This complex bears the status of “on-site”, that is, built on the territory of the enterprise and intended exclusively for “internal use”. However, such a utilitarian purpose did not stop the authors of the project from looking for a bright and dynamic architectural image of the building.
The role of the enterprise in this case is the Moscow International Multimodal Center - a large-scale logistics complex that organizes the storage and transportation of a variety of materials and goods on freight trains and cars. Accordingly, the situation around is purely industrial - this is the most that neither is an industrial zone, on the one hand is a "mortar-concrete unit", on the other is a railroad freight yard (a site where containers removed from trains are accumulated). On the territory where the hotel is planned to be built, there used to be an asphalt plant, and after the construction it will be surrounded by new parking lots for containers, warehouses and truck parking - in a word, this is a gigantic industrial hub that lives by its own laws and regulations, and only people for whom logistics and cargo transportation - work.
This, probably, first of all explains the functional program of the complex, which was designed by PTAM Vissarionova. The future building, although it is called a hotel, consists mainly of offices (out of 8.5 thousand square meters, the hotel accounts for only 811, while there are more than 5 thousand for work premises). In fact, a small block with cozy rooms is soldered into the body of the office space, and the entrances to the offices and the hotel are diverted on opposite sides of the building so that the night truckers and the managers who manage them do not intersect unnecessarily. The architecture of the complex, on the one hand, is also purely businesslike: rectangular volumes and wide stripes of windows resemble classic modernism of the 1970s, all factory and institute buildings that were built in abundance at that time. It is difficult to disagree with the authors of the project: such a solution is most appropriate in an industrial environment, but upon closer examination of the project it turns out that the architects organically supplemented the brutality and laconicism of modernism with high-tech elements.
The main facade of the building is not conceived as straight and flat, as was the case in the 1970s, but curved. More precisely, the glass material with long horizontal strips of windows, which the entire building consists of, is here divided into three layers, neatly wrapped on the sides and on top with a thin concrete strip (this is how burritos are wrapped in a thin cake, and one would also like to compare it with an endless strip of road). The first floor is an exception: it is completely glazed and the transparent canvas is only in some places lined with thin verticals - there is a vestibule and a dining room (with a spiral staircase leading to the mezzanine floor).
A three-storey "block" is placed on top of the glass strip, and its "nose" (about a third of the total length) is pulled to the ground. Due to this, it partially pushes the volume of the first floor in the opposite direction - the lobby and the dining room, it turns out, exist, as it were, slightly autonomously from the entire complex, and the dynamically beveled end gives this part of the building a distinct resemblance to a high-speed train. The upper floors are formed by a similar "bar", only this time it is not just laid on top of the middle one, but crawls onto it like a snake that has laid its triangular head on a stone. To top it all, the architects slightly rotate these volumes relative to each other, due to which the building acquires a pronounced tectonics both in profile and in front view. It is tempting to remember Zaha Hadid, in almost every building of which there is a similar interweaving of stripes. However, Vissarionov's bends are not so radical, and most importantly, this “wave” is entirely dictated by the context. As conceived by the authors of the project, the facade of the hotel is sensitive to its immediate surroundings: trucks drive around it day and night, the air is constantly shaken by their huge mass and the growl of engines, and the bends of the glass strips of the facade "respond" to these flows.
The volume woven from three curved "stripes" is the front, front half of the building. The yard block is a rectangular parallelepiped, also lined with horizontal ribbons of windows. The hotel is located on the second floor of this part of the building, and staircases are designed at the ends between the two volumes - they are recessed deep into the side facades, therefore in the plan (especially on the second floor) the complex resembles something between the letters "H" and "K" …
Next to the flat rectangular hangar of the Multimodal Center and the predictable "box" of the repair shop, the hotel-office building looks representative and modern. Glass walls, a bright white shell and sculptural plastic of the main volume turn it into the front facade of the entire logistics complex.
