Let us remind you that the united Russian-European architectural teams were a prerequisite for this competition. Eric van Egeraat, a very famous architect and acting as a kind of guarantor of the nontriviality and brightness of the final project, was invited by the organizer of the competition, VTB Bank, one of the first, in tandem with the Moscow institute "Mosproject-2". Its head Mikhail Posokhin involved Alexander Asadov's workshop No. 19 in the project.
“First of all, the task of preserving the old stadium was solved. We found an opportunity to completely preserve its perimeter: although only the main facade was not rebuilt here, we thought that for the history of the city, for its chronicle it would be more interesting to preserve everything as a whole,”says Mikhail Posokhin, general director of Mosproekt-2. “Let me remind you that at that time there were constant discussions about which parts of Dynamo could be broken or disassembled, and we radically solved this problem, and not least thanks to this, the Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation, Mr. Avdeev, supported our project.”
Andrei Asadov recalls that the first couple of weeks of the two months allotted for the creation of the competition project, each bureau worked on its own. Russian architects headed by Mikhail Posokhin and Alexander Asadov made the first sketches, in which they immediately outlined the main compositional idea. In particular, the new stadium was supposed to be located in the historical perimeter of Dynamo and covered with a high-tech roof. At the same time, from the side of Leningradskoye Shosse, the architects cut off a part of the roof so that the new stadium looked at the highway with a giant “eye” of the media facade. And the park zone (remember, the design was not only the famous sports facility, but also a small part of Petrovsky Park - an elongated and narrow wedge of land along the Petrovsko-Razumovskaya alley) Posokhin and Asadov turned into a multi-level and multifunctional green structure. In general, the project for the reconstruction of the stadium was based on the idea of a peaceful coexistence of history, nature and high technology, and it was with this proposal that Asadov's father and son went to a meeting with Eric van Egeraat in Rotterdam at the end of March last year.
“At the very first meeting, the fundamental difference between the Russian and Dutch approaches to the development of projects of this kind became obvious,” says Andrei Asadov. “While we were working on the form and its relationship to the existing context, our Dutch colleagues were dealing with marketing issues. In particular, Erik van Egeraat, knowing that one of the priorities of the competition TK is the preservation of the existing park, set before his colleagues the task of finding out whether there is a possibility not to build up the adjacent territory at all. In other words, the Dutch first of all tried to solve the most difficult mathematical problem called “how to cram the unproductive,” that is, to fit into the historical perimeter of the stadium both new arenas required by the customer and 20 thousand square meters of retail and commercial space. And the point is not so much that Erik van Egeraat was striving at all costs to preserve several additional hectares of green space. The main pragmatic European considered the fact that a football stadium, by definition, cannot work for the city all year round, and only additional functions, namely trade, leisure facilities and a second sports arena, can make it constantly in demand and, as a result, self-sustaining. At first, Russian architects were very embarrassed by such a radical approach, but then they recognized that it was precisely such a risk that could become a key factor in the success of the project. “We understood: either pan or disappeared,” Andrei Asadov admits. “The jury would either immediately remove such a project from consideration as not complying with the program of the competition, or would instantly nominate it as the leader as the most daring and anticipating the needs of the city.”
As for the architectural appearance of the multifunctional complex, then the Dutch designers fully agreed with their Russian colleagues: the entire historical perimeter must be preserved, and the roof must be given a vivid and memorable form. Posokhin-Asadov's proposal to create a media facade in the form of an "all-seeing eye" was also accepted. The architects were also united in their intention to change the axis of the main football field. The fact is that modern stadiums are necessarily oriented along the north-south axis (the setting sun should not interfere with any of the teams), but Dynamo, built more than 80 years ago, has an east-west orientation. For stadiums-monuments UEFA, in principle, allows making exceptions, but the architects rightly judged that the comfort of the players is more important in this case. In order to find a compromise between the interests of the heritage site and the players, the field had to be raised above the historical perimeter, and this is what the authors of the project did in the end.
In the existing structure of Dynamo they are placing a shopping and entertainment complex with several levels, and its roof is being transformed into the central foyer of both arenas. Naturally, constructivist walls are not able to withstand the weight of two bowls at once, so in the shopping area the architects (the authoritative German company Bollinger + Grohmann was involved in the project as consultants) propose to build new load-bearing walls, and install powerful load-bearing walls along the edges of the former field. trusses with supports in the form of escalators. The trusses and walls are interconnected by beams, and transverse walls support the stands and roofs of both arenas already on them. The complex structure is crowned with a hexagonal mesh shell with a retractable roof over the main football field. The metal cells of the roof are filled with Teflon, which is so popular today in sports construction, and outwardly - both in shape and the resulting structure - it resembles the head of a snake. However, the architects themselves say that the hexagonal shape of the cells is a hint of a soccer ball.
The placement of sports arenas above the shopping and entertainment complex, of course, entailed a radical reorganization of the pedestrian and automobile connections of the stadium being reconstructed. A whole system of various ramps grows along the western and eastern facades of the historic building: gently sloping for pedestrians, spiraling for cars, one for VIPs and another for fire fighting vehicles. And under the stadium and the metro exits located closer to Leningradka, there is a spacious intercepting parking lot - this new transport hub was named by the architects as Transferum.
The underground space above the deep station, strictly speaking, was not the subject of competitive design - as in the case of the park area, the authors demonstrated considerable liberty here. However, such a decision allows the future VTB Arena Park to receive a huge amount of additional space, and this provided the Egeraat-Posokhin project with a solid “favor” on the part of the investor.
