There is such a deeply frivolous method of treatment - when a clown comes to seriously ill people, bothers them, inflates balloons, speaks in a stupid voice. It has been scientifically proven: in patients from this, immunity increases, allergies decrease, and in general, various difficult-to-explain, but pleasant things happen. As doctors say, there is a positive trend. Recently, even the biggest nerds from medicine have been forced to take clown treatment seriously - in some places they even opened faculties for the preparation of medical clowns. The healing architecture is just a stone's throw from here.
When designing a hospital for children with blood diseases (we wrote about the project two years ago), Alexander Asadov worked something like Patch Adams, the world's most famous clown doctor. Actually, he did not hide this: "The architectural solution of this complex was suggested to us by the doctors themselves - very caring and creative people who asked us to create a very optimistic building that does not in any way resemble a gloomy hospital architecture," the architect explained.
The resulting building is absolutely devoid of gloom. The efforts of the authors to hide the hospital outlines are literally striking - in terms of color, the medical center can surpass any circus. An extremely positive set of colors: light green, orange, red, lilac … Rainbow. Even the black, matte-charcoal rear facade does not look gloomy thanks to the glimpses of bright panels, which, like sun bunnies, appear here and there, combining the windows into bright pairs. Those who remember the computer game Tetris in DOS mode can catch some similarity: bright highlights on a dark background add up to a chaotic but meaningful pattern. The rhythm of the black facade is set by the verticals of the stairwells, the multi-colored pylons of which divide it into three parts, concealing the length of the hospital building that is excessive for the eye. The inner wall of this main hospital building facing the courtyard is white, and also with colored flashes. The courtyard facade resembles a white screen that captures sunlight for children playing in the courtyard.
However, the main optimistic note here is formed by the hotel building for recovering children - the authors call it the “tree of life”. The “tree”, peeping out from behind the ordinary trees of the square on Leninsky Prospekt, is completely multi-colored, like a bouquet of rainbow colors. If you look at the building plan from above and connect your imagination, you can understand that the whole complex fits into the contours of a simple child's drawing. The black facade of the long building is the earth, the transverse hospital passage is the stem growing out of it, and the multi-colored building is the seven-colored flower from the old cartoon. He was magical there. Here too: children who have already been cured, with whom magic happened, will settle in it. The symbolism is clear: from black to white to a rainbow of hope sprouting from the hospital building. The building is not very large in area and from the outside also looks like a "bush" of intergrown and strongly elongated houses, on very long and also multi-colored legs (because of these legs and because of the large windows bent to the side, for some reason they still resemble a flock of fairy giraffes).
The rainbow "tree" of the Hematology Center has become one of the best accents on today's Leninsky Prospekt. The local environment is extremely variegated, many different towers are superimposed on each other in perspective - like a discordant forest that has grown, frankly, at random. There used to be only one interesting tower in this forest - the Tourist House. It is obvious that Asadov measured his new building with this very yardstick, and it must be admitted that it turned out well. The bright and smaller "bush", of course, does not look like the giant plates of the 1980s, however, it forms the right pair for it - light, thin, stretching up like a tree in a dense forest, or like a child standing on tiptoe to - reach …
There is one more important thing to say. Multi-colored designs are a trend these days. There are many of them, and there are especially many of them in the portfolio of the Asadov architects (Alexander Asadov, recall, is the first to start experimenting with color in Moscow). But this building is different. First, the colors in it are not arbitrary, but very well motivated. Secondly, and this is also important, the architects managed to achieve a fairly high (well, for Moscow) quality of execution in their rainbow building: this is not painted plaster. The building is entirely clad in the "leather" of Aluwall metal panels, the seams between which are generally drawn quite accurately and form a neat mesh (by the way, in some places the inconsistencies in the seams are successfully masked with colors). As a result, an environment of almost European quality is formed around: fresh, clean, very humanistic (it contrasts noticeably with the usual Moscow collapse in the neighboring quarters). This is especially true if you look at the black facade through the space of the football field located behind it: well, it is a completely non-Moscow space, it befits a French campus more. The fact that the multicolor looks not only fun and optimistic, but also noble and confident is fundamentally important: this translates experiments with color into the quality of healthy realism.
By the way: inside, behind the rainbow colored facades, there is a pragmatic, balanced, carefully calculated space of the medical center. Which is understandable: the team of authors includes one of the most experienced Russian designers, Vladimir Legoshin, who has built such large medical centers as the All-Russian Cardiological Research Center and a medical and clinical complex on the territory of the Botkin Hospital. The hotel for recovering children and their parents is planned extremely rationally: two parallel corridors, on which are strung several blocks of three double rooms and a common living room with a loggia. The entrance group is friendly and round, there is a playground near the entrance. The narrow passages between the buildings are not overwhelming, and the courtyard and the adjacent public garden are conducive to walking.
One can be happy for the children and envy the authors: it is not so often possible to combine the profession and higher moral meanings. To build a hospital is not a bank or a casino, it is almost a charity. Happened. From the heart. And to your health.
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The joyful multicolored facades of the Pediatric Hematology Center were made possible by the use of the ventilated facade system AluWALL® system, developed by CMK. The hinged facade system (HFS) AluWALL® system is not only bright colors and high accuracy of installation, it is also fire safety, as well as sound, moisture and heat insulation of buildings.
“The façade of the Center had to be ideal in terms of hygiene and fire safety, so the choice fell on the AluWALL® system - says architect Andrey Asadov … And thanks to the wide color palette, including the entire NCS scale, there were no problems with color selection. We were quite pleased with the result."
