If you drive along Leninsky Prospekt from the center towards the region, then after the semicircular Gagarin Square it will look like the following picture. On the right are late Stalinist brick houses, enclosing their courtyards with giant squares. On the left, the pompous palaces of the institutes of the Academy of Sciences stroll around, picking up the theme set at the beginning of the avenue by the Kazakov and Beauvais hospitals. They look like manor houses, in which everything is enlarged several times, starting with the plan and ending with capitals (usually Corinthian). The layout is also similar - symmetrical, with courtyard and outbuildings. Such large, lush, massive palaces. They have large territories.
The reconstruction of one such palace - the Institute of Metallurgy and Materials Science (IMET RAS) - is dedicated to the project of the company "Sergey Kiselev and Partners". This is an investment construction: the institute provides land and receives in return a part of the newly built premises, the rest are occupied by offices. The project involves the construction of four buildings - following the rhythm set by the existing buildings, they are located around the existing building with columns.
It is quite obvious that the project fell into a very specific, holistic post-war context. It is interesting how he reacted to it: two large "front" buildings, facing Leninsky Prospekt, turned into buildings-mirrors.
They consist of two parts: on the back side they are stone buildings, the silhouette of which is formed by large steps, and the facades - by strict ribbon windows and horizontal balconies (the same are the two small "courtyard" buildings). On the front side, facing the avenue, these very strict and restrained volumes are adjoined by high - one-third higher - plates, completely covered with mirrored glass. For greater uniformity of the plane, the joints between the glasses are smoothed as much as possible. These facades look to the north-west and are almost always in shadow - it was assumed that shaded gigantic mirrors would reflect the illuminated, opposite side of the avenue, as well as the sky, dissolving in it by the curves of the upper part of the plates.
The "mirrors" are very large - each of them has 20 floors. In order to revive their surface a little, it was initially supposed to use glasses of different degrees of transparency, arranging them in a chaotic "pixel" rhythm. The Architectural Council approved such a decision, but the customer did not - fearing that the uneven lighting inside would cause complaints from office tenants. Then, to revive the plane, lamellas, built into the joints between the glasses and very high, were used - their height helps to hide the interfloor horizontals. It turns out as if it rained and drew rare stripes on the glass.
So mirrors are a way to fit into context. No curtsies, ruffles, plaster or anything else. The stone is only in the form of a giant "stand for mirrors". This topic is not new - since it became possible to make large glass, architecture thinks about what it literally reflects. Generally speaking, baroque interiors began to work in earnest with mirrors (let us recall the Tsarskoye Selo Palace, though). And the architecture of modernism, one might say, is half glass and cannot imagine itself without glass.
And yet, Sergey Kiselev's company has been developing the "theme of mirrors" especially carefully in recent years, moving from calm forms and gray-striped facades to giant glass screens designed to dissolve buildings in a context with almost cinematic believability. This technique is used on the courtyard facade of the Hermitage-Plaza, where the glass stripes are turned towards the sky. We find it in the project of a business complex near Paveletskaya Square: glass "shields" there make buildings more impenetrable and more contextual than stone.
Probably, such an adherence to giant mirrors is associated with the enlargement of the scale - previously, Sergei Kiselev & Partners built separate, small houses in the city center, using large stained-glass windows in them would be more of a challenge than a disguise. Now the projects are large, from 100 to 400 thousand square meters. meters, and the approach to them is different. They should seem invisible, like water or steam, this is the only way to "hide" such large buildings. "Hide" - in this case, the expression is, of course, figurative. Houses are clearly visible, even glass ones. It even seems to me that these games with mirrors are more semantic, theatrical, and require the spectator to get used to and imagine in order to start working for real, to “absorb” the surroundings and produce a picture of the “through the looking glass”. The whole point is in the looking glass - in the reflection we no longer see the same world, but some other, albeit similar.
In this case, however, mirrors are not destined to be embodied. IMET RAN has a new director, and the new director wanted the buildings to be built closer to the red line of Leninsky Prospekt. It is impossible to move these gigantic volumes so close, even mirrored ones. And if the buildings are made lower in height, then the investor will not receive the desired areas. Therefore, the project is likely to remain on paper. Through the looking glass.
