The office building on the Garden Ring near the Kursk railway station was designed for the tax inspectorate and tax police, but during the design the tax police were disbanded. The northern half of the building became a rented office space - the Citydel business center, while the southern half remained under the jurisdiction of the tax office.
It grew on the site of a single-tier glass of the 1970s - a gap in a row of frontal buildings. On the left - a four-story apartment building of the 19th century, on the right - several Stalinist houses, which at one time were built here in order to increase the scale of the Garden Ring, turning it from a bourgeois (cf. apartment building) into a heroic one. At that time there was barely enough material for a heroic scale, which is easy to notice when looking at the end of the Stalinist house - it barely carries its cornice. In our time, on the contrary, there is a lot of matter - the architect is required to create not a screen for the avenue, but many square meters. And the situation was reversed. The building is limited - leveling in height, forcing it to adapt to its historical neighbors - but it still grows, where can it go?
The building turned out to be very large. It is impossible to deny this, although in order to hide its real dimensions, almost all methods known in modern Moscow practice were used here - alignment of cornices in height with neighboring houses; rhythmic quotes; glass planes reflecting the sky; stepwise increase in height into the depth of the site and stepwise cutting of too high volumes. I would even like to suspect, in addition to the well-known, some other magical methods - because when viewed from a distance, the building seems no larger than its neighbors and even seems to bend along the Garden Ring line. Approaching - the facade is straight, and the volume is rapidly moving towards, almost growing before our eyes. According to the author, Vladimir Plotkin, “there were even too many bows in different directions”.
But despite the "bows", the building did not lose its face at all. The author's method is easily guessed in it, and it seems to me that it was the method in this case that allowed the building to completely and completely preserve its identity, despite many requirements and restrictions. This probably happened because the buildings of Vladimir Plotkin grow like crystals. They have some basis - maybe it would be correct to call it a module - responsible for the shape of each cell and for the way they are connected. Following this law, the cells are attached to each other, grow, forming larger structures.
This approach to the construction of architectural matter has twofold consequences - it means austerity and structure, and deeply internal, originating from the "crystal lattice". On the other hand, the same crystal lattice paradoxically endows the building with almost endless freedom of transformation and growth. The structure, relying on its law-module, can continue to grow in almost any way, reacting to environmental conditions. In other words, a building, abundantly endowed with internal regularity, turns out to be much less constrained by external frames than its counterparts, devoid of this immanent crystallinity. It seems to him that the restrictions are not so scary - it "outgrows" them and still becomes what it was going to be. Therefore, a building can rise and fall, contract and expand. Open up, allowing the underground collector of the Chernogryazka River to flow and merge into a massive volume around the well of the courtyard. And even to form inside yourself another, half-open courtyard, similar to the street.
The building has two types of façade planes. Some are covered with wide white and glass stripes connected by lines of horizontal windows. Despite the sterility of the "paper" white color, these planes are more material and protrude where a relatively impenetrable "serious" facade is needed: on the Garden Ring, where they form a "front" front volume, on the sides of the mentioned inner street and on the back side facing to the railroad.
The second type of planes is glass. They are also drawn by horizontals, but thin and grayish in the color of the glass. These planes form caesuras, depressions and - precisely calculated reflections, working like mirrors. Contrasting white-glass stripes are well reflected, continuing their lines in glass mirrors - this makes the depressions appear deeper, and the mass of the building looks more indented than it really is (which also works to reduce the volume).
This technique is especially noticeable in the inner “street” between the two buildings - its dead-end end is glass-mirrored, the stripes are reflected in it and the street seems to be longer. Thus, the building reflects not only the sky (which everyone is used to) and not even the surrounding buildings (they are also used to this), it reflects itself, tying some intrigue inside itself, complementing the asymmetric play of rectangles, hollows and ledges.
Stripes and reflections are characteristic not only of the exterior of this building, but also of its interiors, in particular, the halls of the main tenant company, Citydel. Here the stripes are softer, because they are colored and glow, but their rhythm is the same, and it is also repeated in the shiny plane of the polished floor, creating a hint of "antiworld" underfoot - however, unobtrusive.
