It is planned to build a hotel on the shores of the Caspian Sea in the satellite town of Makhachkala, Kaspiysk. The site is located two blocks from the coastline between two roads leading to Makhachkala, next to it there is a highway to Makhachkala - therefore, it is separated from the sea twice: distance and road. The sports life of the city is densely concentrated in this place: on one side is the Sports Palace named after Ali Aliyev, on the other - the new, recently built stadium of the football club "Anji". The site itself is now a trapezoidal wasteland, devoid of any buildings and even vegetation.
Here, with the assistance of the New City Social Assistance Fund for Urban Development Management (funded by a private investor without attracting government funding), it was decided to build a four-star hotel under the management of an international network operator in strict accordance with international standards to create comfortable conditions for the business community in the Republic. Dagestan. And also for sports events, including international ones: during the football matches, it is planned to accommodate guest teams and tourists in the hotel.
With a request to develop a project for such a hotel, the customer turned to the ADM bureau shortly before the New Year; now the project is ready for examination.
The first thing the architects thought about when working on the hotel project was the proximity of the site to the sea, which, paradoxically, is practically invisible behind the dense residential buildings in the neighboring quarters. Due to the seismic hazard (earthquakes up to 9 points are possible here), the height of buildings in Makhachkala is limited to five floors - therefore, the idea of making the building high by raising it above the surroundings had to be abandoned immediately. As a result, only a narrow strip of the sea remained for review against the background of a rather dull panorama of the city. In addition, the requirements of the international operator for the efficiency of the use of space are very strict: a standard layout of rooms with a corridor-type layout was required and nothing more. “The most efficient shape for a hotel building is rectangular. This was not the case when you can afford at least some form of shaping,”says the author of the project, Andrei Romanov.
It would seem that everything was going to ensure that the hotel building became a boring parallelepiped, of which there are many. However, the architects did not want to accept this and, as if in opposition to the everyday environment and the rigid framework of the technical specification, revived the project by combining a simple orthogonal shape with flexible "natural" lines.
According to the design assignment, the area of the first tier of the building, which includes the lobby, restaurant, meeting rooms and administration offices, was to be almost double the size of any of the other four floors of the hotel. Instead of, following the example of the "classical" modernists, turning this additional volume into another parallelepiped - the architects gave its contours complex, smooth outlines. Several triangular protrusions resemble fins, and the entire outline of the ground floor plan looks like a giant fish. In the ledges are the entrances to the lobby, the lobby of the meeting rooms and the restaurant - their merged, flowing spaces with free layouts seem to spill out, leaving an inner rectangle for workspaces fenced off by walls.
The roof of the first floor protrudes even further, forming several large canopies, inheriting a rounded-triangular shape from the outline of the lobbies of the first floor. The canopies hang over the open terrace along the glass walls of the restaurant and the spacious lobby; they mark the central entrance with an acute angle; they fly out in a swift wave towards the garden above the conference hall. “This is a purely emotional decision, - explains Andrey Romanov, - It comes from the desire to fill a rather aggressive space with softness, in which a person is always much more comfortable”. However, for all its softness, the form is not devoid of internal energy: the visors throw themselves over the access roads, extending into the outer space as a pseudopodia of a fantastic creature striving to spread as far as possible from its core.
It turns out not only spectacular, but also practical: cars and buses will be able to disembark passengers in the rain immediately under the roof. From above, the entire roof of the first floor canopy, according to the authors, should be covered with grass - when viewed from above, it no longer resembles a fish, but a bizarre lawn or, more precisely, an exotic aquatic plant, on which, like Thumbelina on a water lily leaf, the architects planted a hotel plate … (This decision cannot fail to remind us of the green canopy over the road in the Moscow Region office complex, the architectural competition for which the ADM architects recently won in an international competition.)
However, the plate itself can be compared with the escape of a fantastic water lily on the first floor, since the hotel facades are designed in a multi-colored green key. The embossed metal frame, characteristic of ADM, forms a regular grid, the equal horizontal cells of which alternate in a checkerboard pattern. Inside, each "window" (in fact, one cell inside corresponds to a pair of rooms) is mosaic filled with verticals - transparent, bright light green and covered with a thin strip of glass folds into a varied, but not chaotic, but subject to regular rules, a surface that is also charged with grass. spring optimism. Behind the thin, ephemeral geometric pattern, the bluish horizontals of the interfloor floors are almost invisible, which, thus, fade into the background and do not burden the overall impression, being included in the play of colors and lines.
In all respects, the "green", nature-oriented image is successfully complemented by a garden, to which the architects plan to give almost all the space surrounding the hotel (however, there is also a place for parking along the contour of the plot. there is just enough space left for lush vegetation: fruit trees and flowering bushes, separated by cobbled paths and complemented by a small pool, the triangular petal of which hugs the glass "nose" of the restaurant. grass - landscape design is given no less attention here than the architecture of the building itself. The building and the garden are inseparable, like a French castle and its regular park, they continue each other, play one melody: the garden "enters" through the glass walls, and even when you look from above it becomes the main context of the hotel - the characteristic seaside cottages remain almost on the horizon and are no longer so important.
Such an attentive attitude to the landscape and the multitude of things, united in our minds by the rapidly aging word "improvement", has become a characteristic feature of the work of ADM architects over the past few years. On the territory of Moscow office centers, they experiment with paving, urban furniture, night lighting effects. They set up cafes on the roofs, plant trees on balconies, in a word, surround their buildings with a kind of oases of a comfortable environment, invariably drawing it - almost to the leaf. Here, in the seaside Kaspiysk, an oasis is quite appropriate; however, it is known that it is now customary to build hotels, especially seaside ones, with a garden and a swimming pool, but architecture and nature do not always react so sensitively to each other.
In a word, if the customer, as Andrei Romanov told us, wanted to get a modern building of the European level, devoid of any historical or national allusions, then this task in this must be recognized as completed. The building has received a completely European "face", this face looks at the Asian Caspian with calm dignity.
