The sports complex was built on the territory of the School of Cooperation, the first private school with an economic bias in Moscow, which today is deservedly considered one of the most elite. The number of parents who want to give their children exactly here is steadily growing from year to year, so it is not surprising that the school badly needed new classes, as well as a full-fledged sports complex. On the other hand, especially after the crisis, additional sources of income for the school would also be welcome. So the new building houses auditoriums, gymnasiums and a swimming pool; During the day all this serves the schoolchildren, and in the evening, when the students go home, the sports center turns into a fitness club, which is perhaps as rare for the Taganka district as for schools.
According to the chief architect of the project, Alexei Ilyin, the customer entrusted the development of the technical task, as well as the functions of the project manager, to a specialist who thoroughly knows the fitness industry from the inside. It was precisely the well-written terms of reference, according to the architects, that ensured the success of the project. By the way, now its author has become the director of a new sports complex. “Working with such a competent customer, undoubtedly, greatly facilitated the task set before us,” says Alexey Ilyin. “We were not only asked to design a high-class sports complex, but were also provided with a really detailed technical task.”
A new sports complex appeared on the Garden Ring opposite the Taganka Theater, or rather, inside the block between the former Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya Street (last year it was renamed into Solzhenitsyn Street) and Bolshoy Drovyaniy Lane. But despite the fact that cars drive up to this building from the side of the lane, and it is listed on the freshly baked Solzhenitsyn Street, the main facade of the new sports complex faces Sadovoye.
The most visible part of this façade is a dramatic rounded corner with panoramic windows of curved glass, clad in plates of a warm terracotta hue (the color looks almost orange in the photographs, but in fact it is brick terracotta). In the upper part there is a wide light gray stripe, which from the side of the courtyards turns into an almost blank back wall: it seems that a moderately energetic terracotta "nose" with curiosity, although not without dignity, peeps out from under the gray "casing" to the busy ring road. The rounded "nose" on the right smoothly turns into the straight plane of the facade, on the left it turns at a sharper angle and meets the 12-meter stained-glass window of the atrium, forming a wide triangular ledge with a canopy above the main entrance.
The architects made the decision to “round off” the corner after they thoroughly analyzed the results of the landscape-visual analysis, which showed that the new complex would be visible to those passing through Sadovoye only for a fraction of a second. It is clear that if an edge of the corner flashes in the crevice of the alley, the new building will remain unnoticed, while the spherical surface of the eye has time to fix it. The difference here is about the same as in night photography with short and long exposure: in the first case, the headlights of driving cars are just dots, in the second - spectacular flashes of light, which are remembered for their unusual pattern. By the way, the role of such "flashes" in the evening hours will be played by brightly lit stained-glass windows, as if "embracing" the cylindrical volume.
It must be said that the two main plastic techniques used here by architects - the rounded corner and the triangular ledge of the main facade - must be recognized as well-known and even very simple in our times. Another thing is interesting - a successful combination of two simple techniques has formed such an integral form that it even works to some extent for "optical illusion". The building, which is almost rectangular in plan (except for a small appendix with classrooms on the side of the courtyard), may seem to a passer-by as a compact volumetric triangle.
The almost 5-meter drop in relief, skillfully used by the architects, also works for this effect. Bolshoy Drovyanoy Lane is typical for the Taganka area: narrow, winding and hilly. The sports complex is located just on the "slope". The building faces the Garden Ring with three floors, and from the side of Solzhenitsyn Street you can see only two; from Drovyanoy it seems that it seems to go up, and this movement is emphasized by a double row of steps, one of which runs along the wall along the alley, and the other is applied directly to the facade.
The building, designed by the SpeeCH workshop in the very center of historic mansions, has not a grain of historicism: the smooth outlines of the main façade, panoramic windows and flat roof are read as elements of one hundred percent modern, contemporary architecture. At the same time, modernity is by no means opposed to the historical environment, and even more so it does not assert itself at the expense of the latter. On the contrary, both the palette and the plastic of this object emphasize its friendliness towards its surroundings. Needless to say, it is extremely difficult to achieve such an effect in such a contradictory urban planning context as in Moscow. Specifically on Taganka, it seemed completely impossible: a dense historical environment, a wide canvas of the highway in a direct perspective and a symbol of Soviet architecture of brutalism, a theater on Taganka, directly opposite. In such a situation, the answer should be not only thorough, but also extremely honest, and, perhaps, this is what Sergei Kuznetsov and Alexei Ilyin succeeded in best of all. They honestly preserved the proportions and dimensions of the Drovyanoy Lane building, honestly and simply answered the theater of Gnedovsky and Anisimov - after all, it is obvious that both the triangular "nose" and the terracotta cladding are homage to the architecture of the "new stage" of Taganka (now pretty old and included in all textbooks). And on the Garden Ring, the architects oriented their complex so that the result of their meticulous creative searches did not go unnoticed.
