As a reminder, the SPeeCH architectural bureau was founded in 2006. This is the result of many years of cooperation between the architectural workshops nps tchoban voss (Berlin) and Choban & Partners (Moscow) with the SPProekt company, which first performed visualizations of all projects for German colleagues, and then gradually became their full-fledged co-author. Today SPeeCH is run by three architects - three striking personalities whose combination and complementarity of professional and personal qualities, perhaps, determine the formula for its success. Sergei Tchoban is an architect whose creative method is based on an attentive attitude to the traditions of a European city and the "genetic code" of the place, and combines the St. Petersburg academic education with many years of experience in implementing projects in Germany. Pavel Shaburov is a city planner with a huge experience, who perfectly understands not only the mechanism for developing large-scale concepts for transforming the city, but also the complex process of their approval and implementation. Sergey Kuznetsov is one of the first professionals in Moscow in the field of 3D computer architectural graphics, a designer with a very open and fresh outlook on the world and a talented leader. At first glance, these three people exist in fundamentally different dimensions, however, according to each of them, it is not so important to have a common background, how much to be able to listen to each other and conduct a full-fledged creative dialogue.
The fact that Choban, Kuznetsov and Shaburov really master this skill is best evidenced by Alexey Muratov's interview with these three architects published in the monograph. In a twenty-page conversation, the partners talk about their collaboration, the organization of the creative process and business, the impact of the economic crisis on their work and, of course, their views on architecture. The founders of SPeeCH are supporters of the urban planning approach to volumetric design and are confident that only based on the principles of architectural and compositional unity, it is possible to create truly viable and durable buildings. True, architects have little faith in the fact that such a principle can be implemented on the scale of a city like Moscow: “This is a metropolis where it is difficult to preserve or recreate the environment of a European city, since it is intertwined with highways, railways, and communal zones. But it can be done on a chamber scale”, - Pavel Shaburov is sure. The section “Urban planning concepts” convinces that these are not just words, where projects for various districts of Moscow are published, from Sretenka to Otradnoye and Rublevo-Arkhangelskoye, clearly demonstrating the creative urban planning approach of SPeeCH.
It is interesting that, despite the young age of the bureau, its portfolio already includes many projects completed for other cities of Russia - St. Petersburg, Omsk, Sochi. A separate layer is made up of projects carried out within the framework of cooperation with the hotel operator Kempinski, for which the bureau has already designed complexes in Kiev, Minsk and Nizhny Novgorod.
Separate (and, by the way, the most extensive) sections of the monograph are devoted to public and shopping and entertainment centers, residential and multifunctional complexes. And although only 3D images and sketches of objects are published in the book, it is in these sections that you can find buildings that SPeeCH is already finishing construction at the moment. One of them is a business center on Leninsky Prospekt for the Novatek company, the other is the Byzantine House in Granatny Lane. According to the architects themselves, these projects became for the young bureau a kind of “examination for professional maturity”, an opportunity to form its own standard of work, its own alphabet, if you like, its own architectural language. “Last year we had a number of orders where it was possible to make the“Project”stage on a scale of 1: 200, as is customary in Russia, and wash our hands,” Sergei Tchoban recalls in an interview. - But I insisted (and met the understanding of my colleagues) that we need to do differently: immediately involve specialists in facades, acoustics … That is, to develop a building so that, having designed it on a 200th scale, you know how it will look and in the 50th, and on a scale of 1: 1. This is exactly the kind of professionalism that is lacking in Russia."
By the way, it is precisely this kind of focus on the smallest details of buildings that helps the workshop not only successfully survive the economic crisis (and it employs about 70 people), but also find considerable advantages for itself. “Now only projects that are directly related to life are being done, whereas before there were many concepts designed solely for the customer to increase the capitalization of the land plot for the purpose of its subsequent resale,” says Sergey Kuznetsov. “The fact that we began to do real things - real estate for specific people, and not to increase financial assets, I think is a very positive and paramount factor.”
The same orientation towards reality, the authenticity of architecture keeps SPeeCH from developing deliberately futuristic exhibition projects. The two Sergei, who are at the head of the architectural department of the studio, are very different from each other in age, education, even the country that each of them calls his home, but they agree on the main thing - they design each new building taking into account all the pros and cons of the place, with a desire "Cure" it, if necessary, but in no way distort it.
