The Golden Capital is one of the oldest and largest professional contests in the country, held outside Moscow and St. Petersburg. Since 2007, the festival has been held in two stages: in winter, events are dedicated to architecture, in summer - to design. According to the organizers, such a division helps "not to be scattered", and acquaintance with the current program of the "Golden Capital" and its projects-laureates shows that the festival is quite successful.
One of the central events of the Golden Capital 2011 was a series of master classes under the general title Designing the Future, in which Frank Heinlein from Werner Sobek Engineering & Design and Kees Donkers, one of the organizers of the Dutch Design Week (Dutch Design Week). Another “cross-cutting” event was the “So-Society” workshop, which included several private and open lectures on digital design methods and programs. Its purpose was not only to acquaint the audience with the peculiarities of parametric architecture, but also to consolidate the material covered in practice: the workshop participants created a sculpture made of cardboard and plastic, which was presented at the closing ceremony of the festival.
The best architectural projects have been reviewed within the framework of the Golden Capital since the festival was established, but over the past years it has grown from a city-level competition into a national one: for several years now, architects from all over Russia, from Kaliningrad to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, have been participating in it. In 2011, for example, 108 works from 10 Russian cities applied for the Golden Capital, and 2 works took part in the exposition “out of competition”.
The Grand Prix of the festival this year was awarded to the project of an administrative building on M. Gorky Street in Novosibirsk (concept authors: D. Gerasimov, K. Frolenok, architects: Valery Filippov, Timur Nasyrov). The building is a high-rise high-tech volume "squeezed" into a narrow crevice between two existing buildings. The curved mirrored glass used for facing the facade emphasizes the expressiveness of the resulting shape: the building is definitely cramped on a tiny area, so it seeks to fill the space to the maximum. Instead of the usual roof, this business center has a glass "bell", and the first floor is completely reserved for public space.
The "Golden Capital" in the nomination "Public buildings" was awarded to the Architectural group "InForm" from Yekaterinburg for the project of the garage of the government of the Sverdlovsk region. It must be said that the regional government has a rather big car fleet, so the architects had to fit a complex that was rather impressive in size into the existing development. It was possible to get to the scale with the help of a large indent from the red line - only the three-storey volume of the reception group comes out onto it, designed as a cube with the main facade sloping inward. In the nomination "Restoration and reconstruction of architectural monuments" the project for the reconstruction of the Novokuznetsk Drama Theater ("AMT-Project") was recognized as the best, but for "Public Interiors" the "Golden Capital" was again received by the "InForm" group - this time for the building of flight services airlines "Ural Airlines". The corporate interior of the largest air carrier in Siberia is designed in strict, conservative colors, and the corridor system dominates the layout. The architects allowed themselves the greatest plastic freedom in the interior of the hall of the fifth floor, where the offices and reception rooms of the airline directors are located: its central part is covered by an extended skylight, similar to an airplane wing,and the reception and recreation area is designed as an island inscribed in a complex curvilinear space.
