On the map of Moscow, Kulneva Street, located on the outside of the Third Transport Ring between Kutuzovsky Prospekt and Taras Shevchenko Embankment, is marked in gray. And this is not surprising, because it is located on the territory of a large-scale industrial zone. In the mid-2000s, it was planned to implement the Big City project here - to create a business quarter, which would become a logical continuation of the Moscow-City MIBC and improve the embankments of the Moskva River, hitherto occupied by not very attractive industries. In its complex form, this undertaking was never destined to come true, but single projects of large office buildings were nevertheless implemented. Among the most notable and titled ones, of course, is the Mirax Plaza complex, designed by the Sergey Kiselev & Partners bureau in 2006-2007. The site for which the SPEECH Choban & Kuznetsov bureau is designing is adjacent to this object almost closely, therefore, the requirement to organically enter the already created Mirax Plaza composition became one of the main requirements for architects when working on the new MFC.
However, this is by no means the only requirement of the TK that architects had to comply with. For example, the dimensions of the future building were rigidly set - 135x76 m, with a height of 68 m - dictated by the size of the site and the marks of neighboring buildings. In addition, the class of the future complex was known in advance, and this class was predictably high ("A") - whatever one may say, the neighborhood disposes and even obliges in something.
The above figures, in general, speak for themselves: the architects had to design a building that was very long and at the same time wide. This, in turn, threatened to give a colossal percentage of areas devoid of natural light, which is completely unacceptable from the point of view of standards. In search of a solution in which the output of square meters would be maximized, and their illumination would be acceptable, SPEECH Choban & Kuznetsov developed 4 schematic diagrams for building a rectangular plot of land, which differed among themselves in the number and options for placing light pockets. In one case, there were four pockets and they were designed from two long sides (and the complex resembled the letter HH in the plan), in the other, there were only two and they were located either on one side (W-shaped plan) or on different sides (laid on side S), in the third the pockets were completely replaced by two internal open atriums. The latter option was eventually recognized as the most rational, guaranteeing the greatest planning and communication freedom, so it was taken as the main one.
The first two floors of the complex are reserved for public and retail premises, and the shops are concentrated mainly on the ground floor and are oriented towards a small pedestrian street between the new complex and Mirax Plaza. On the second floor there are conference rooms, meeting rooms and a fitness center, which can be used by both tenants and guests of the complex. Office premises located on floors 3 to 17 are grouped into 4 independent blocks with a free layout, each of which has its own lift hall. And at the ends of the complex there are two blocks of apartments "divorced" - they are designed as hotel rooms of the highest category and have their own communication nodes with elevators, spacious halls, winter gardens and a security-point on each floor. Thanks to this solution, the entrance lobbies are organized on all four street facades of the complex - two for offices, two for housing.
And if the general shape of the complex was set by the initial configuration of the site, and its layout was largely dictated by SNiPs, then the architectural solution of the MFC is entirely "tied" to its high-rise neighbors - glass-faced triangular towers with elegant rounded facades (recall that so far only one of them has been built). In particular, architects alternate between flat and embossed facades, united by a common pattern, vaguely resembling a microcircuit or an electronic board. The authors use "convex" details on the external facades of the complex overlooking Kulneva Street and the skyscraper: a large-format volumetric lattice of wide horizontal and vertical rods-imposts, lined with metal composite panels, is superimposed on the main structural glazing. It is curious that these rods, formed by two planes beveled at 60 degrees, fulfill not only an aesthetic, but also an important practical role - the emerging bay windows provide a rather tangible increase in the area of offices.
Courtyard facades are designed differently. Smooth structural glazing here is interrupted only by the vertical volumes of the staircase and elevator blocks, but nevertheless, the illusion of multidimensionality and depth is present here as well. It is created by alternating two types of glass - transparent and colored (from bright yellow, through orange and red to muted purple) - which not only visually enriches the space of the courtyards, but also helps to partially compensate for their tightness. As for the color scheme, the architects admit: they tried to choose the shades in such a way that the employees of the offices had the feeling of sunbeams moving along the facades.
