The Bankside business quarter in Nastavnichesky Lane, stretching in the bend of the Yauza and united by the panorama of the Andronikov Monastery, the neighborhood of the Winzavod, Artpley and the Garden Ring, in a word, in a convenient and almost central place, between a small park and a river, was arranged by the architects of the bureau ADM, commissioned by the development company Sminex, on the site of a group of buildings of different characteristics and different levels (from one to three floors), united by a common industrial past. Once completed and populated, the Bankside quarter has become a successful example of redevelopment of the banks of the second largest and most important Moscow river.
“We offered the customer the idea of office mansions,” says Andrey Romanov, head of the ADM bureau. - We supplemented the existing buildings with new entrance groups and thus divided the buildings into several relatively small isolated blocks. Each has a separate entrance, stairs and two or three floors of premises, the area of which does not exceed a thousand square meters. A small company may well be accommodated in such an office."
The facades are finished with travertine with green patinated copper inserts. The roofs and sloped walls of the upper floor on the main facade overlooking the embankment are covered with the same thick green panels. Green copper inserts also mark the vertical lines of the entrance areas and divide the long body into separate blocks, "flowing" onto the facade from the roof in wide vertical stripes. The travertine window frames, on the other hand, rise upward, "sprouting" through the green wall of the third floor.
The theme of the interpenetration of two matters is continued in the courtyards of an office building, where stone predominates: the entrances are also marked with copper verticals, growing slightly below the main volumes and slightly protruding forward. It seems that all the buildings consist of a copper frame and stone masses put on it. Copper is felt as an internal matter (here and there through the windows, copper elements are visible in the decoration of the halls), only occasionally protruding outward, as if in order to meet visitors.
The stone is the outer shell, which, however, it is historically supposed to be. The choice of travertine, stone spongy and embossed (in contrast to the polished cladding popular in Moscow), gives the buildings a restrained nobility, and perhaps even a hint of resemblance to the development of some southern European city. The delicate pattern of joints between the stone plates resembles a light rustic texture and, in combination with the color of patinated copper, completes the associative array that brings us to fond memories of old European cities.
However, associations exist at the level of sensations - the architects do not give any direct hints of similarities with historical buildings. On the contrary, the complex is purely modern. The architecture is laconic to the point of asceticism, which makes the viewer focus on materials that, due to the emphasized simplicity of form, are perceived almost as Pythagorean "elements", representatives of the basic properties of matter. These are pure, basic types of matter: stone, metal, wood and glass.
There is very little wood, and it behaves in approximately the same way as copper, but unlike metal, it is almost completely concentrated in the interior decoration, and it comes out very sparingly - with transverse plates that divide the French, floor-to-floor, windows of the first floors into two parts vertically. The appearance of wood on the facades enhances the general warmth of the architectural texture and again brings us back to the theme of tradition. And, finally, the fourth "element" of plastic play is glass. Its clean surfaces not only fill the windows, but also form several accents in the courtyard. One of them is a staircase, a copper staircase in a glass casing, which looks like an art object against the discreet background of stone walls.
The second, main accent is a completely transparent cubic volume, which houses an unusual cafe "Bank", already noted
in the Afisha review: a cafe where food, no joke, is served in glass jars so that you can easily take it with you if you wish. “Sitting in glass - eating from glass” - the main “trick” of the cafe sensitively reflected and played on the features of the most transparent volume in the entire complex. The cafe is popular, which pleases, among other things, architects who are attentive to the subsequent life of the spaces they have created. Now it has spilled out onto the Yauza embankment as a terrace, connecting the business complex with the city.
By the way, the arrangement of courtyards and streets of the future business quarter in this project is almost as important as the facades of the buildings. The architects paid a lot of attention to the improvement of the space between the buildings, drawing it almost more meticulously than everything else. In this, the project is consonant with many works of ADM, for example
office complex "Atmosphere", where the office of architects ADM is located; or the Smart Park business quarter in Nauchny Proyezd, made for the same customer - Sminex.
For a long time, for five years or even longer, ADM architects have been consistently developing the theme of landscape design, "immersing" their buildings in a comfortable environment and merging them with the environment - thought out and designed no less carefully than the buildings themselves and their facades. Bankside on Yauza was one of the first projects, working on which the architects put their souls into the improvement of the territory. It is now implemented. Four types of paving and smooth granite, which serves as a frame for the lawns, make the texture of the courtyards varied. The lawn grass is flush with the main pavement, which transforms the lawn from an "untouchable island" into a kind of fluffy carpet. The granite frames of the lawns are echoed by the same stone bands in front of all the facades, into which the lines of the lamps are mounted. In the evenings, it is not so much the usual lamps on "legs" that shine here, as the pavement itself forms a light ornament. Rectangular granite benches are covered with wooden strips - a common technique, but in this case it echoes the wood particles on the facades and also brings warmth.
As a result, the streets-courtyards of the business center (and together they form a rather complex internal space - do not forget that the architects did not demolish, but only redesigned the existing quarter) - become a cozy space. One would like to compare it with an atrium without a roof. The architects built several transitional "layers" between the city and the offices of the business center, or rather, several environments: a thin layer of a semi-boulevard along the river facade serves as a border; the first inner, half-open space is the courtyards; the second, slightly more closed, is a glass cafe, then transitions are stairs. It is these spatial "layers" that have become the main subject of the architects' work in this project. They constitute its main and most fascinating content: not decor, not texture and not volumes, but the mutual sequence of different spatial environments. This is a subtle and unusual object - the fusion of landscape architecture with the familiar stone architecture.
