The class A business center "Alkon" is located on Leningradsky Prospekt, if you go from the center to the region - on the right, one block in front of the Sokol metro station. The erected buildings are easy to spot even in a glimpse, driving along the avenue by car: they seem to be hidden behind the massive wall of the first line building, but the large volumes and rich color attract attention. In October, it is planned to dismantle the brick building-plate overlooking the avenue, sparingly decorated with vertical blades in the spirit of the harsh classics of the 1970s, and to build in its place a building of the second stage, recently approved by the architectural council, according to the ADM architects project.
“The history of our work with this territory began just with the project of the second stage, - says Andrey Romanov, - in 2008 we were offered to make a project of buildings overlooking the avenue. A little later, we took up the transformation of the project of the first stage buildings, on which Fitzroy Robinson architects had previously worked. The customer asked not to change the already agreed volumes of buildings and the plan of the complex (especially since the construction had already begun by that time) - if we had started to design this part from scratch, we would have done everything differently. So in the project of the first stage, we first of all changed the facades, carefully worked with the improvement, but also made the entire stage P, working documentation and passed all the further necessary approvals. By the time we started working from the old project, we only had renders, we didn't even have building plans”.
Thus, the layout of square buildings with an atrium in the center and four lift groups at the corners of the atriums; the height and stepped silhouettes of buildings that rise in the depths of the block; many ventilation pipes around their perimeter and technical floors, which had to be masked with grilles - all this was inherited from the previous project by Fitzroy Robinson architects.
Andrei Romanov and Ekaterina Kuznetsova managed, however, to radically transform the image of the complex. First of all, the architects replaced the white porcelain stoneware with terracotta panels. Their dense dark orange color is not typical for the sandy-gray tonality of Leningradsky Prospekt. We asked the architects if the characteristic “ceramic” shade is associated with the memory of the Izolyator plant, which was replaced by a business center (the plant produced mainly technical, but some decorative ceramics; and its buildings were built of bricks, although they were painted) … “No, you shouldn't look for any memories of the relocated factory in our project,” Andrey Romanov confidently answers this question, “in the end, insulators are not a terracotta color at all. No, we were guided by European practice, where terracotta panels are very popular in office buildings. We consider this material effective and modern, and in principle we love to use it."
In addition, the terracotta tiles of the business center successfully echo the rich brick color on the facades of the residential towers built by the Ostozhenka bureau near the Sokol metro station - so that modern buildings build their own chain of associations among the Stalinist and panel houses.
If we talk about the structure of the facades, then ADM acted in this case as they did in several of their other projects with the boxes of reconstructed Soviet buildings: visually stretched the proportions of the windows, disguising the wall under the windowsill with glass duplex panels with a pattern of horizontal stripes applied by sandblasting technology. The stripes help to hide the massive wall behind the glass, and it seems that the windows are high, almost "to the floor" and stand on interfloor rods, marked by horizontal terracotta stripes, similar to ADM's favorite metal I-beams. The stripes on the glass echo with the relief of thin horizontal lines on the terracotta walls and with striped glass inserts on the upper floors - which is why several "layers of complexity" of the pattern are formed, which are read by the eye as a sign of the richness of the surface and avoid uniformity.
The architects arranged the walls between the windows in an order reminiscent of a chessboard, but decided in a rhythm not “one-two”, but “one-two-three”. Two units in this order occupy the window halves, one - the pier. In the second line, the pier is shifted one third to the right and is located above the left half of the window. However, higher, in the third line, the started movement does not continue and does not form a hint of a spiral climbing upward, but is interrupted in order to start again on the next floor and interrupt again. The dynamics are outlined, but not developed, and the structure of the facade remains regular, not destroyed by excessive whirling. Probably, the described stop is necessary in order to avoid the theme of the stepped ziggurat inherited from the previous project, a kind of Tower of Babel.
Unable to change the stepped silhouette of the upper floors, Andrei Romanov and Ekaterina Kuznetsova made their facades fundamentally different: light, glass with a thin terracotta cut protruding forward. Step by step retreating from the edge, the upper floors form terraces in front of them, which the architects have improved and turned into mini-squares raised above the city: the floors are covered with wood, small lawns with grass are arranged between the benches. By the way, wood is becoming another important material in this project, after glass and terracotta. The walls in front of the entrances to the buildings are trimmed with stained spruce, wood trimmed and benches on the territory of the inner boulevards.
The atriums, one in the center of each square building, are covered with the MARCHI system (named after its developers, the designers of the Moscow Architectural Institute), which makes the glass ceiling non-massive. The interiors of the atriums are almost sterile, and the strict and thin white cut of the glass planes, as well as the narrow lines of the illumination, unobtrusively echo the main theme set on the facades.
These boulevards are a favorite part of the project for ADM architects. The land improvement project, which is planned to be made open for the city, has not yet been fully implemented. But an expensive granite pavement with a strict geometric pattern is already ready: thin black lines line both the pavement and the surrounding lawns with a grid of large squares, picking up the theme of unobtrusive speculative structuring of space, subordinating it to the general proportional structure. Anyone who learned to draw as a child remembers the experience of building perspective by drawing a grid of lines to help create a semblance of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional sheet; many still liked not to erase, but to preserve the traces of these constructions. So, in this case, one might think that architects are so keen on proportioning that they seize the opportunity, even in small things, to show a rational Cartesian grid, to instill it in a reckless Moscow space.
The landscaping is not striking, but it is present everywhere. The squares are filled with granite, grass, and white beach pebbles. In the black stitching of the pavement, the strokes of the lamps are neatly embedded (very similar to the same lamps in the lower slopes of the atrium walls). During the day, unless you specifically look for them, you will not notice them. But at night they form a large pattern glowing underfoot on the pavement. In the same black stitching, slotted drains are built into, the bias to which is almost not felt.
Along the boulevards there are trees in high square plinths, and every third tree is surrounded by a frame of a wooden bench made of rounded planks. The trees - some complex hybrid cherries - are already in bloom. The atmosphere is completed by the ventilation posts: trimmed with inclined glass slats and similar to art objects, the whim of an eccentric artist ("although if they could, they would have removed and decided the ventilation differently" - the architects repeat).
Even now, despite the unfinished landscaping, the complex looks like a high-quality, expensively finished thing. But this is not its only feature. The main thing in this project, probably, is the subtlety of the lines of the regular, crystalline clarity of the grid, which is enhanced by reflection in the glass and comes into conflict with the massiveness of the silhouettes, stretching the proportions and making all the buildings of the complex more slender, austere and as if taut. The phenomenon of lightening the mass through the introduction of order is probably the main merit of the architects of the ADM bureau, who managed to transform the initial project almost beyond recognition, endowing it with completely different stadial characteristics. Simply put: the architects turned a ten-year-old project into a completely modern building.
