According to the terms of the competition (we wrote about the winning project in September), the exhibition and administrative center should be located on the territory of a gas liquefaction plant near the city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. The site intended for construction is, of course, as far away from the production buildings as possible and is located on a hillside - almost on a cliff. From here, a breathtaking view opens up: green hills, steep slopes, a fast river descending to the majestic ocean and … the plant is a brand new, modern and clockwork example of industrial construction, the fantastic interweaving of pipes of which makes you remember the baulism of Richard Rogers.
"We were delighted and amazed at this picture of human" greatness ", - says Valeria Preobrazhenskaya, - a pile of metal of the finest assembly, a magnificent monster, giant tankers at the gas station, military discipline, English speech and untouched hills around."
The tender was announced in the fall of 2011. At the same time, Levon Airapetov and Valeria Preobrazhenskaya visited Sakhalin - an island on which the unique and almost untouched nature of the Far East coexists with the despondently faceless and heavily neglected architecture of rare settlements of the Soviet era. In some places, however, old Japanese buildings have been preserved - museums, remnants of defensive lines. Today, Japan's influence on the island is becoming more tangible: this is why the frightening contrast between the high-tech, almost space-based plant, built with the participation of the Japanese, and the Soviet architecture of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, which makes a generally depressing impression.
The architects got the opportunity to inspect the closed territory of the enterprise and its surroundings. The first thing that caught my eye was the plant's emphasized environmental friendliness. “It's hard to imagine where else in Russia, on the territory of a huge enterprise, there are protected natural zones with flora and fauna objects included in the Red Book,” the architects of TOTEMENT / PAPER are surprised. “After a conversation with representatives of the plant, we got the impression that we had visited the ministry. environmental protection, not the company that built a huge plant, installed drilling platforms, pumps gas and oil, and lays thousands of kilometers of gas pipelines through the green island. " The second specific feature of the place is strict regulations and rules of conduct on the territory of the plant, operating under the slogan: "Everything for the safety of people!" Explosive areas are marked, employees move exclusively along specified and permitted routes, and even wash their hands according to the rules.
In such an amazing place in all respects, the architects needed to develop a universal space in which a wide variety of functions would peacefully coexist: from modern offices, exhibition and educational premises for training and advanced training of employees to ceremonial halls for meeting high-ranking guests and foreign partners. The building was supposed to meet the business, cultural and educational needs of the plant as much as possible. Solving a difficult and at the same time interesting problem, Levon Airapetov and Valeria Preobrazhenskaya developed two radically different options.
The first version of the Exhibition and Business Center is a stereometric experiment to obtain a complex space from a simple form taken as a basis. Such a basic theme, the core of the formation, has become the symbolic for this area, that is, the shape of a cone similar to a plague. The idea of intersecting an inverted cone with a non-inverted one came to the mind of the young bureau architect Egor Legkov, who also discovered a figurative connection between the conical shape and the direction of the plant's activity. In the cone, he saw an endless centripetal movement, the simplest image of a funnel formed as a result of the rotation of a drill, and at the same time an image of an oil fountain bursting out of the ground.
The role of such a "fountain" is assigned to the atrium. Its inverted, upwardly widening cone with transparent walls of splashing sharp triangles of glass is located exactly in the center. It becomes the semantic and imaginative core of the building, besides connecting its floors with a spiral staircase along the contour of the "funnel": the visitor, thus, will be almost literally included in the game, going up against the rotation line of the imaginary tornado and feeling the dynamic pressure of the form.
The crystal funnel is echoed by many concrete cones of various scales, and the “simple” cones alternate with inverted ones, densely filling the interior of the building, becoming a cell of its spatial structure, and even forming a kind of three-dimensional texture, a space with a powerful emotional charge, filled with sensations completely unusual for a person … All internal walls in the building are sloped and circular. In some places, they are cut out for passages and stairs - in the places of the cutouts, parabolic arches are formed on thin inclined legs, meeting with other arches, inclined to the other side. There is a feeling of being inside a giant sponge, the gene code that was not built on bubbles, as usual, but not on cones.
In a word, except for the floor and ceiling, there is not a single straight plane inside. On the plane, however, it is filled with ovals (how not to recall Francesco Borromini here; but it must be admitted that the local family of ovals on the plane is more numerous, and his life is freer and more spacious). Ovals meet at different angles, sometimes stick together, cut into each other. They accommodate a large and small auditorium, two small double-height atriums with trees and spiral staircases, and even bathrooms. The oval outlines in the plan indicate another characteristic of the cones that form the building - most of them are flattened horizontally.
However, before redistribution, stereometry, charged with the dynamics of curved lines and surfaces, is nevertheless balanced by straight lines and planes. A rectangular slab of the second floor is put on the "elephant legs" of the cone-shaped concrete volumes. This effect of carrying the second tier with massive supports is especially noticeable from the side of the main entrance, and it arises because the warm space of the first floor is limited only by a glass contour (by the way, also oval). The first floor is transparent, the landscape is visible through it - and therefore, concrete tubes take on the function of carrying not only in fact, but also visually.
Surprisingly rectangular, subordinate to the planes of the floor and ceiling, the slab of the second floor is glazed along the perimeter and is generally similar to the classic Corbusian "sandwich" (floor layer, glazed space layer, ceiling layer). With one exception: the plane of the facade along the contour of a complex building becomes a sectional plane for complex stereometric entrails - as if a piece of Dutch cheese was cut in an arbitrary place, and on the cut it shows the truth of its entrails reduced to a plane. Somewhere on the plane were the contours of the dissected cone. Somewhere they were built up with deep cantilever extensions, which form two trapeziums above the facade, an ordinary one and an inverted one, denoting the essence of the formal idea, frightening the volume of heavy matter hanging over the void, reinforcing the breathtaking height of the steep slope to which the building is angled. Somewhere (just like a hole in a cut piece of cheese), a glass smooth glass cavity-exedra has formed.
“The outer form, which works as a plane of cut, gives the inner a new formal life, often unexpected and accidental. But this randomness is rigidly "programmed" by the internal predetermination of the connections of all elements subordinated to the requirements of the technical task - in this case, these are exhibition halls, offices, lecture rooms, technical premises, - explains Valeria Preobrazhenskaya, - The building that we received as a result became a reason for further formal studies of the interaction of various forms”.
In this case, the structure consisting of cones was cut around the perimeter with a classic rectangle. Levon Airapetov and Valeria Preobrazhenskaya have other projects developing the same theme - reducing a complex three-dimensional structure to a relatively simple external shape by means of a section that allows the outside to draw everything that is inside (which, as mentioned above, is a bit like cutting a piece cheese). The architects used this technique in the competitive
the project of an opera house for the South Korean city of Busan - where the outer contours are a cube set at an angle. The same method is behind the bookcase and table that TOTEMENT / PAPER came up with earlier this year for the Corian competition (and featured at Milan Design Week). The table - that one at all resembles a freely executed model of the Sakhalin project.
The theme of a section, showing a slice of the volumetric composition of a building on a flat facade, and, in general, the chosen design method, in which the image of a building is based on a particularly three-dimensional structure - all this connects the appearance and appearance of the interiors in such a way that there is nowhere closer. The facade and the interior are not only interconnected - they really become part of the whole, in different ways of perceiving the same idea. Moreover, the building is perceived as a fragment of a slightly different reality than here, neatly carved in a rectangular manner, tightened for preservation with a thin film of glass and placed on the grass among the hills. It's not even about fantastic, although the building is certainly fantastic, especially inside - it's about something else: the designed space is endowed with other qualities than the spaces that are familiar to us. This space has a different fabric, it is built according to different laws, and only if necessary is cut into the usual: the floor and ceiling.
“In such objects, we do not have to separately draw interiors,” continues Levon Airapetov. “In general, our task is not to draw, but to naturally obtain from a simple form the unexpected, and even unexpected for ourselves. A building is like a human body. And the process of designing it is like giving birth to a child, the appearance of which is predetermined by genetic codes."
In conclusion of the conversation about this version of the project, it must be said that all the components of the idea are instantly sought out from the classics of modernism, and among the most important techniques. The spiral ramp at the Wright Guggenheim Museum; spiral staircases (and "house on legs") by Corusier; the cylinders of the Melnikov house embedded in each other. All the main precepts are fulfilled here - the overflow of spaces, the identification of the internal structure of the building from the outside). But several nuances were added: the cylinder became a cone, the cone was flattened, turned over and multiplied - and the project cannot be mistaken for an epigone of classical modernism. This is probably its most curious quality: the complex arises from the simple, the unusual from the familiar.
