The Nizhny Novgorod authorities have been planning to build up the left bank of the Volga for several years already. The so-called Borskaya floodplain has repeatedly appeared in real estate news: in particular, it was here that two years ago they planned to build an ambitious Globe Town designed by Italian architects who made a giant snow-white sphere (the Globe proper) a symbol of the new city. The economic crisis prevented the implementation of these plans, but the attractiveness of the territory (it consists of flooded meadows and forests, while the city center is just a stone's throw away) and the need to develop it makes the city authorities look for new solutions. One of them is to divide the land into compact plots, each of which will subsequently be built up by its own investor. This particular plot, with an area of 4.3 hectares, went to the customer of PTAM Vissarionov.
The territory intended for the construction of a recreational complex is located just 800 meters from the Bor district (the former city that merged into the agglomeration of Nizhny Novgorod) right on the very bank of the Volga and faces the Kremlin and Nizhnevolzhskaya embankment located on the opposite side. Another plus of the selected site is that it is virtually free of development - now only old factory buildings are located here, one of which, better preserved than the others, the investor decided to include in the ensemble under construction. The restored red-brick building is supposed to house an administrative complex and a small museum, and a fragment of the neighboring building will be included in the interior of the complex as a picturesque ruin.
The combination of favorable ecology, proximity to water, excellent views and transport accessibility of the site predetermined the functional purpose of its future development. The client and the architects had no doubts from the very beginning that a holiday home with its own beach and a sports and entertainment complex should be located here, but soon a business center was added to these functions. The designers allotted the coastal zone itself for a landscaped beach area and a yacht berth.
The basis of the volumetric-spatial composition is a 9-storey hotel, on the two lower levels of which there is a business center. The building is predictably stretched along the river, which provides excellent panoramic views for most of the rooms. And to avoid long flat surfaces, the architects have transformed the traditional parallelepiped of the hotel almost beyond recognition. That is, it faces the city with a rather calm and laconic facade, but a convex undulating volume emerges to the river, gradually tapering upward. The hotel is connected to the building of the wellness center by a covered walkway. The internal layout of the hotel is organized around an atrium displaced to the side, which permeates the floors and ends with a glass dome. The second larger dome almost completely covers the wellness building. Both buildings have a common stylobate, the curvilinear shape of which follows the bend of the coast.
All hotel rooms have panoramic glazing, while the interfloor floors are deliberately brutal and resemble curvilinear concrete "pancakes". By reducing the area of the upper floors, it seems that the building is "floating", slowly spreading over the surface of the site, forming additional functional zones. Residential floors “flow down” onto the green roof of the business center, which, in turn, flows into the roof of the side building, the white spot of the stylobate spreads even wider, smoothly turning into the beach. Such a structure of a multilayer "pie" allowed Yuri Vissarionov, on the one hand, to concentrate all functions in one place and thereby leave most of the coastal zone untouched. On the other hand, such a biomorphic composition helped to inscribe the new complex into the almost wild nature, not affected by the low-rise buildings on the outskirts of Bor. It is planned to connect the hotel to the residential area by a network of driveways and paths, which will line the green area behind the hotel. There is also a parking lot for 250 cars in the depths of the site.
The expressive volume of the hotel, reminiscent of either a glass dune or a spaceship, hangs over the red-brick building of the former factory like a huge genie from a fairy tale - however, the improvised colonnade of the business center and small rounded bay windows scattered along the facade of the hotel add some scale.
This is not the first time that Vissarionova has been designing PTAM for Nizhny Novgorod. Not so long ago, architects made a project for a shopping and business complex on Strelka. Compared to the famous Strelka, the left bank of the Volga is seemingly much calmer and simpler, but the virgin landscape has become a challenge for the authors no less than the historic center of the city. And if in the first case the main emphasis was on tact and care for the environment, then for the wild green beach of the Volga the architects have developed a futuristic volume with "landscape" plastics.
