Office Next Moscow 2012, organized by Officenext.ru for the third year in a row, started yesterday in Moscow. In terms of its format, this event is most similar to what is called a festival in our country, but the organizers prefer not to use this word and call it “the main professional event of the year for the office industry”. The event lasts three days (May 15-17) in the second Art Play building on Yauza, the largest and recently opened. It consists of three parts: an exhibition of office furniture and stands of manufacturers of finishing materials (OfficeNext Trends), a conference (OfficeNext Talks) and an award (Best Office Awards), where office buildings and interiors are awarded for the year. The prize will be awarded on the evening of May 17th.
Arriving yesterday at the beginning of the event, I was able to find in the new white hall of Art Play a rather impressive selection of stands of various manufacturing companies; on a remarkably wide balcony overlooking the Yauza - a small multi-colored cafe with chairs bolted to the ceiling for beauty, made according to the project of the Pole Design bureau. On the mezzanine there is a not too large exhibition of wall panels and furniture, and there are also tablets with projects of a small, albeit pleasant competition of the participants of the competition (for more details see here below). There were no exhibitions of projects presented for the award (there is none, all projects are shown in the catalog).
The conference, which the organizers called Event last year, and now it was renamed Talk, takes two days: the first day, according to the organizers and participants, is more architectural, so we will tell you a little about it.
It consisted of four parts: first, the tendencies in the development of office real estate were discussed. Then - everything that forms added value, that is, in the language of school political economy, added value for this office real estate (the main players here were light, architecture and ecology). And finally, the last two parts were devoted to the design and arrangement of office interiors. The conference as a whole (at least its first part) can be understood as a meeting of specialists from various related specialties, where everyone briefly tells his colleagues about the specifics and basic rules of his work (without going into details, the regulations were strictly observed and in general it must be said that the conference was organized good and slender). For a person who is not completely immersed in office real estate problems, this approach allows you to look at the industry as a whole, let's say, from the outside. And for professionals, this is a reason to talk, which is actually the main goal of such conferences in any area of business.
So, considering the field of office real estate, to some extent, from the outside, from listening to reports and discussions, we can draw approximately the following conclusions. On the one hand, our office real estate has developed in a very short period of time (20 years) and now it has everything or almost everything, on the other hand, and this is a direct consequence of the short development period - this market, like many others in our country, is very colorful.
During one day, one could see people, with sparkle in their eyes, discussing how to cram more people into the office and how to make them work almost around the clock - and hear the remark by Alexei Polyakov from the Council for Green Building in Russia (RuGBC) that the good health of a working person is actually also a resource, and if a person works 14 hours a day he will someday get sick and take sick leave or make some important mistake that will cost more.
One could hear the confession of Stanislav Biryulin from the management company CBRE about his intention to save money by giving work to "designers for example in Vladimir" or somewhere else, where the work of an architect is much cheaper than in Moscow. I must say, no one supported him, a rather lively discussion began in which the architects defended the quality, and therefore the high cost of design solutions and the need for normal deadlines for work. Denis Kuvshinnikov, head of the interior department of ABD Architects, however, summed up the dispute, saying that the customer's requests may be different, including minimal. Not everyone wants very high quality. But, of course, if the customer needs an elite office, or at least at the European level, then it is not very reasonable to save on design, buy a foreign project for reuse and tighten the deadlines too much - most of the participants in the discussion agreed with this.
The conference was attended by representatives of two, probably the most famous now in Moscow, architectural bureaus, specializing (including) in working with office buildings and interiors.
Sergey Choban (SPEECH Choban Kuznetsov) spoke about three recent projects of the bureau, in which, in his opinion, the architects managed to achieve a harmonious unity of the external image and interior of the building, as well as to achieve the desired quality in general and in details, although according to Sergey Choban (alas, fair) "the quality of Russian construction, unfortunately, is still terrifying." Sergei Tchoban showed St. Petersburg Plaza, a glass tower with a "double curvature" facade, the interiors of the lobbies of which are filled with glass planes with prints of details of classical architecture. The second object was the Novatek building in Moscow on Leninsky Prospekt, where striped stone façade panels resonate with the very similar stone texture of the interior. The third is the interior of VTB's office in the Federation Tower. According to Sergei Tchoban, it is important to think over the building to the last handle: “the handle is very important, because it is here that tactile contact of a person and a building takes place through touch”. The architect also believes that only high-rise office buildings should be built with glass, while houses of medium height should be clad with stone that ages beautifully (which was done in the Novatek building).
“You can build as many 'green' buildings as you like, but if they are spiritually unstable, their fate is deplorable. After all, if we build it in such a way that the building will become old in 10 years, then nobody will need it and it will have to be demolished,”says Sergei Tchoban. The architect also voiced the important problem of Russian construction: “we build from Italian stone, importing it through China”, in Russia very little is produced locally, and too much is bought - it turns out to be expensive and harmful to the economy. In Germany, on the contrary, many small office buildings, not too complicated and expensive (rents are lower there), but nevertheless interesting architecture, are built and finished entirely with local materials.
Boris Levyant, the head of ABD architects, spoke together with the head of the interior department of this bureau Denis Kuvshinnikov. This presentation was a very succinct, well-structured and clear summary of ABD's extensive experience in office construction. This presentation looks like a mini-textbook and fits perfectly into the format of a conference for sharing experiences. The architects put it all down, point by point. And the first, i.e. the most important, they called the social significance of the city and the openness of its "contact zone". "It is not always possible to answer this civic task," said Boris Levyant, "but sometimes it works out." As an example, the architect cited the complex
White Square on Belorusskaya and Metropolis Business Park, where a small square was specially designed. By the way, during the conference, someone mentioned that Procter & Gamble moved to Metropolis from the City when it opened.
The second point Denis Kuvshinnikov called transport accessibility, and further downward (however, all important). The lobby is very important, in the shell & core concept it should be finished at the expense of the investor; it is better if it is made by the architect who built the building. The building should be easy to navigate - for example, if you direct the exits from the elevators to a narrow cross corridor, it will be difficult for visitors to find the reception. The ideal module for the grid of columns is 1.5 meters, but you can also use the European module - 1.35 meters. As Denis Kuvshinnikov said, “It's a terrible torment for interior designers to fight the forest of columns. I just want to cut it down. " Further. The more natural light, the more expensive the area is and the better it sells, which is why a glass facade is a standard for an office building, Boris Levyant is sure: “There is a legend that a glass facade is colder than a stone one, this is not so. Nowadays, a double glass façade is equally effective, and the main trend is to make the building as light as possible. Glass panels are lighter than any others. " The depth of the floor is important - the ideal is 7-8 meters, and now it is more and more popular to seat employees at the windows, and hide the offices of the bosses in the depths. Vertical communications should be combined, and not scattered throughout the building - this reduces the loss factor, the so-called lose factor. In Soviet administrative buildings, according to Boris Levyant, it was almost 30-40, and in Metropolis ABD was calculated as 9.2%. And finally, the last of the listed items is the floor height. With modern interior design, the thickness of the suspended ceiling and raised floor (which may include ventilation systems) can go up to half a meter, and this thickness must be taken into account when calculating the height of the floor.
This was followed by presentations of individual interior projects. Sergey Estrin showed
the office of Sanofi-Aventis, Ivan Chuvelev spoke about the project to create a multimedia presentation room in RIA Novosti, Larisa Talis - about the interior of the Dutch brokerage company Schildershoven, and Denis Lobanov about the office for testing NVIDIA processors, where half of the young people “spend all day chasing devils on a computer , And the other half thinks about how to make these devils run faster. Projects presentations and conference program can be seen here.
Let's tell a little more about the competition works shown now on the mezzanine floor of OfficeNext. The competition was organized to find the best project for the showroom of glued timber producers NLK Domostroenie. In this case, a showroom is not just a showcase for displaying goods, but a building in which the manufacturer's materials are used in such a way as to maximize their capabilities. The winning project does it with success - the Petersburg architects managed to achieve serious curvature without sacrificing the texture of the tree to the form. Something, but the breadth of the possibilities of the material, this project demonstrates with success. The showroom is planned to be built on the territory of Art Play. The authors are entitled to a prize of 100,000 rubles.
Two other projects received honorary prizes from the sponsors of the competition. The work of the Bureau "ArchiTact" - a house with a gabled roof, consisting of strips of glass, metal and wood, received a prize from the Velux company - 30,000 rubles.
The classic project by Yaroslav Kovalchuk and Yevgeny Shirinyan was awarded an honorary prize from the organizers (ProjectNEXT project).
