The business complex will be located on Novodanilovskaya embankment, across the river from ZIL, on a former industrial territory, which is now gradually but relentlessly being built up with new offices. The immediate surroundings are warehouses, sheds, but there are also old brick factory buildings. However, the main context of the new complex is, oddly enough, no longer a plant. And the business center with the poetic name "Danilovsky Fort", designed and built by Sergei Skurat by order of the "MR Group" (construction was completed this year). It is very close, in the neighborhood: the address of the Skuratovsky complex is 8, and the site for which ‘SPEECH’ is designing is property 6. Now there are small warehouses in this place, which will be dismantled for construction.
The complex of Sergei Kuznetsov and Sergei Tchoban consists of two 12-storey buildings set diagonally on a site that resembles a short zigzag. The composition of the volumes looks like the "Danilovsky Fort": just like there, the southern building is placed perpendicular to the embankment and is extended with its end to the river, while the northern one recedes into the depths of the quarter. The master plan of both complexes turns out to be L-shaped - the transverse body stops the eye and closes the composition. It is curious that in Sergey Skuratov's "fort" this technique was purely plastic, and in the ‘SPeeCH’ project it was partly forced, since it was dictated by the shape of the site - a small three-story house is located in front of the northern building, it is planned to keep it, so the building was moved deeper. But one way or another, the composition of two neighboring complexes turns out to be similar: the new project looks like a figurative "reflection" of a neighbor - or, if you prefer, his rhythmic pair. In perspective, when viewed from the side of the Danilovsky Monastery, they look very related.
On the marked volumetric similarity, the similarity, perhaps, ends. Dialogue begins. The coldish gray northern building is fenced off from the neighbor, and the terracotta southern one echoes it, albeit at a distance. The ‘SPeeCH’ buildings, in contrast to the “fort”, do not have a common stylobate, but they are connected “through the air” by hanging passages at the level of the eighth and eleventh floors. Needless to say, one transition is gray and the other brown.
But the fundamental straightness of the walls and corners, as well as the rigid grid of square windows, are clearly opposed to the well-known sculpturality of the walls and the picturesquely "floating" openings of the neighboring building. In contrast, the ‘SPeeCH’ complex appears crystalline, crisp and clear.
Although - the geometrism of identical windows does not at all exclude an element of architectural play. Quite the opposite. Square windows have asymmetric stepped "frames", similar to an angular version of a perspective portal, from which the authors cut off exactly one third - now to the left, now to the right. The resulting effect is hypertrophied and promising, especially when you consider that the turn of the stepped “bells” of the windows changes from one floor to another. It turns out that on the first floor the vanishing point of the perspective drawn by the steps is on the right, then on the second - on the left, and so on.
By the way, the Art Deco style, beloved by architects ‘SPeeCH’, also loved to play with perspective: to imitate it, sometimes to enhance it with the help of decorative techniques. That is why the architects of the 1930s loved squares so much, and especially caissons, square depressions, with the help of which it is so easy and convenient to build space, both real and illusory. In the ‘SPeeCH’ project we see something similar, but the game here goes a little further than it was customary in the 1930s: before us is not just an illusion, but that ornamental-optical version of it that makes you want to twist your head and blink; or ponder and calculate. She not only entertains, but tries to influence consciousness; or appeal to reason. It's like a puzzle. In other words, Art Deco's love of perspective is combined here with the mathematical ornamentation of 1960s optical art. Something often now has to remember about op-art. One might think that the architects' hobby for ornament has outgrown its vegetative stage and passes into the mathematical stage, when not only decoration is expected from the ornament, but also a good rebus.
