It was possible to submit works for the last 10 years, and as a result, the most famous Russian projects, for which "Glass" became another award, however, well deserved, formed a quorum. A new meaning to this procedure is given by the highly specialized nature of the competition, which, like the young Archiwood prize, does not mark the project as a whole, but only the quality of the use of a particular material in it. Unfortunately, with the abundance of modern "glass", there were not so many worthy ones.
The Grand Prix was awarded to the Hermitage Plaza business center by the Sergey Kiselev & Partners bureau, which won all possible laurels a few years ago. With this project, the architects set the highest bar, which, as it turns out, is difficult to compete with even today. Presenting the diploma, ISA President Viktor Logvinov noted that the Hermitage Plaza was unanimously chosen “for subtlety, intelligence and innovation”.
The structural glazing of this complex is not just high-quality and expensive. Let us remind you that from the courtyard the Hermitage Plaza borders on the Osterman-Tolstoy estate - in this part the façade is made up of horizontal stripes of cold-thread glass, inclined towards the sky, like the scales of a crumpled battleship. This technique allowed the architects to achieve two goals at once: to avoid the effect of an office-aquarium, behind the glass facades of which everything is visible, from blinds to working clerks. And visually "hide the facade" by reflecting the sky with glass stripes - you certainly cannot hide such a house as a whole, and the ephemerality of glass, as you know, is deceiving - however, the ribbed glass surface behind the wing of the Museum of Applied Arts really looks rather unsteady, in this it can make sure anyone who drives by from Tsvetnoy to Mayakovka (or is there in a traffic jam, which is even more likely). One way or another, and the structural glazing of the Hermitage Plaza remains one of the most spectacular, delicate and flawless examples of the use of glass in Moscow in recent years, the choice of the jury must be admitted not only fair, but even somehow too infallible, calculated for general approval … However, it does not matter: rewarding well-known and generally recognized in our post-crisis time has become, frankly, a habit.
A special place in the competition was taken by the SPEECH Choban / Kuznetsov workshop, which presented almost all of its major projects in recent years and, as a result, received the most diplomas: gold was awarded for a business complex with the head office of Bank Saint Petersburg, which bureau performed in conjunction with the workshop of Evgeny Gerasimov. The intricate curved facades of the 21-storey glass dominant demanded a great deal of ingenuity from the architects. The business center "Langensiepen" with its whimsical Greco-Roman ornament received bronze. The building, we recall, for the first time in Russia applied the experience of the Swiss concern Schmidlin and the developer of the method of digital printing on glass of the German company Okalux, which makes it possible to accurately reproduce graphics on the entire glass covering of the building.
Gold was also awarded to Sergei Skuratov's House on Mosfilmovskaya, which survived the political intrigues of last year. The jury especially noted the glass mega-wicker of the second (small) tower of the house, and the fact that there are three types of windows: transparent, opaque and false.
But the shopping and entertainment complex as part of the Central core "Moscow City", which also received gold, somehow passed critics - although the chief architect of Moscow, Alexander Kuzmin, entered its team of authors. The bluish green facades of the building imitate vertical landscaping.
One more gold went to the favorite of the press and the public, Totan Kuzembaev, for the Golf Club in Pirogovo. Indeed, this work of the master, whom everyone is used to counting among wood specialists (I remember the same ArchiWOOD), shows that the architect is also virtuoso in handling glass. The golf club is perhaps the only Pirogov building with completely transparent walls, which allows a huge 700 m2 hall to literally dissolve in a pine forest.
Silver was awarded to the elegant "twins" of the Aeroflot office building of Vladimir Plotkin and the equally well-known Linkor business center of Nikita Yavein, the Copper House patriarch of Ostozhenka Sergei Skuratov and, unexpectedly, the interior of the Boomerang cinema as part of the Varshavsky shopping and entertainment center. combining glass panels with multi-colored lighting.
Bronze was awarded to Terminal D of the Sheremetyevo complex for a giant skylight, as well as to the Izmailovo Ford Center for the glass bubble of the exhibition hall and the restoration project of the Pushkin Gallery in Zheleznovodsk. This gallery, or rather the summer concert pavilion, built at the beginning of the 20th century from glass and metal in memory of the poet's stay in the Caucasus, in recent years has fallen into disrepair; it was recently reopened after “restoration and adaptation”.
A special prize for the imaginative design of facades was given to the private residential "House on the Bay" in Irkutsk ("A. Tiguntsev's Bureau of Architectural Solutions"), and the interior of the Target Media office of young architects from the Praktika bureau.
