The architects were offered to participate in a small closed competition for the design of a shopping and entertainment complex. The customer put the bidders in a fairly strict framework: on a relatively small area, it was required to design a large multi-level shopping center and a spacious above-ground parking lot (since the customer quite justifiably did not want to burden himself with labor-intensive and expensive earthworks).
The site is located seven kilometers from the Moscow Ring Road, on the edge of the Moskovsky village, not far from the junction leading from the Kiev highway to Borovskoye. The village (almost a city in size) is rapidly developing, and now it consists of half of giant greenhouses, where vegetables and fruits are grown on an industrial scale, and half of panel houses, which are actively growing in whole microdistricts of new residential high-rise buildings. Several years ago, greenhouses were demolished on the site next to the future shopping complex and the same giant houses are being built. It is planned to build a new interchange in the direction of Moscow nearby, to continue the village boulevard to the east. And the new shopping complex should be located behind the boulevard, on the site of a temporary shop selling seedlings from greenhouses to summer residents (its successor will be a garden center on the first floor of the building).
The shape of the site is polygonal, the boundaries of the building spot are quite ornate and resemble a schematically drawn house with a pipe or even a profile with a long nose that looks west, towards the Kiev highway. Since a lot of usable area was required, and the site was relatively small, it was necessary to occupy it entirely.
In the competition project, the five-level parking lot occupies a rectangle in the southeastern part, and the shopping center itself is a triangle facing the highway and boulevard. Thus, the shopping part of the building tries on the whole intricate configuration of the plan with many edges, corners and small protrusions, and the calmer volume of the parking lot, which is taken inland, serves as a background.
“We have already had to solve a similar problem - connecting in one volume an overground parking and a shopping complex, in particular, in the project of a shopping and entertainment complex in Yuzhny Butovo, although there was much more spaciousness there,” says Vladimir Labutin. “In this case, it was quite difficult to fit the required retail space and parking in the designated area, since under the terms of the competition we could not use the underground space.”
In the presented versions, different facades are superimposed on the structure of the complex, which are united by the brightness of the color scheme, as well as by the theme of the diagonal.
In the first draft of the project, the main role is assigned to color. The facades are covered with glass and advertisements, and where there are blank blank planes, a large pixel pattern appears. Bright - blue, yellow, red, and, unlike traditional "pixels", irregular: somewhere the picture is rotated diagonally at an angle of 45 degrees, somewhere the borders of colored spots change direction, forming triangles and trapezoids - in a word, all together it looks more like not even a fashionable pixel coloring, but a Russian abstract painting of the 1910s. To strengthen the analogy, the architects occupied several advertising spaces with enlarged reproductions of Malevich's paintings. The result is a kaleidoscope, in which, like among mirrors, paintings, similar to a large ornament, and advertising canvases alternate in a certain order. All this is superimposed on the complex large-relief structure of the facade (which, as we remember, repeats with accuracy, saving meters, each protrusion of the building spot), intersects with a diagonal protrusion of the travelator and is complemented by several more cantilever protrusions (which also adds meters, yes, yes) … The alternation of floors is completely lost, and the building turns into a three-dimensional version of the avant-garde painting, a volumetric collage.
It should be noted here that the architects of the studio "Sergey Kiselev & Partners" work a lot with bright colors: just remember the house "Avangard" (there was a classic large-pixel drawing), the shopping mall in Yuzhny Butovo (strokes of color on a gray "canvas") or the project residential complex in Mytishchi (which was built on a three-dimensional optical game with shades of a rainbow). The project in Moskovsky adds another option to this series - a building that grew out of an abstract picture of the classical avant-garde. (It is impossible not to notice that this is a whole topic, and earlier foreign "stars" thought more about it: David Adjaye in the building of the Skolkovo business school or Erik Egerat in the project of a house that he was not allowed to build on Yakimanka.)
The second option, proposed by the architects of SK&P for the shopping and entertainment complex in Moskovsky, is calmer and not so charged with associative series. The facades are lined with thin strokes of wood-brown diagonals interspersed with iridescent, like a hummingbird feather, yellow-orange. These "rays" were supposed to be made of panels
ROCKPANEL Chameleon that change color depending on the light and angle of view. Advertising is also interspersed in the drawing of the facades, although in the second version it is less than in the first one.
The deliberate inclusion of advertising, its artistic interpretation is also a common feature of the two variants of the project of the SK&P architectural studio. This decision looks sensible and sensible: frankly speaking, billboards are necessary for a shopping complex and it is better when they do not spoil the architect's plan, inevitably invading afterwards. In both versions, they become an organic part of the overall design, an important part of the image and at the same time loudly inform everyone about the purpose of the building.
The resulting imagery is consonant with the once popular song of Maryla Rodovich “Colorful Fairs” - warm nostalgia that has passed onto the walls of the building looks quite appropriate. The greenhouse-panel environment definitely lacked a bright accent; and from the Kiev highway it would be nice to see. In one of the options, the architects even suggested making the roof of the shopping complex multi-colored so that residents of tall neighboring houses, going out onto the balcony, could see a bright spot. Why, as the authors hoped, would make life more fun.
