The closed competition was announced at the end of February by the investor of the Empire Tower complex by MosCityGroup at the initiative of the chief architect of Moscow, Sergei Kuznetsov. At the end of April, the jury chose the UNK project bureau project; According to the organizers, this bureau, as the winner of the competition, will be entrusted with further work on the design of the second stage of the complex.
The second phase building is planned to be built on a square plot between the Empire Tower and the embankment. In the period from 2002 to 2009, this place was consistently designed: a glass dome with a water park and entertainment center (Giovanni Corradetti), a white striped building with rounded corners (ENPI) and finally one of the latest projects was a streamlined wavy language”, which stretched in the NBBJ project from the tower to the embankment. Now, in 2013, the functional content of the second stage of the complex has changed: the building will not be connected to the pier, as it was planned earlier, and there will be no water park; According to the terms of the competition, part of the complex should be occupied by an overground parking lot, some by offices, and the upper and lower floors should be given to public spaces with shops and cafes.
The architects of the UNK project bureau focused their attention on the movement of human flows and therefore made the protagonist of the project an atrium cutting through the cubic volume of the complex diagonally, from the south-east corner to the north-west corner. It divides the cubic volume into two buildings: north and south. The northern floor from the 3rd to the 8th floor is occupied by parking lots (there is non-mechanized parking on the 3-6 floor, mechanized parking on the 7-8 floor), higher with offices. In the southern part, a medical center will be located on the 2-3 floors, above - office premises. An observation deck is planned on the landscaped roof, which can be reached by elevator directly from the atrium. The center of the northern triangle is the round ramp of the parking lot (as in Evropeyskiy; the architects give scientifically substantiated arguments that such an entrance is more convenient than others for drivers who do not have to turn the steering wheel again). In the core of the southern triangle, there is another triangle, a smaller one, which includes two elevator shafts - which, in turn, allows you to divide the southern part into two more triangles, each oriented to its own elevator, which means organizing office space with minimal losses of usable space and good to light it up. Efficiency and economy have become one of the important topics of the project (allowing the authors to fit into the budget, while laying in it high-quality finishing materials): where possible, standard solutions are used. In addition, the architects managed to use the existing substructures in the project - a grid of underground columns built earlier.
The entire ground floor is dedicated to a public space with shops and restaurants. It is supposed to be open around the clock. The center, or rather, the axis of the first floor, in fact, becomes the diagonal "road" of the atrium. At its beginning and at the end, at two corners of the cubic volume, in front of the entrances there are small squares arranged like giant "loggias" and protected by the common roof of the complex "from direct precipitation", as the architects write in their explanatory note.
The gorge of the atrium opens to the east, towards the Bagration bridge and the Vystavochnaya metro station - in the direction from where the streams of people are directed towards the City. People will be able, according to the idea of architects, to go around the building from the south and from the east, but the main scenario proposed by the architects is, of course, a passage through the atrium, through the body of the building: leaving from the opposite side, we find ourselves on the square in front of the Empire Tower, from where it is already a stone's throw to the central part of the business district.
From the side of the bridge, the funnel of the atrium looks like a perspective portal - this is what the authors call it, although it must be admitted that the similarity with the portal here is only partial; only one promising bevel is clearly visible, the right eastern one. The role of the second slope is played by the southern wall facing the embankment: it is turned at an angle of 3 degrees towards the entrance to the atrium. It turns out that if we talk about the portal, then the portal is radically shifted from the right - in the classic, characteristic of the 1970s scheme of the "TV", the axis is, as it were, sharply shifted. Stretching along the axis, the slopes became very different: one formed an acute angle, the other became a glass screen, rather covering the entrance from the river side than helping to find it. The entrance itself, as already mentioned, is turned towards the bridge, that is, approximately at an angle of 45 degrees to the plane of the main river facade. In other words, if we talk about the portal, then the "classical" portal (such as one can imagine in the architecture of post-war modernism) performed in this case a manipulation akin to a military rebuilding - took a step to the left and turned around. The movement is clear, designed for one or two, but in fact it is spiral, and it is not for nothing that the authors say that the composition of their building "supports the spiral composition of the silhouette of Moscow City."
The described “reversal” practically deprived the form of classical allusions, endowing it with a romantic resemblance to the Pillars of Hercules, the legendary gates of the ancient world. Indeed, we are more likely to face the gates of the City - passing through them, we find ourselves in the world of skyscrapers-cliffs, and the energy of the “gorge between the rocks” prepares us to enter a space of a different scale and other stresses than those that are usual in an ordinary city.
It must be said that the resulting aberration between the habitually classical and the acutely romantic permeates the entire project, creating in it both plastic and meaningful, semantic tension.
The architects suggested covering the glass walls with an overhead mesh made of architectural concrete. The mesh will be reflected in the glass, crushing and multiplying, enhancing, but also dissolving the ornament in a sequence of reflections. In a simple and large drawing, it is easy to see the designation of the main idea of the building, built by dividing a square into triangles. The same division is repeated many times in the drawing of the concrete mesh of the facade. Moreover, when looking from below, due to the perspective reduction, it will be difficult to distinguish a rhombus from a square. At the corners, the triangles, merging, form an almost sculptural zigzag, hinting at the classics of the genre -
Hirst Tower by Norman Foster. However, in order not to get bored, the architects conceived their grid as “parametric”: the thickness of the ribs is constantly changing, smoothly thickening and thinning, as the skin of a living creature could do - “waves” of matter pass along the facade.
The concrete grid, according to the authors, should serve as a transitional link from the stone architecture of Stalin's Kutuzovsky Prospect on the other side of the river, to the glass architecture of the City. In some places the grid is interrupted by glass planes; inside the atrium, the western wall is glass, and the eastern one is covered with concrete ornaments.
It turns out well and economically: the drawing is duplicated by its own reflection on the opposite wall. If we take into account the presence of a glass wall also behind the lattice, then there are two reflections, and the grid - one, the extended space turns out to be saturated with highlights and shadows. In addition, the atrium tapers upwards, enhancing the perspective effect for those who are not too lazy to raise their heads and look up, and facilitating the intersection of reflections from different angles.
At the level of the upper floors, white diagonals of passages appear, connecting the two buildings with each other (this is convenient for those who will work here: from the parking lot you can go directly to the office). Some bridges turn out to be stairs and cut through space obliquely in three dimensions. Trees appear here and there on the bridges. Below, white lamps in the form of stylized airplanes hover on thin cables, creating a feeling of habitability of the 50-meter height of space above the heads of passers-by. Panoramic elevators slide along the walls, adding to the dynamics of forms of real movement (by the way: there are several elevator groups, one of them is specially for public spaces, it connects the atrium with the operated roof, and office employees will be able to use other elevators so as not to intersect with visitors shops and cafes). In a word, despite the almost sterile whiteness of the atrium, the space of the atrium turned out to be difficult, lively - and certainly spectacular.
Typologically, this is a passage, but it is expanded, and in two dimensions at once: on the first floor, shops and restaurants are allocated more space, since they occupy the entire area of two triangular buildings. The height of the “passage” also turns out to be large, transcendental by store standards, which allows architects to experiment with space and perspective, creating a restrained monumental, but at the same time charged with plastic intrigue, an eve of the dense forest of Moscow skyscrapers.
