The main building of Lukoil, standing at the intersection of Sretensky Boulevard and Academician Sakharov Avenue, is familiar to almost all Muscovites. It began to be built in the late 1970s for the USSR Ministry of Electronic Industry, designed by the architect Felix Novikov. But in the 1990s, it somehow became not up to the electronics industry: the USSR collapsed, and the complex itself was acquired and completed by the Lukoil company. And although the architectural solution has not undergone significant changes - a number of additions by the new owners (including plastering and repainting of the building) forced the author of the project to refuse authorship.
For many years this building has been the central office of one of the largest oil companies in the country. But Lukoil developed so intensively that it gradually outgrew its headquarters. Today, a number of its divisions are scattered at other addresses in Moscow, and the company has been planning to expand its main office for several years in order to reassemble them under one roof and not spend money on rent. For a long time this seemed almost impossible, but the oilmen were still able to come to an agreement with the city and the owners of neighboring properties: the land plot in Kutuzovsky Prospekt owned by Lukoil was exchanged for the possibility of expanding the land plot for the construction of a new building. The company invited the architect Pavel Andreev to design the new complex.
Since the site allocated for the construction of the new building is located between two rather narrow lanes with the existing buildings, the authors tried, as far as possible, to minimize the impact on the environment of the new volume. “By the time the design began, there already existed a version of a high-rise building approved by the Moscow Committee for Architecture and Construction,” says Pavel Andreev. - It seemed to us completely inappropriate and unjustified in urban planning, but in order to solve the volume in the logic and scale of the existing development, while maintaining the areas required by the task, it was necessary to increase the building site, and the owners did it. Let me emphasize that this is the rarest case in the Moscow construction practice, worthy of all respect and gratitude. " The height of the building under construction thus decreased from 90 to 46 meters and on the one hand it closes the courtyard of the territory of the main buildings of the company "Lukoil", and on the other hand it picks up the building lines of both lanes and forms the quarter perimeter. Rectangular in plan, four-, six- and eight-storey buildings, continuing the line building along Ulansky and Kostyansky lanes, "embrace" from both sides the twelve-story central part of the complex, which has the shape of an elongated trapezoid in plan. With its sloping side, this building emphasizes the coordinate grid of the existing Vega building and the stylobate part of the complex.
All connections of the new complex with the city are carried out through two small lanes, and, of course, this was reflected both in its architectural design and in the organization of the transport scheme. There are two lobby groups in the building, facing each lane, and between them, at the ground floor level, there is a landscaped courtyard with a parking lot, covered by the overlying volume of the main building. Guest parking spaces will be located here, while a two-level underground parking is being designed for the cars of the company's employees, the entrance to which will be located from Ulansky Lane. This decision is not accidental: the architects took into account that both lanes are one-way roads, and from the side of Kostyansky Lane there is already an entrance to the Lukoil parking lot.
The architectural solution of the new complex, as already mentioned, is of an emphatically neutral character. In the facing of the building, the authors propose to use natural stone of white, beige and light brown shades. The variable number of storeys in the volumes is emphasized with the help of decorative “breaks” - fully glazed inserts that give visual lightness to the central higher part and create the illusion that the office quarter is assembled from separate small blocks. The complex also includes a reconstructed facade of the existing house No. 6 on Kostyansky Lane, which once housed the Kharitonevskoye city primary school. All buildings will be connected to each other, as well as to the existing complex of buildings, by glazed galleries at the level of the third floor.
