The project was made for the very site (number 17-18), where Norman Foster in 2005-2006 designed the 600-meter tower "Russia" - a large triangle to the north of the main massif of the City, fenced off from the Third Ring by a low building by local standards " North Tower ". Construction of the Foster Tower stopped at the end of 2008, the site was frozen for three years, although it was not forgotten (the place is too ambitious) and was constantly discussed. In 2009, it was decided to lower the height of the building to 200 meters. In 2011, co-investors held a closed international competition (the only Russian architect who participated in it was Sergei Skuratov).
That competition ended in the fall, and a couple of months later, in December, the customers decided to hold another one. TPO "Reserve" was invited to participate, among others, offering to make a project in co-authorship with one of the foreigners. Vladimir Plotkin invited the Dutch MVSA bureau Roberto Meyer and Jeroen van Schotten. The customers liked the project, and in February the authors were even informed that it had become one of the favorites of the competition. However, after a while it turned out that the results of the competition were canceled, and what will be built on the landmark site is again unknown.
The architects decided to make their building both iconic (like all skyscrapers) and original, that is, in this case, unlike an ordinary skyscraper.
The entire site is occupied by a 9-storey stylobate cut by triangular holes in multi-tiered atriums and open courtyards. The roof of the ninth floor is covered with greenery, and then the fun begins. Instead of consistently growing upward, like the usual towers of all the Cities of the world, the building radically changes the concept: three 23-storey triangular buildings are placed on the green roof of the stylobate, separated by a distance of 20 to 50 meters. On the roofs of these three buildings, in turn, there are two more triangular houses, 19 floors each. The upper mark fits into the altitude restriction currently accepted for the site - its height is 224.8 meters. There is a second option, 280 meters in height, there are 33 floors in three towers, and 41 in the upper two.
All together it looks like a city block of several houses, which stood on each other's shoulders like gymnasts in a circus or like cards in a house of cards. This is, to put it mildly, an unexpected way of increasing the mass: not a classical pyramid, not a modernist vertical, and not even a more complex "house on legs" or a "mountain" house, a tectonic heap of apartments with terraces. Before us is a quarter, striding upward not in mass, but directly in units of buildings. Moreover, this is a modernist quarter (otherwise neither Reserv nor MVSA can have it), therefore the volumes are laconic and spaced far enough from each other. So in the 1970s, it was supposed to build urban neighborhoods.
There are two main results, they are announced in their booklet by the architects themselves. They call the first quality of a building transparency. Transparency is not literal - it is provided by the distances between the buildings: giant and orderly, staggered openings transform the building from a heap of masses into a coarse mesh, blown by the wind and allowing you to see the sky through the sky.
Firstly, the silhouette of the building has become similar to the letter "M", if you look at it from the front from the Kremlin or Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Frankly, the buildings in the shape of the letter M are nothing new to the City, the first was the project of the Moscow City Hall by Mikhail Khazanov, a red tower that resembled a battlement of the Kremlin wall. However, in the Reserva / MVSA project, the letter is very geometrized, almost pixelated (this is how a very small print looks on a computer if it is greatly enlarged). The stylized letter "M" from the side of Kutuzovsky Prospekt turns out to be to the left of the silhouette of the City, logically precedes it and the conditional "M" -City is obtained - which gave the name to the whole project. So the project is, to some extent, both opposed and assigned to the City, like an incredible initial letter before the medieval text. Necessary and dissimilar.
Functionally, the building, like all similar megastructures, is mixed. Three tiers of underground parking, plus four floors of parking above the ground, form a powerful "technical" tier, into which a number of shops and a hotel are built. Above, the stylobate is occupied by offices grouped around the triangular atriums mentioned above; they are multi-tiered and in the project are covered with a glass mesh and planted with various hanging greenery, which can remind office workers of a tropical vacation, and for those who are more well-read - the gardens of Babylon. Of the three towers of the first tier, two are occupied by offices, one by apartments; both upper towers are given to apartments. They were supposed to offer wonderful views of the Kremlin: the buildings are lined up and rotated at different angles in order to capture the best panoramas. By the way, the project began with the idea of putting three triangular towers on the stylobate, turning them with their corners towards the Kremlin (this is how the most views of the monument are obtained). The complex was supposed to be built in two stages: first, half of the stylobate with a hotel and three towers (two lower, one upper), then the second part of the stylobate and two more towers, lower and upper, which would stand at a corner on the roof of one of the towers of the first stage.
After some deliberation, the facades of the complex were decided to be striped by removing the interfloor floors as terraces. The whole building thus resembles pieces of a neat sliced puff pie: thin "layers" of terraces, shiny glass "filling". The contours of the layered terraces either deepen, sinking into the glass, or protrude, turning their curious "noses" in different directions - their unobtrusive flickering creates the illusion of life and diversity, complicating the decorative system of the facade.
In addition, as already mentioned, the building was planned to be seriously landscaped, and not only in the atriums. The architects planned to turn the roofs of the stylobate and towers of the first tier into full-fledged squares planted not only with grass, but also with large trees. In some places, bushes appear on the balconies in front of the windows of apartments and offices; in a word, all free planes were to be overgrown with greenery (except for the uppermost ones, over which the architects hinted at a small helicopter).
So, we have before us a large and effective project, to some extent even pretending to be typological novelty. Another thing is interesting - this project was made in co-authorship, and, as it seems, is quite equivalent. The architects have provided a booklet dedicated to the project with several pages, which compare the portfolio of "Reserva" and MVSA. From the comparison, plastically, there are obvious similarities between the buildings of Vladimir Plotkin and Roberto Meyer: the same clean forms, flying consoles, shiny glass, thoroughness of drawing a laconic form. Of course, there are also differences, and of course, it is interesting to understand what is in this project from MVSA and what is from Reserv. At the same time, it is a difficult (and not completely solvable task), since it is obvious that architects speak the same language. For example, the revitalization of the strict geometry of buildings by means of asymmetric spots is found in the works of both workshops; many similar coincidences can be cited.
For example, visiting the website of Roberto Meyer's MVSA bureau, it is easy to notice that they have recently also
love striped triangles. However, in the case of the City, the theme was obviously dictated by the shape of plot number 17-18, triangular like the Kremlin (the architects in every possible way compare their triangle with the Kremlin on the plan).
However, in the City project, the "triangular" theme has become more complicated and has taken on its own, in its own way, an exciting life. The shapes of triangles develop from bottom to top according to quite readable rules from wide shapes to thin and light ones, and also from chaos to order. The most important triangle of the base is essentially arbitrary, it occupies a building spot, therefore in the northwest it grows a small "hump", on the south side there is a depression, and the southern "nose" is slightly turned. The triangles of the main, middle part, both courtyards and towers, are variegated, there is even one trapezoid among them, and the atriums merge with the entrance lobby, forming two intricate "horns". However, already at the level of the middle towers, a couple characteristic of Plotkin appears - the central and northern buildings are similar, although not quite. Finally, order prevails at the very top: there, two thin towers mirror each other. Vladimir Plotkin's favorite technique - mirror pairs, was embodied in this conglomerate, let's say, stereometrically, being complicated by the theme of "natural" growth and "tectonic" diversity.
In one of the first versions, the shape of the building was more rigid: it was supposed to put three identical triangular towers on the stylobate, connected by passages. Then the architects "cut" them in the middle of the height and built a "pyramid". Then there was a silhouette in the form of a symbolic letter "M". There is no such “vertical block” in the portfolio of both studios - it, apparently, should be recognized as the result of joint work of people speaking the same language.
