The competition "Office space: creativity, technologies, innovations" has been held for the fourth year at the initiative of NAYADA, a manufacturer of partitions for office and public spaces. Of course, there is an element of healthy self-promotion in this undertaking: for example, only those projects and implementations take part in the competition, in which either NAYADA partitions are already involved or potentially can be used. And one of the nominations of the competition - "Archiperegorodka" - is conceived as a collection of ideas to expand the possibilities of using partitions in the office space. This year, there was also one new nomination in the competition - "Archivesreda", in which innovative projects for the arrangement of the workplace took part. The competition website also hosted a virtual exhibition of the participants' works throughout October, and the project that received the largest number of votes in the online voting was awarded the Audience Award.
The awards ceremony itself has also undergone several significant changes. First, from the Manezh, where it took place in all previous years, it moved to the Media Center of the Izvestia newspaper. Secondly, the participants who were unable to attend the awards ceremony were given the opportunity to watch its online broadcast on the competition website. And finally, for the first time, voting on the Internet was stopped just a few minutes before the start of the awards ceremony, which kept the intrigue alive.
In total, more than 180 works from different cities of Russia and Ukraine were submitted to the competition this year, and this is almost twice as many as in 2008. According to Dmitry Cherepkov, the founder of the competition and the president of the NAYADA group of companies, such a dramatic increase in the number of projects made the organizers of the Office Space very happy, but made life extremely difficult for the jury members, since in each of the four nominations a lot of really high-quality and interesting works.
In the nomination "Archives" were considered the implemented projects of office and public spaces, the ideas of which "best embody the philosophy and culture of the customer's company." According to the architect Sergei Estrin, one of the members of the competition jury, this is the most difficult nomination for judges, since in the course of implementation any project undergoes inevitable metamorphoses, colliding with the character of the customer and his taste, the quality of the performers and the suddenly decreasing budget. The interior of the Yandex office (Arseniy Borisenko and Petr Zaitsev) was recognized as the best out of 60 works submitted for the nomination. It is interesting that the decision to award this particular project with the first prize was taken by the jury unanimously - it won the judges "by the purity of the figurative idea and the quality of its implementation into reality." Alexey Shkiria won the second prize in the Archive incarnation nomination for the interior of the office of the financial company "Cube", where the center of the composition was indeed a cube made in corporate colors - dark gray and red - and the workspace was divided into zones by solid glass partitions. Sergey Glukhovtsev and Larisa Loseva became the third in the list of awarded in this nomination for the project of the head office of Hals LLC, which the authors executed in the aesthetics of industrial architecture: bare concrete walls are decorated with protruding bolts and brutal steel structures, and the interior palette is composed exclusively of shades of gray …
Conceptual ideas and projects were presented in the "Arch-solution" nomination, demonstrating the capabilities of NAYADA partitions in organizing office space. Timur Bashkaev, who announced the winners in this nomination, noted that the quality of the submitted projects is steadily growing every year, and this is the merit not only of the contestants, but also of the organizers, who stimulate the emergence of interesting concepts. Here, about 60 works were also nominated for the award, and the best of them was the project "IN [OUT]", the author of which designer Anastasia Komarova likened the interior to the urban environment and turned the office space into a street with houses, each of which is actually a comfortable work place. The second in this nomination was the interior design of the Moser boutique by Alexander Malygin, where the retail space is decided by a chaotic composition of racks stacked of racks for displaying dishes, which also serve as partitions dividing the hall into various functional zones. The third prize was awarded to the project of Anastasia Frishman "Line", in which the main formative element of the interior design was the ribbon, with the help of which workplaces in the common rooms, the openspace zone, the staircase to the meeting room, the bench in the waiting area in front of the office of the head of the company, and the reception counter were organized.
Perhaps the most favorite nomination for the participants of the competition is "Archiperegorodka", which gives architects the opportunity to dream up a lot about the future of office partitions and sometimes find the most unexpected application for them. According to the jury, when choosing the winners in this category, it paid special attention to the environmental parameters of projects and technical indicators. In the end, the best was named "Folding partition" of the architectural group "Megabudka" (megabudka), which is made of simple lightweight materials and is transformed according to the principle of an accordion. As conceived by the authors, with the help of this mobile structure in the office, you can very quickly rearrange and organize new workplaces. The second was the HOUSE project, the author of which Shamsudin Kerimov proposed to equip an office cell for each employee with true home comfort. "Archiperito" number three was the project "Poltronic" by Kamil Izrailov, in which the partition is constructed from ordinary folding chairs.
Much in common with "Archiperegorodka" and the new nomination "Archsreda", in which innovative developments in the organization of the workplace competed, "allowing a person to work comfortably, productively, safely and with pleasure all day long." Alena Khoreva was recognized as the most creatively thinking here. In her project "A-table A-chair", the designer proposed to personify the workplace of each employee with the help of furniture in the form of letters of the Russian alphabet. The second prize was awarded to the project "L.7" by Sergey Nasedkin, who invented an "operational zoning system" of office space using modular furniture, the architectural forms of which unambiguously refer to constructivism. The jury noted this project for "an appeal to the history of the Russian avant-garde and the lightness that the author was able to give to massive architectural volumes." The third project awarded in this nomination was "Office in a Box" by Ekaterina Savenkova and Andrey Cherdakov, embodying the very popular idea of creating such a mobile workplace that can be carried in a small suitcase or ordinary box.
After the announcement of the winners of the four main nominations, Dmitry Cherepkov named the owners of a special prize from the organizers of the competition “For entering another dimension”. Another dimension means the possibility of using partitions in any other capacity than vertical planes. The prize was awarded to three works at once - "The Barrel of Diogenes" (Evgeny Logvinov), ECOL (Yulia Gubareva) and "Line" (Anastasia Frishman), which gave the organizers the legal right to talk about an interesting new trend in the design of partitions.
Leading Russian architectural magazines announced their last favorites among office interiors projects. The magazines "Architectural Bulletin", "Project Russia" and "Construction Technologies" agreed with the jury of the competition that the most worthy of all the projects presented was the office of the "Yandex" company. Tatiana Lomakina from the Office Interior magazine named the concept of the flexible system of partitions "TuBuS" (authors - Ekaterina Konyukhova, Irina Ivanova) as the best project. The Tatlin Publishing House awarded an annual subscription to its magazine to the authors of the RBI Holding Office project, Alexandra Kazakovtseva, Maria Makhonina and Sergey Krivosheev. The editor-in-chief of the magazine "Made in future" Nikolai Malinin gave his preference to the project of the rack-partition called "Rack-Screen" (author - Alexander Malygin). Well, the audience award, which was determined during the Internet voting, went to Alexander Grachev for the design project of the additional office of Sberbank of Russia and left for Novosibirsk.
