An open six-level parking lot is planned to be built on the territory of the Krylatskie Hills business park. Designed by Boris Levyant's ABD architects bureau in 2002-2003 and built in 2006, this office complex at one time acquired textbook fame as a representative of the typology of a business park that was new for Moscow at that time, as an example of competent office design, and also as an example restrained strict business architecture.
However, the business park had a drawback from the very beginning: four six-storey office buildings with a total area of 10,000 sq. M. meters, there was definitely a lack of simple open parking spaces arranged on its territory. Neighboring streets began to fill up with cars, which turned out to have little space there - in a word, as soon as the office space was filled with tenants, the area began to turn into a transport disaster zone. Therefore, it was decided to build a multi-level above-ground parking lot on the territory of Krylatsky Hills. The architects of the "ABV Group" bureau of Nikita Biryukov had to design the parking without disturbing the scale of the urban and natural surroundings - and at the same time arrange the construction process so that it would not interfere with the flow of office life.
For the building of the new parking lot, a plot has been allocated in the southeastern part of the complex, separated from Krylatskaya Street by a regular arc of the office buildings of the business park, which stretches from the building of the medical center (in the east) to panel residential buildings (in the west). The closest neighbor of the future multi-level parking lot is the Moskvoretsky Park - one of the large Moscow parks favored by skiers, along the border of which there will be a stretch of land. The building strives to conform to it and even be similar to it in some way. The building has no external walls, as befits an overground parking lot, and the floors will be ventilated. The walls were replaced by a curtain structure consisting of vertical timber lamellas. The ribs bend in smooth, slightly irregular waves, creating the impression of a permeable and moving mass, similar to a bundle of flexible tall grass in a light wind, to plant trunks, or even to a giant skeleton of a prehistoric creature that unexpectedly appeared on the border of a Moscow park. Strictly speaking, these ribs are an independent form, although not devoid of bionic associations. But the facade is permeable, like a light pine forest, and the line of tops growing above the last floor, like woody ones, tends to dissolve in the sky.
Natural associations are complemented by many blotches of green vegetation. It is the answer to the challenges that architects have faced when designing. Directly in the middle of the plot there is a building of a transformer substation. It was impossible to move or move it anywhere (construction should not interfere with the work of the offices), and the architects divided the building into two parts, connecting them together with metal truss-bridges over which cars can pass from one part of the parking lot to another.
Dividing the volume into two parts made the building larger, the image lighter, added compositional diversity, and, in addition, the opening that arose made it possible to preserve part of the views of the Moskvoretsky Park for the employees of the business park. The idea of the architectural image of the building belongs to the greatest extent to the natural environment - the building is conceived as a transitional element between the regular ordered architecture of the city and the irregular, flexible, permeable nature of the park.
And if the building gravitates towards the green space, then it rather opposes itself to the nearest neighbor - the buildings of the business park. There are corners, strict geometry, the simplicity of the alternation of wide stripes, the dense and smooth surface of the facades. There are bends, the complexity of wavy lines, a permeable lattice. Glass and aluminum are opposed by wood and greenery, horizontals - verticals, and finally, the severity of office work - a "rustling forest", a hint of park freedom.
The office buildings are lined up in a regular arc, and the parking building is only slightly curved in the plan: it stretches along the border of the park, and the border in this place is gently sloping, almost straight. The new building, however, also lends itself to the charm of the arc, but in its own way - as if carried away by the process of rotation, it gets rid of all the corners. “All the buildings of the existing complex of the business park have sharply outlined forms,” explains the architect Ivan Loginov. “Another building with right angles would introduce dissonance into the existing architectural and natural environment. Smooth lines, on the other hand, smoothed out the perception. In addition, the round ends allowed us to get additional parking spaces, which is one of the main factors for this project."
The main task of the architects was the rational use of the site to ensure the maximum number of parking spaces. The wooden edges of the facade protrude above the roof slab, enclosing the upper, seventh level of the parking lot - and in fact, this is not a decorative technique at all, but the fence of the upper parking tier: it will also be possible to park cars on the "roof" - thus, the parking gets one additional tier. The distance between the concrete supports is very large - 17 meters; one row of supports runs along the perimeter of the building and only one more row is placed on the central longitudinal axis - large spans made it possible not to clutter up the space with pillars and place more cars with a shorter building length. In order for the structure to be reliable, “floor slabs will be slightly thicker than usual, but much lighter,” explains Ivan Loginov. The inner space of the garage is organized according to the well-known, but rarely used in our country, the “ramp” parking scheme: all the floors in one half of the floor are inclined, and the cars in such a garage are also on an inclined plane. “And this, - emphasizes the architect, - increases the number of parking spaces by almost 20% more”.
So, the building is pragmatic: a simple, in essence, function is implemented here with the utmost care in saving space. However, architects are not limited to mechanical, mainly engineering tasks. They surround the volume with a shell, which turns it into an extraordinary structure with its own associative row, unlike the neighboring buildings - however, it is quite appropriate on the border of the city and the park.
How not to remember here that it was garages that were one of the favorite types of buildings of the Russian avant-garde, which was sincerely fascinated by their technogenic function and practiced on this typology his skills in mastering a large form. Since then, a lot has changed: storing cars has become an almost futuristic task associated with building a new world - an everyday necessity. But, as we can see, practice shows that this function still hides many possibilities.
