The business center really began to be designed long before the mind-blowing surges in world currencies. The customers turned to Sergey Kiselev as a master of filigree office design and at the same time an architect capable of solving complex urban planning puzzles. The fact is that the office complex, which is quite traditional in its program, will be built on a site that can hardly be called successful even with a very big stretch.
The building site is located in the area of the Vodny Stadium metro station and is bounded by the backup of Kronstadt Boulevard and Golovinskoye Highway. Close to it is a joyless industrial zone, which is built up with motor depots and warehouses and is adjacent to the Golovinsky cemetery. In fact, this place itself posed the most difficult task for the architects: to design a complex, significant in terms of urban planning, which would become a long-awaited dominant for the district, give it a "human face" and fence off the spontaneous shopping and pedestrian part that inevitably arises around each exit from the districts. At the same time, the customer initially asked to focus on simple and laconic architecture: a high-rise complex overloaded with all sorts of details against the background of half-abandoned warehouse buildings and a cemetery would look not just alien, but frankly ridiculous.
Since the terms of reference initially prescribed the design of a complex of several buildings, the architects decided to reasonably distribute the roles between the future buildings. An office skyscraper, round in plan, but outwardly very reminiscent of a futuristic control tower of some airport, will become a new dominant, and 11-storey buildings, painted in bright “optimistic” colors and having cozy landscaped courtyards in front of them, will be responsible for the same “human face ". Each case received its own palette, and the color, be it red, blue or yellow, is presented in the form of transitions of the same range from dark to light. Fascinated by the color play, the gaze involuntarily lingers on such a facade - and the question immediately arises: how many floors are there? The architects deliberately abandoned tape glazing, which always "headlong" gives the office essence of the building: horizontal color inserts are distributed in such a way that there is not even a hint of the true number of storeys of buildings.
The tower, in turn, is faced with color-neutral mirrored panels. In order for it not to look alien against the background of the rest of the buildings of the complex, the architects rounded their corners. In light of the economic crisis, the customer, by the way, did not agree to this decision for a long time, lamenting its irrationality, but in the end he sacrificed one of the buildings, and the remaining ones equalized in height (in the original version, they were all multi-story). But the original constructive scheme of the tower - a truss along the contour - which would have made it akin to the works of engineer Shukhov, the architects failed to defend - is too expensive.
But these are details that are unlikely to be obvious to ordinary pedestrians. The main thing is different - with laconic artistic means of office construction, Sergei Kiselev managed to create a complex that attracts attention precisely by its hidden non-obviousness. He seems to provoke questions. How many floors does it have? And why is it so bright? And is it true that it will be possible to walk in the courtyards of the office complex? If you think about it, they are born - if not local attractions, then objects that qualitatively change the environment. And even more, they endow the urban environment with such qualities that make it fit for life.
