Every Muscovite has seen the building of the Tsentralnaya Hotel at least once. At the very least, he had heard of it, because the famous Filippovskaya bakery was located at 10 Tverskaya Street, and the people often call this house with a beautiful neoclassical decor "Filippovskaya". In general, the entire quarter between Tverskaya and Bolshaya Dmitrovka streets, Kozitsky and Glinischevsky lanes once belonged to this merchant family, and in the current register of valuable objects of the city it is referred to as "a complex of Filippov's tenement houses." The hotel also existed here for a very long time. So, already in the early 1880s, the son of the famous baker Ivan Filippov owned not only his father's bakery and shop, but the furnished rooms "France" and "Florence" located above them. From 1884 to 1904, in their place, according to the project of M. A. Arsenyev, the "Lux" hotel was built, and in 1905 the architect N. A. Eichenwald reconstructed its lobby. In 1934, the hotel was set up with three floors, immediately after that it became a hostel of the Comintern, and only in 1953 it was re-launched as a hotel, now under the ideologically neutral name "Tsentralnaya". But since then, the era has changed; For a long time, there are no business travelers, to whom the hotel provided an optimal price-to-location ratio, or Gorky Street, and in recent years, Tsentralnaya itself has turned into an improvised office center, where dozens of companies and firms rented rooms. The inevitability of a new reconstruction of the "Central" was closely discussed in 2007, at the same time the first project of its transformation into a five-star hotel was completed and shown to the city council. Since then, however, it has undergone a number of changes and is still being corrected.
It is very difficult to upgrade the hotel category by three stars at once (and the Tsentralnaya Hotel remained the last two-star hotel within the Kamer-Kollezhsky Val). What is at least a mandatory requirement to have your own parking, spa complex and congress center! In other words, one cannot do without surgical intervention, and the most serious one - with anesthesia, ectomy and subsequent transplantation. However, Moscow is no stranger to such surgical acts: historical buildings are everywhere scraped out from the inside, completed and expanded at the expense of courtyards, underground space and attic floors, so nothing that would be unexpected will happen to the hotel on Tverskaya. Just one more building, retaining its ceremonial historical facade, will be carefully rebuilt, updated and restored within the necessary framework. Is this fair in relation to a genuine element of the historical environment? Pavel Andreev believes that yes. After all, no one grabbed his head when the merchant Filippov rebuilt his house in accordance with the architectural fashion he liked, no one rang the bells, and when the entire Tverskaya street expanded more than 3 times and evenly grew by a couple of floors, and Lyuks - and just doubled.
By the way, it was these floors, built on in 1934, that it was decided to donate in the first place, they are supposed to be dismantled, and in their place, in the same high-rise dimensions, it is planned to build four hotel floors, which will help to accommodate the optimal number of rooms in the new hotel. In general, a little design and planning dexterity and no fraud. In addition, as the chief architect of the project Sergey Pavlov told us, the stylistic solution - plastic and detailing of both facades (along Tverskaya Street and Glinishchevsky Lane) were made on the basis of the preserved and restored three-story historical part (the restoration project was carried out by L. V. Lazareva's workshop). The project, however, provides for two more additional floors, located at a distance from the facade line and hidden in the volume of the cylindrical roof, the outlines of which, according to the architects, fully correspond to the lost covering of the building and the original project.
Are all described works in relation to the monument of history and architecture legal? Since 2007, the defenders of heritage sites have unanimously insisted that no, and invariably named Filippov's apartment building among those architectural landmarks that Moscow will lose in the very near future. But at the very end of 2009, they suddenly lost their main argument. The commission, headed by V. I. Resin, confirmed the subject of protection and the amount of necessary restoration previously developed by researchers, but changed the general status of the building and, referring to the works of the 30s of the last century, defined it as a “valuable object of historical development”.
As you might expect, the main changes are not expected on the facades and interiors of the historical building (they are preserved and restored), but on the internal layout of the buildings located on the site. In fact, apart from the interiors of the famous bakery and coffee shop, as well as the "Gothic" foyer on the second floor, all other premises will be rebuilt. The implantation of new "organs" such as a fitness and spa club with a swimming pool, as well as a congress center will be carried out through the development of the courtyard and the dismantling of the dilapidated buildings that were part of this property. All this space, in fact, will remain, but from a courtyard it will turn into an internal cylindrical atrium, around which all the functional premises of the ground part will be grouped. Today, there are two working options for solving its internal facades - in the traditional manner (wall - window) and in a modern design that contrasts with the external solution and obviously tends to high-tech.
In general, despite the fact that there are not enough luxury hotels in the city center, the operator of the future "Central" (Mandarin Oriental Hotel Groups) assigned the hotel function itself only the second place in the "table of ranks" of the projected multifunctional complex. The main idea of this project is to make "Central" an active element of the urban environment, an open and public place. For this, part of the first underground and two first ground floors will be occupied by shops, restaurants, exhibition galleries, souvenir shops and, of course, the Filippovskaya bakery and confectionery with a cafe. The third floor (the last one, preserving the restored historical facades) is reserved for the congress center, designed for conferences, seminars, business meetings of various sizes and formats. The hotel located above will occupy five floors, four of which will be occupied by standard-layout rooms facing Tverskaya and Glinishchevsky pereulok, and premium-class rooms surrounding the inner atrium space. The top floor will house two "presidential" suites.
The innovation of the Centralny layout lies in the fact that the entrance to the hotel block itself is carried out not from the first floor, as is usually the case, but from the last, on which the architects designed the sky-lobby, which opens onto the atrium. A similar decision was suggested to the authors by the urban planning situation: the flow of people on Tverskaya is inexhaustible, and it is this that should become the main profitability of the future complex, so there was no room on the ground floor even for the entrance group of the hotel and the reception zone. The main entrance to the hotel is located on the side of Glinischevsky Lane - the architects successfully use the relief drop on the site (about 2.5 meters down the lane) and design an underground entrance lobby at the -1st level. And the desire to make the main lobby of the five-star hotel not only ceremonial, but also light, made the authors raise the reception, concierge and porter services closer to the sky, organizing a sky-lobby at the highest level under a glass dome with views of the center of the capital and the Kremlin towers.
There was not enough yard space for parking, as well as for all technical premises, including those necessary for the pool of the spa complex, so they are quite predictably placed in a five-level underground space, with a foundation depth (excluding the historical part) of 18 meters. There will also be a staff canteen, linens, warehouses and other technological premises of the complex.
Currently, the project documentation is in the stage of finalization in accordance with the requirements of the hotel operator, and in a few months the project will be sent for approval.
