The Technopark is one of the most important parts of Skolkovo, its task is to create all conditions for the business development of the participating companies.
The key task of the Technopark, designated on the general plan as district D2, is to create an environment favorable for the development of the business of the Skolkovo member companies. Together with the French bureau Valaude & Pistre, whose head, Jean Pistre, simultaneously chairs the town-planning council of the Skolkovo Foundation, it is designed by the dean of the Harvard School of Design, Mohsen Mustafavi.
The Technopark quarter is being created for 300-350 companies with an average number of employees from 25 to 35 people. It will unite a variety of transforming offices and interdisciplinary laboratories with a total area of about 100 thousand square meters with retail, social and service premises (about 42 thousand square meters). In all three variants of the Valod & Pistre concept, offices and infrastructure form a single building spot, stretching along the central block boulevard. On the other side there is about 260 thousand sq. M. residential buildings.
Two versions of the concept are based on a free layout of volumes, and the third offers a rigid linear development scheme. In the variant called "Natural character", the rectangular buildings of the Technopark are arranged in a V-shape and are surrounded by a single roof strip. In the residential area, the houses are scattered in a checkerboard pattern, cut by wide V-shaped green rays, continuing the directions given by the composition of the office part. All free space is occupied by a park.
In the concept of "Free Canopy", the composition is more picturesque: office buildings are assembled under a single roof, and a through gallery that unites all buildings is hidden inside the complex. The central element of the composition is a large round courtyard-well. Echoing him, residential buildings are arranged in circles - oases, set among the greenery, between which the main pedestrian highway meanders.
The third, rigid-geometric concept is called "Sign character". Here, the building structure resembles a modernist grid: the premises of the technopark are combined into rectangular blocks with square courtyards-wells and a single facade-tape, and the living area is neatly cut into regular rectangles, inside which the building of such rectangular boxes differs only in the arrangement of elements.
So far, the Skolkovo Foundation has not decided which of the three concepts will be implemented. However, they promise to open the Technopark already in 2014, since it is he who is the key object of the innovation city, on which the successful future of its inhabitants largely depends.
