The Kempinski Plaza project on the banks of the Grebnoy Canal in Nizhny Novgorod is a multifunctional complex of four buildings. Only one of them (though the most prominent) is intended for a hotel, in another - offices and a conference room, and finally two out of four are occupied by apartments. Quite an up-to-date alignment. In addition, the place is beautiful and profitable - on the one side there is a canal, on the other there is a park, city streets are nearby, but at a distance. And the architectural solution is modern - the buildings are lined up in a dense row, boldly curved along a sinusoid, which provides insolation and opens up beautiful views. The line, made up of buildings, is one, and the facades are all different - which allows you to divide the houses by function and diversify the impression of the complex, which is rather gigantic against the background of 5-6 storey buildings of the nearest street.
The techniques used here are familiar from other SPeeCH projects - a serpentine bend, striped stone blinds, a tree in the yard, different facades … And the resulting effect is completely different. First of all, the variety of facades, known from the projects of building blocks, here turns out to be compressed into a significantly smaller area. If in "Gardens of Cultures" on Pyatnitskoye Shosse, the variety of appearance is distributed quarterly and generously diluted with trees - here the buildings of the hotel complex are lined up in one ribbon and may well be perceived as a whole. It is as if in an English park from the time of Catherine the Gothic, Chinese and hut pavilions lined up along the bend of the main alley instead of hiding at a considerable distance from each other.
True, in the SPeeCH project for Kempinski we are not dealing with a variety of styles, but rather with a variety of ornamentation. Ornament is loved by architects in principle: to a greater or lesser extent, it is present in every project; The first issue of ‘SPEECH:’ was devoted to the same topic. However, in this project, the activity of the ornament is unexpectedly high even for these authors. He seemed to have forgotten his place - this is not a decoration, not an addition, or even an ephemeral picture superimposed on a building. Somewhere the ornament distorts the perspective, somewhere the surface rears, and the motives replace each other with such density that one might think that the bending of the buildings is somehow connected with the activity and diversity of the facades.
The general impression is motley and bright, the definition “fabulous” fits well with it. The fairytale effect is supported by a golden sculpture - a tree with a firebird - in the middle of a fountain in the main courtyard. This is not the first time that the tree has become the semantic core of the project for SPeeCH. Only in the office complex on Odessa was it a living tree, but here it is golden, and it resembles the mechanical amusements that foreign ambassadors gave to the Russian tsars in the 17th century. The tree is important, it becomes the core of the composition, but it does not provide answers to all questions, in particular, it does not explain the unexpected riot of colors and drawings.
The answer, apparently, lies in the contextual, or, shall we say, geopolitical plane. Those. the reason - the so-called "genius of the place", a hero popular among architects in general, and SPeeCH has received its own, special interpretation.
In the commentary to the project, the authors sparingly mentioned that they used "techniques of historical building". But the urban development itself is not so bright (not much more colorful than Moscow). But in the history of the culture of Nizhny Novgorod, you can find at least three "reference points".
The first is the 17th century, the time of the unconditional prosperity of the trading city of Nizhny. And although now the buildings of the 17th century in the city are almost all white, it is not for nothing that the architecture of this century is called "ornamental". And - there is one famous "postcard" view (probably everyone who has ever been in the city knows it) - on which the strange knobby bulbs of the heads of the Stroganov Church of the Nativity flaunt against the background of the Volga expanses. Such unusual, but undoubtedly eye-catching church chapters became fashionable at the turn of the century, at the end of the “Naryshkinsky style”; they were also in Moscow (for example, at the Church of Our Lady of Vladimir on Nikolskaya), but most of all they are characteristic of Stroganov churches. What is not so important for our history, but more importantly something else - these Stroganov "bumps", only enlarged about 20 times, can be recognized in the reddish diamond-shaped protrusions covering the facade of the hotel.
The second theme is the famous Nizhny Novgorod Makaryevskaya fair, a symbol (and for a long time a source) of the city's prosperity. The fair is a motley thing by definition, and the point here is not in the late industrial building of the 19th century, but in the image that haunts us at the mention of this word. The fair is something Rabelaisian, a kind of congress of everything in the world, sheer fun, a giant cornucopia, in which the more of all sorts of different things and the closer, the better. And since this carnival and commercial happiness is a symbol of Nizhny Novgorod and a significant part of his life, then the image of the city gets a corresponding shade. And I must also say that over the 70 years of Soviet power, all Russian fairs have completely and completely wiped out. What happens now is either provincial business exhibitions or municipal fakes for fun. But a fairy tale remained, in books and in films - and as such, it is even more colorful, vivid and attractive than reality. Lower - one might say, the capital of this lost Volga fairy tale.
And the third topic, which is so necessary for round-the-clock counting and, moreover, is the closest in formal and stylistic terms - the architecture of Nizhny Novgorod in the 1990s - early 2000s. Nizhny Novgorod residents were the first to try to revive the fairy tale of their city, who created a flowery, slightly homegrown, but cozy, sincere and attractive Volga image. By the end of the 1990s, there were few topics for architectural conversation in the capitals - everyone was talking about Nizhny. Kempinski also picks up the bright, in an amicable, original spirit of Nizhny Novgorod architecture. But it only seems to multiply it by four (maybe in proportion to the increase in size? - most of the buildings in Nizhny Novgorod are small …).
Thus, in the brightness and variety of the facades, as well as in the magic bird holding them together on the tree, you can see the reflection of at least three Nizhny Novgorod fairy tales. Obviously, SPeeCH is thus looking for the theme of the Nizhny Novgorod Volga region, just as it used to look for the theme of Moscow (art deco, stone). The bottom one turns out to be flowery, fabulous. There is a slightly different approach to context here than is widely accepted among our contemporaries. After all, how do architects (and coordinators) usually understand context? The first way is visual analysis. This is when they take pictures of panoramas and make sure that the building does not stick out from anywhere (although why, by the way, shouldn't it be visible from anywhere?). This is a way to hide a building, relatively speaking, by cutting off its head. The second way - let's call it mimicry - is also very visual in nature. The authors look at their immediate surroundings and make a new house of the same color, texture, and so on. There are other (less superficial) ways of thinking about the context, too, we wrote about some of them - you can, for example, be inspired by the nearest famous architectural monument, town-planning dominants of the environment … Well, and so on.
SPeeCH's way of thinking about context can be defined as historical and cultural. Instead of pretending to be like the genius of the place, the architects try to talk to him and find out who he is. The result is an architectural reflection on the meaning of the place - what it is, where and why it is, when it became so - a kind of embodied essay, which - as a result - is curious to analyze how interesting it can be to read the story of a local historian. Thus, the Moscow center becomes Byzantine, the Stalinist city becomes stone-classical, and the suburbs become a park filled with cultural reminiscences. So for the Volga region, an image was invented - "fabulous".
