The multifunctional complex "Fusion Park", completed in 2008, is already well known. They wrote about it several times (both during construction and immediately after its completion), and in the fall, as part of the "Days of Architecture", an excursion took place on this - completely new - work of the architect Vladimir Plotkin. Which, as we know, manages to successfully build modernist buildings even in the city center. The past year, by the way, can be considered "fruitful" - few of the famous Moscow architects completed so many buildings in this hectic pre-crisis year. Vladimir Plotkin has three of them: Arbitration on Seleznevskaya Street, Tax on Zemlyanoy Val - and Fusion Park in Khamovniki.
In my opinion, one of the curious features of the architecture of this complex is that there is a park here (and even a good one, Park Trubetskoy or named after Mandelstam), but fusion (fusion, Latin: merging, mixing) is not … Of course, it’s ridiculous to expect an architecture to match the real estate name, this doesn’t happen often. And yet: firstly, fusion is such a stylish word that it begs to be adjusted to it. And secondly (and this is the most curious thing) - I was involved in fusion projects.
The multifunctional complex consists of three parts: a residential building that occupies two out of three hectares of territory (this is a lot for the center); offices, stretching "in line" along the park and Usacheva street, and the museum of retro cars. As a rule, modern architects deal with functions in two opposite ways. Or they mix them inside the building “cut-in” (this is especially typical for towers), so that, for example, there are offices on the 5th floor, on the 15th dwelling, and on the 20th a hotel. Or - functions are divided into separate bodies. There are also hybrid variants ("rifled" turret plus hulls, etc.). In this case - at first there was option number two, divided into volumes, and then the office part absorbed the museum so that it was not visible from the outside - and it turned out rather a hybrid distribution. Why should we talk about it - because it seems to me that this change had a decisive impact on the architectural image of the complex.
In those early projects, where the museum was clearly visible from the outside, it looked like a transparent airship landing on the rooftops of offices, with a red display ramp inside. Cars, as in a showcase, would be visible from the outside - but not much, in the distance. So, to denote an object that can only be seen by going inside. Thus, the museum was not only a semantic, but also the main architectural feature, a large abstract sculpture on a pedestal.
A person with imagination could also see in the oval of a museum building a shape similar to the flattened nucleus of a comet. In this case, the other two corps could be understood as the "tail" of a celestial body. It turned out geometrically, but it looks like, and most importantly, this theme perfectly justified the plastic of "fusion" -mixing. The office building turned out to be in the central part - where the comet's plume is supposed to be rarefied. Accordingly, the plastic in it is thin, light, almost ephemeral. The residential building was located at the end of an imaginary "tail" - where the train heats up before it dries up - its facades were more brutal and the theme of "fusion" sounded here with a tense final chord.
And then the museum disappeared from the composition. He did not leave at all, but remained and even operates (although the heavy interiors of the exhibition halls were made by other architects) - but as an architectural unit he left, merging with the office space. Together with him, the plot disappeared, and as a result, the building became different. Instead of the dynamics of displacement and the experiences of the interpenetration of chaos and order, there was a division into two parts, each of which has its own, very specific face. As the author himself says, these are two neighboring buildings, with different themes, even with a different scale.
The apartment building consists of white tartan fabric, which has taken shape as a theme in a giant Airbus house. These cells clearly originate from modernist high-rise buildings, but they are significantly transformed - the color is light gray (white in the sun), the borders are thin, the grid is clear. Although in some places signs of the old "fusion" grow through it: some window no, no, and it will shrink, fall out of order, the pier will change its thickness or color to gray, and zigzag patterns are seen in place of the stairwells. But such places are few, especially compared to the project. Everything is orderly, clear and precise. We can even say that this white grid gradually becomes a specific feature of housing for Vladimir Plotkin, and therefore it serves, among other things, to designate a function. This is a completely crystallized and already recognizable image of the house. Compared to the project, the composition of the residential buildings has hardly changed - in terms of the plan, it looks like a two-sided ridge, with one longitudinal building and three transverse ones. The latter descend by steps to the Trubetskoy Park, but this is more a consequence of the coordination procedures than an architectural concept.
The office part is given over to massive plastic of simple shapes. It is in many ways the opposite of the house-neighbor: the main tone here is dark, not light, the windows are not checkered, but tape, and the scale is larger: the windows combine two floors. The architecture loses the lightness inherent in a residential building, and is imbued with laconic meaning. But above all, of course, this simplicity and this enlargement refer us to the main source - the Russian avant-garde. I don't know if the author thought about the classics of architectural modernism, but if they could dispose of modern materials, they could probably build something similar.
The main facade of the office building facing the street is formed by four identical L-shaped projections. Their large 5-storey volumes with huge corner consoles are defiantly simple. Each, if you look closely, is not so much like the letter "G" as, due to the drawing of the piers on the "P" or even on the "S" - in a word, some kind of letter, brutal like Mayakovsky, but also huge, encrypted in the building. When they line up, there are stable allusions to what we could all observe in the 1970s on Kalinin Avenue, when inscriptions like "USSR" and "KPSS" were laid out from the glowing windows of book-houses. The inscriptions were strange, but they became one of the vivid stagnant memories. So the effect is obvious. Of course, it would be more than stupid to suspect the author of encrypting the inscriptions. Rather, there is a kindred device here: an integral form, original and therefore noticeable, reinforced by scale and repetition - all together makes the observer suspect that she may be speaking. But no, it never happened - no monograms, just pure art.
This office building has a few more secrets and features. For example, photographer Yuri Palmin discovered in him the same perspective effect in the mirror of window reflections as in the Tax Office building on Zemlyanoy. But there was one "pseudo-street", and here there are four of them according to the number of ledges. Needless to say, this gives the building depth, complicates perception and hints at some kind of looking glass. However, the world of reflections is one of the favorite heroes of the architecture of Vladimir Plotkin.
Thanks to mini-streets, half of which are real and the other are mirrored, the author managed to overcome one of the unpleasant problems of modern buildings in the city center - the problem of a covered gallery. Usually, Rivoli Street does not work out in Moscow, but something dark and damp appears, such that pedestrians try to bypass it even on the roadway. It never happened here. Small columns have given way to massive blank panels, on which the very protrusions - "letters" rest. It would seem to be gloomy. But the entire inner wall is glowing. In addition, the "gallery" is torn apart by transverse "streets", which adds light and space to it.
So, after the museum was hidden, the complex changed - it changed the topic, focusing instead of confusion on separation. Two parts are even to some extent opposed to each other: light - dark, high (relatively) - extended, fine-mesh - large sculptural. Like yin and yang, or like rest at home - to a work rhythm. So in the process of development of the project "fusion" gave way to its opposite. It is interesting how sensitive the author’s reaction to changes in the structure of the complex turned out to be - the plan was preserved, and the final image changed radically.
