Moscow standards, it is already quite “old” and green - three blocks to the south of Bitsevsky Park, next to the opposite side of Nakhimovsky Prospect is the “Kotlovka Sports Park”, and the surrounding five-story buildings have been overgrown with trees over the years of their existence. In addition to environmental observations, as well as industrial and typical architecture, there is no other context nearby - the church of the end of the 17th century, which is distant several blocks away, cannot be considered as such. Therefore, nothing prevents the appearance of an ensemble of three large glass buildings at the crossroads of motorways.
The complex is curious due to the combination of unconditional massiveness and some, let's say, restrained elegance, apparently designed to redeem this obvious bulk, large structure (on 1.7 hectares, about 150,000 m2). It consists of three buildings, arched around a common center - when viewed from above, the complex looks like an open, divided into parts cylinder. And when looking at the plan, he discovers a distant resemblance to a propeller - the "parts of the cylinder" are placed not exactly in a circle, but rather in a spiral.
The center of the imaginary propeller is a round square, curved driveways converge to it, which connect the buildings to each other and penetrate them through and through, providing entrances and exits from different sides. The square is not just a landscape or transport device - it acts as a pivot of the composition not only figuratively, but also literally. In the center of the square, a 12-meter-high round well was conceived; a tree was planted in the well. The roots of the tree are at a minus fourth level underground, its crown should be visible from the square, arranged on the roof of the stylobate. It turns out that the tree in the well denotes the center of the architectural ensemble, embodying its axis - a kind of mythological “tree of life” growing out of the ground.
Three buildings (two office buildings, one apartment, but outwardly they are similar) respond to the living “woody” core of the composition and seem to also begin to come to life. Walking around them, one would think that the buildings are moving, but not much, without a rush and tear, but in the same way as large trees do in a weak wind - slightly changing the shape of the crown.
The wiggle effect arises from two architectural techniques. First, the shapes of the buildings are not strictly inscribed in the sections of the cylinder. The width of the enclosures varies from bottom to top: their end walls are not rectangular, but trapezoidal. They narrow and widen, and so that if one end of the building narrows downward, then the other - the opposite - narrows upward. In addition to the main arched shape, the hull volumes acquire a slight diagonal curvature, a hint of the shape that is given to the propeller blades for better aerodynamics. But again, all this is not too much. To discern that the logic of contraction-expansion is exactly this, it will be possible only by walking around many times and analyzing the sensations. The first impression is more direct - the cases are not just curved, they also smoothly change their thickness.
The second technique for making buildings flexible is associated with the solution of facades. They are divided into horizontal bands of two floors each. The front plane of each tape is inclined towards the sky in such a way as if each pair of two floors is inscribed in a giant pyramid. On top of it, another pyramid of the same type is put on, the next one on it, and so on - the effect is a bit like a giant toy tree made up of glass tiers. It also resembles the scales of an armadillo or plates of armor of a medieval knight - in those places where the iron shell had to bend, the plates were found on top of each other and provided some flexibility. In buildings on Odessa Street, the contours of the buildings fluctuate, change the thickness of the volumes from top to bottom and from bottom to top - this requires a visual “margin of flexibility” from buildings. Which is due to the fact that the volumes seem to be composite - you must admit that the "scaly" shape is easier to bend than a rigid glass parallelepiped.
Of course, the described effect exists only at the image level - no one is going to bend the bodies in real time. However, they look as if it is possible. As if inside buildings, for example, special mechanisms were hidden that allow them to change their configuration - for example, in order to provide the tree in the well with maximum light throughout the day. Or to slowly turn the building itself after the sun and vice versa, running away into the shadows. Again, these are just fantasies. But if mechanisms of this kind suddenly appear, the shape of the buildings of the multifunctional complex on Odessa Street will be a suitable architectural solution for them.
In the meantime, within the framework of a static architecture, the technique serves some other, closer purposes. First, it protects the top floor of the ribbons from the sun, as the console above it casts a shadow. Secondly, the glass planes of the "ribbons" face the sky and reflect it more efficiently than vertical facades do. It is impossible not to recall that it was for the sake of reflecting the sky that a similar technique of inclined glass ribbons was used in the courtyard facade of the Hermitage Plaza by Sergei Kiselev (however, there were no bends and the motive was aimed at solving the problem of fitting into the urban context). And finally, the third - the inclined ribbons are doubled, and the horizontal lines of the interfloor floors are softened by the "dissolving" gradient color. The horizontals are accentuated across one - this hides the true scale of the building, eliminates the fragmentation of the stripes and makes it more sculptural - which is especially good when looking out of a car window, when the traveler does not have time to peer into details.
Among the Russian projects of Choban & Kuznetsov there are ornamental and pictorial, there are stone ones - analyzing tradition, and this project could, relatively speaking, be classified as “stirring modernism”. It is glass and metal, simple and austere, but not quite. There is movement in it - born within the architectural form and frozen, but seemingly not for long, provoking the observer to fear that the buildings will move again.
It is bad for such a stir to be plotless, and the ensemble has an intrigue. For example this. In the former estate, and now a block-panel, although not cheap area, a reinforced-concrete office and hotel complex appears on the inside, and on the outside. As expected, its parking spaces take up the entire area in length, in width and four floors in depth. As expected, its architecture is modern and austere. Three buildings of the complex are inscribed in a simple geometric shape of a cylinder - here you can recall the Moscow hotel "Cosmos", which is two-thirds of a very regular cylinder. But in the middle of the concrete parking lots something alien appears - a tree “sprouts” like an echo of the place's long-lost manor identity. This sprouting forces the architecture to react to it - to "come alive" and "move". Which it does, breaking the smooth glass surface with striped "scales" and bending its contours. But all this is only an architectural plot, the house, of course, will not be dug up and will not go anywhere, it will just make a little noise and freeze. Like a tree.
