Southwark is one of the central districts of London, located south of the River Thames and the City. Once densely built up with factories, today the area is famous for numerous theaters and studios working in reconstructed factories. The site intended for the construction of a multifunctional complex is no exception - this is the territory of the former Menier chocolate factory, which today houses a theater, an art center and several restaurants. The re-profiling of the confectionery shops turned out to be so successful that the investor (an individual whose name was not disclosed) decided not to stop there: having acquired a neighboring plot, he intends to expand the theater, create several new galleries and concert studios, and supplement the cultural function with a commercial one, namely offices and housing.
According to the head of Studio 44, Nikita Yavein, the client of this project is a Londoner who is keen on Russia and Russian culture. It was this passion that pushed him at one time to search for Russian business partners, and now a Russian architect who is able to organically fit the techniques of national architecture into the urban planning context of the British capital. The choice immediately fell on Yavein, the author of the reconstruction of the Hermitage and the Olympic Station in Sochi - perhaps the most branded and recognizable in the West (at least by ear) projects of modern Russia. And, of course, the architects did not refuse the opportunity to realize the object in London. However, the task set for "Studio 44" cannot be called simple. On the one hand, these are the already mentioned motives of Old Russian architecture - the customer is crazy about tents, kokoshniks and zakomars. On the other hand, he is no less delighted with the name of Gagarin, and the idea of the first manned flight into space should have been reflected in the project no less visibly than the kokoshniks. Plus, of course, the complex program of the facility - in total, the complex should include ten functions, including rehearsal rooms and an art school, as well as tea and vodka museums.
Fortunately for architects, high-rise dominants can and should be erected in the Southark area - the high-rise construction program in central London provides for the emergence of new accents and city-wide landmarks here. That is why the overall composition of the complex took shape at once: all social functions are located on the first levels, housing is in a high-rise building, and offices serve as a kind of insulating layer between them. True, the 80-meter skyscraper, in accordance with the urban planning norms of the British capital, had to be moved into the depths of the block, so the theater had a separate building facing the red line, and the art center occupied the first floors of the second building, from which, in fact, and The skyscraper "sprouts". The chamber area between the two buildings was named Gagarin Plaza. It is raised one floor above ground level, and an open staircase leads to it from the street, running along the side facade of the theater. Its composition - 3 flights of stairs with locker platforms, as conceived by the architects, symbolizes the Red Porch of the Faceted Chamber of the Moscow Kremlin.
The treatment of the facade of the theater building facing the street with diamond rustic reminds of this famous monument. But if historically such cladding is designed to create the illusion of a particularly strong masonry made of stone blocks, then in the Studio 44 project this illusion is debunked. Faceted "stones" are separated by narrow strips of glass, so that, looking closely, an attentive viewer will inevitably discover that the stone blocks are overhead, and the massive wall is nothing more than a snag, provocative architectural decoration. The geometrized "kokoshniks" - triangular prisms of the windows of the three upper floors of the theater, and the atlas under the entrance visor, clearly hinting at a relationship with the caryatids of the Highpoint Two residential complex of the Russian Londoner Berthold Lyubetkin, are also slightly ironic in nature.
In the first version of the project, another compositional principle of Russian architecture was actively involved - "octagon on a quadruple". “As you know, a building is a classic of the genre, the lower part of which is a cubic volume, and the upper part is an octahedron, crowned with a tent or a dome,” explains Nikita Yavein. - In our project proposal, the volumes were inserted into each other with a "matryoshka", which made it possible to diversify the layouts of the apartments. And the use of various textures (four - concrete, octagon - brick, cylinder - glass) created the effect of three-layer clothing, visually reducing the dimensions of the tower. " The customer was not satisfied with this option, he strove for a more literal image, for a space rocket at the start. So the matryoshka turned into a glass cylinder with a conical top. The resemblance to the Vostok ship is enhanced by the metal structure embracing the all-glass body - in its cross-section it alternately has squares (ie fours), then octagons (ie octagons). On each floor of the "rocket" there is one luxurious apartment with a panoramic view of London, and at its sharp end the customer intends to place the Vodka Museum.
According to Nikita Yavein, the concept of the project was based on the principle of “urban collage”. The rich program of the complex was equally disposed to this, and the customer's desire to certainly see Russian and cosmic motives in its architecture. “We didn't want to do stylization, but the opportunity to rethink traditional planning techniques and decor elements in a modern way seemed very interesting to us, especially in such a diverse city as London,” says the architect. “Of course, this is only the initial concept of the complex, and its appearance may change more than once, but, as it seems to us, we managed to guess the nature of this place - at the same time progressive and emphatically theatrical, moderately ironic and open for dialogue and social activity”.
