The new Russian office of Philip Morris is located in the Legenda Tsvetnoy business center. Its total area is about 9 thousand square meters, which the customer wanted to turn into a space that is not only convenient for work and business meetings, but also as different as possible from a standard office with long corridors and many doors. Philip Morris management immediately proposed to the architect Sergey Estrin to realize this idea - the previous projects of the workshop convinced the customer that he was addressing exactly the right address. And Estrin really created an office for the holding, filled with spatial intrigue.
The work on the office of the tobacco company turned out to be a non-trivial challenge for the architect, first of all, from the point of view of the ideology of the future interior. After all, usually the basis of the artistic image of the headquarters space is the activities of the corporation or the products that it produces, but in the case of cigarettes and cigarette packs, everything is very ambiguous - you cannot use their images as an element of decor, since this can be regarded as propaganda of smoking … On the other hand, Estrin did not want to completely ignore this topic, so he and his colleagues were looking for "semitones" - they came up with and selected details that could indirectly tell about the activities of Philip Morris.
Perhaps the most eloquent in this sense are the lamps used in the entrance area, main corridors, recreation areas and meeting rooms. They are made of white frosted glass and have not only a characteristic elongated cylindrical shape, but also darker side caps, reminiscent of compressed shredded tobacco. To illuminate the main meeting room, as well as transit zones (entrance lobby, reception, main corridor), architects use several rows of such lamps at once, placing them in a checkerboard pattern and thereby emphasizing the constant movement in these parts of the office. The inner corridors, which are mainly walked by employees of specific departments, are illuminated by the same "torpedoes", but already lined up in one chain, - according to Sergey Estrin, this helps to better navigate in space and at the same time does not highlight the passages too much. the general structure of the office.
The color palette of the office is also subtly associated with the protagonist of the Philip Morris business - tobacco. Combinations of light and dark brown tones with a characteristic matt shade are present both in the decoration of the walls, and in the design of floors and ceilings - creating “blends” of varying degrees of “strength”, architects get a space that is stylish in its astringency. “One of the sources of inspiration for us, of course, was the legendary Marlboro cowboy and everything connected with him, but in the modern interior we have left only a slight hint of this harsh style,” says Sergey Estrin.
One of the main tasks of architects, as already mentioned, was to get away from the corridor system with its given linearity. To get rid of monotonous passages was helped not only by the abandonment of offices in favor of open space, in which meeting rooms, recreation areas and small smoking rooms with their own hood are integrated with islands, but also a number of decorative techniques. First of all, this is the use of transparent partitions, which the architects place at different angles, thereby breaking the perspective of the corridors. In order to make them more tangible, the authors apply a matte pattern to the glass in the form of a map of Moscow, and some of the transparent walls are made with the effect of broken glass, making the light refract and play in countless cracks.
An even greater expression of the corridors is given by the flooring, assembled from polygonal fragments of carpet of different shades. It seems that some passages are cut by lightning, while the floor of others consists of ice floes that have split into many separate fragments. Taken together, this creates the feeling of a dynamic space, the logic and structure of which cannot be read at first glance. “In this interior, we tried to combine zones that initiate movement and speed of decision-making, with spaces that seem to slow down reality and encourage a pause,” says Sergey Estrin. - It seems to me that this is the main point of smoking: to have several legitimate reasons for stopping during the day. And although I have long been a long-term no-smoker, I wanted to convey this mood of work and life in which there is a place for a smoke break in the appearance of the Philip Morris headquarters."
