We have already talked about the competition for the development of the Moscow City site next to the 60-storey Empire Tower on Krasnopresnenskaya embankment. This site has a rather long history: projects of various functions were designed for it. And not only sketches remind of this - the underground and part of the ground levels of the once agreed upon for this place of the water park have long been erected in concrete. Since now the investor has made a decision to locate city-wide and multifunctional premises, as well as parking, the above-ground part will be dismantled, and the existing underground part remains unchanged and should be put into operation as a parking lot in the near future. Therefore, one of the conditions of the competition was the task of integrating the underground part with its exits to the surface into a new building.
The architects of the DNA group did not begin to build their solution on a catchy curvilinear shape, but chose a fundamentally different, very strict geometry. “We proceeded from the fact that the City is already overflowing with buildings with an unusual shape, so another such volume is hardly appropriate there, especially since the building is smaller than its neighbors and its restrained nature will allow it to be commensurate with its surroundings, will add significance,” explains the team's position one of the founders of DNA, architect Natalya Sidorova - Plus, the implementation budget was rather tightly limited, so it, by definition, was not designed for any large-scale experiments with form."
The dimensions of the building spot, which is almost a square of 90 mx 75 m, and considerations for the optimal depth of the building dictated the division of the conventional parallelepiped into two blocks with a light space between them. The latter was placed by the architects perpendicular to the embankment - it is this arrangement that gives all the internal spaces of the building the opportunity to have a view towards the river. Both blocks were enclosed in a single shell to match the scale of the surrounding skyscrapers. Thus, a spacious atrium appeared between the two buildings, a kind of visual corridor connecting the embankment and the "Empire Tower", which stands on the second building line. The architects deliberately centered the complex strictly on the axis with the 60-storey tower building, thus connecting the two parts of the "Empire Tower" and emphasizing their connection with each other. The new volume has become a semblance of propylaea, a strict entrance portal in front of the high-rise. On the other hand, the plan of the atrium, which tapers towards the center and widens with sockets towards the entrances - like a concave lens - conceptually echoes the "signature" oval niche on the main facade of the Empire Tower skyscraper and allows better visibility from its premises to the river.
One of the main objectives of the competition was the creation of a new public urban space, included in a single pedestrian structure "Moscow City" and connecting the embankment, differing in height by almost 5 meters, and the entrance to the high-rise building "Empire Tower". In architectural discussions, it has already been repeatedly noted that the river in our city is little used for the formation of public space and a full-fledged embankment-promenade is almost never found in Moscow. The City complex had a great opportunity to correct this situation, but it cannot be said that the buildings already built have succeeded. Therefore, the architects of DNA made the embankment the main priority of their project, setting themselves the task of filling it with life. The inner street in their project is not closed inside the building, but spills out onto the embankment with large 2-level terraces with cafes and restaurants. The very same DNA street was made inclined, directly connecting the embankment and the City without escalators in the form of a natural urban landscape. A wide terraced promenade is oriented along the axis of the Empire Tower skyscraper and leads from the embankment to its main entrance and further to the city center. On the internal "steps", connected by a snake of ramps, a variety of landscaping and landscape elements are provided. There are shops and cafes along the street, representative lobbies of the multifunctional "towers" of the upper tier also open up here, and it is easy to get into the network of existing underground pedestrian passages of the City from it.
The outfit of the new volume, despite the fact that it is the second stage of the Empire Tower skyscraper, is fundamentally different from it. The least "visible" northern and western facades are made almost flat, but the eastern one has a stepped structure, which emphasizes the angular location of the complex: in the series of mid-rise buildings on the embankment, starting from the Bagration Bridge, the new building will be the first. The main theme of the southern facade facing the river is vertical divisions, which are designed to introduce an intermediate scale between the street and the towers in this rather extended surface. In fact, the architects are recruiting it from lattice fragments, the width of which is equal to the width of the atrium, which makes it possible to clearly articulate the general structure of the building. It is important that each such DNA fragment is placed at a slight angle and this simple technique helps to give the building a more intimate, pedestrian scale and brings dynamics along the embankment: when moving from one side, asymmetric plastic is more noticeable, and when moving from the opposite side, it is less active.
According to the authors of the project, they interpreted the facade rather as a "wall with windows", considering that for the embankment, which serves as a kind of buffer between the city and the island of skyscrapers, the plastic of the developed pylons introduces the detailing necessary for perception from the pedestrian level, in contrast to smooth mainly, surfaces of buildings "Moscow-City". At first they even thought to put this “wall” of DNA in stone, but then they still settled on a more subtle solution - frosted structured glass framed by wide slopes of polished stainless steel with “windows” made of glass with a slightly greenish tint.
The authors paid great attention to the elaboration of the optimal functional structure of the building: parking lots are compactly located on 4 floors in the rear part of the building from the river, so that the facades with the best river views on all floors are occupied by office premises; the parking ramp at the corner of the building is made unheated, which should significantly save energy costs; the location of the vertical communication cores makes it easy to move around the building, in particular, from the parking lot you can get to any floor; in two blocks the optimum depth is maintained from the light front to the communication core and the floor area is more than 2000 sq. m. with free planning; most of the technical rooms are located in the central dark part of the basement level; Technological loading of shops and restaurants are designed in such a way that they do not cross the main public spaces.
The project also fulfills all the conditions for integrating the new building with the existing underground levels. Thus, all the numerous stairs for evacuation from the underground floors, which go to the embankment level, have been preserved. By the way, not all participants strictly adhered to this condition. According to the constructive scheme for the transition from one step of the columns to another, the project proposed a terrace ribbed unloading plate, which, due to its small thickness, made it possible to maximize the use of the space under it, and the distributed arrangement of the cores of the building and columns retained the structure of the underground parking without loss of parking spaces.
However, the topic of public spaces is not limited to the improvement of the area between the building and the embankment and the creation of a covered city street. DNA decided that the newest complex needs them no less than the city, so the tenants of the second phase of the Empire Tower will also have their own oasis with greenery. The atrium has a stepped structure and is interpreted as a spectacular courtyard open to the river panorama. “The quality of the environment in the complex itself seems to us no less important than the quality of the space that appears in the city with the emergence of a new building,” says Natalya Sidorova. “Only by forming a holistic environment inside and around, we achieve a balance of interests of the city and investors, which, in our opinion, is the key to the successful implementation of the project”.
