Cooperation between Siemens and ABD Architects began in 2009, when the corporation decided to unite most of its divisions under one roof and acquired for this purpose the 6-storey office complex Legion-2 on Bolshaya Tatarskaya Street in Moscow. The choice was due to a very convenient location for an international company - the office is available for both colleagues and partners from different countries, because is located next to the terminal station of the Aeroexpress, and for employees, because there is access to three metro stations at once (Paveletskaya, Novokuznetskaya and Tretyakovskaya).
“The main requirements of customers for the future headquarters were the compliance of the complex with the LEED gold certificate and the presence in its interiors of motives that help to instantly identify the office as a Russian representative office of Siemens,” says Mikhail Gumankov, chief architect of the project. In other words, the architects had to combine energy-efficient technologies and national Russian flavor - a task, to be sure, non-trivial, but ABD Architects coped with it masterly.
First of all, the authors of the project conducted a brainstorming session to find the symbol of "Russianness". Banal variants such as nesting dolls and balalaikas, painting under Gzhel and Khokhloma were immediately swept aside, but the architects understood that they had to find an equally recognizable image. As a result, they were birches - Mikhail Gumankov, Fyodor Rashchevsky and Irina Prisedskaya came up with the idea of depicting thin snow-white trunks, so characteristic of central Russia, with the help of glass matting. In this performance, the birches turned out to be recognizable, but at the same time very conditional.
The second most important task facing the architects was the design of the atrium, which the customer asked to turn into a memorable image space, suitable both for holding conferences and organizing corporate parties and social events. In terms of plan, the atrium has the shape of a very elongated rectangle, and the architects tried to overcome this dictate of right angles and lines. That is why diamond-shaped pedestal benches with living plants appeared here, and the floor was divided into curved segments, highlighted by materials of contrasting colors. At the end of the atrium, the architects installed a multimedia wall, a podium and a bar. The illumination of this space deserves a separate mention - floor lamps are placed on each mobile bench, and lamps of reflected light are used as overhead light. Thus, competent and most comfortable lighting is installed in the atrium, the so-called atmospheric light, in which the light source itself is not visible.
The structure of the six-storey building is extremely rational: the first floor is reserved for all kinds of public functions: in addition to the already described atrium, there is a recreation area, meeting rooms and lecture halls, a dining room and dining rooms for VIP clients. The next 4 floors are occupied by employees' workplaces, on the last floor there is a zone president of the company.
The ABD architects describe the layout of the main office area as “total open space”. And this is not an exaggeration: four small staircase and elevator blocks, which are adjacent to bathrooms, dressing rooms and mobile archives, “fix” the corners of the rectangular cutout of the atrium, and the rest of the space on each floor is reserved for workplaces. At the same time, each employee has a personal locker for storing clothes and a laptop, but he can change his workplace at least every day - all tables are designed and equipped in the same way. By the way, the height of each working table can be adjusted, if the employee wants, he can work while standing. For managers who spend most of the day outside the office, hot desks have been designed - the workplaces are high table-stands, fenced off by flower beds.
On the whole, the palette of the office floor is simple and restrained - gray floors, light wood tables, glass with frosted glass. Color accents are concentrated in public areas. They contain mini-meeting rooms (mobile modules measuring 2.7 x 2.7 m with bright ends), recreation areas with bright sofas with high sound-absorbing backs, coffee points. The latter are designed in the form of small bar counters, placed under a bright "visor" in which round niches for lamps are made. In general, at first the architects planned to decorate each floor with their own color for the convenience of employees' navigation, but then they settled on the alternation of two tones - green (even floors) and orange (odd). A separate color - yellow, which goes well with both orange and green - denotes copy centers.
Another interesting unrealized idea is the mobile meeting rooms, which Siemens calls "synktenki" (from the English think tank, which translates as "think tank"). Initially, the architects proposed to equip them with wheels, like wagon wheels, which would allow the modules to be moved to any part of the office, but this solution was considered too expensive, so the authors opted for transformable partitions that allow combining several syntenks into one large meeting room, and limited the area of their movement to the central axis of corridors in order to provide access of modules to ventilation and air conditioning systems.
The VIP zone of the Moscow headquarters of Siemens occupies a small part of the upper floor (its main area is reserved for engineering equipment). Here are the offices of the general and financial directors, two meeting rooms (one of them is also transformable), a recreation area and workplaces for executive assistants. The reception desk as a whole repeats the composition of the main counter on the ground floor, but if you turn around the corner, it turns out that in the realm of the CEO it is combined … with a bar.
During the work on this project, great attention was paid to lighting. In particular, on office floors, architects have almost completely abandoned standard ceiling lamps - they are used only to indicate public areas and escape routes, while workplaces are illuminated using individual floor lamps equipped with presence and light sensors. This not only creates a comfortable working environment, but also provides significant energy savings, which, in turn, allowed Siemens to receive the LEED gold certificate, which not every office in Moscow can boast of. However, the project is unique not only for the applied engineering solutions - first of all, it is the architectural image of the headquarters that attracts attention. Siemens' corporate design and office design standards threatened to transform the interior into a space that is both comfortable and at the same time very predictable and discreet in appearance, but ABD Architects redesigned the German “rulebook” so creatively that the new headquarters acquired an individual and recognizable character.
