SMART City Kazan is a new financial and business center of the Republic of Tatarstan, which is being built on an area of 650 hectares, 3 km from Kazan airport and 15 km from the city itself. It is assumed that the district will be built using advanced energy efficient and "smart" technologies, and its main residents are large international, Russian and Tatarstan companies that will move their offices to SMART City. While the project is at the very initial stage of implementation (on October 2, 2013, the first stone was laid), however, its master plan was approved, the construction phase was determined, and now projects of individual structures and clusters are being actively developed. It was in this work at the end of last year that the "Architectural Workshop of Totan Kuzembaev" took part, which received an order for the development of a multifunctional showroom in the public and business center of SMART City.
The typology of a showroom itself is most often associated with a specific brand and a demonstration of its products, but in this case the architects faced a completely different task. In the case of SMART City, the show object was supposed to be the innovative area itself, therefore, in addition to the actual exhibition halls, the functional program of this facility included offices, a conference center, and a restaurant, and the most central place was chosen for its construction. The public and business center SMART City itself is the first stage of a large-scale project (a developed park, a free economic zone and a science center are planned to be built later), and the area allocated for the showroom is its central square. In other words, the architects got almost the most "tasty" order - to come up with an image of a building that is geographically and typologically prescribed to become a symbol of the new city, its "zero kilometer".
The location on the main pedestrian square prompted the architects to create an object partially raised above the ground - as Totan Kuzembaev explains, the last thing they wanted was to tightly block the prospect of the streets leading out here and take away the central public space from future citizens. On the contrary, I wanted to emphasize its role in the structure of the district, creating here not only a pleasant place for walking and recreation, but also decorating it with a certain symbolic element of improvement, eloquently emphasizing the importance of the place and the city as a whole. The model of Arkaim, a famous ancient settlement from the "Country of Cities", which served as an observatory and scientific center of civilization, became such a symbol. “Actually, like today's SMART City, which is assigned the role of a research center of modern Tatarstan,” Kuzembaev explains his choice.
The ancient city, which had circular walls, served as a prototype for the compositional solution of the showroom itself. The building is a hoop hovering over the square, which is supported by three spheres. More precisely, the hoop is soldered into the balls exactly in the middle, so that the building has three entrances, three spaced apart rooms on the first floor, a single second floor and several completely independent rooms on the third floor. For all its futuristic nature, such a composition ideally meets the diverse functional program of the showroom - the architects were able to completely separate the exhibition space, conference hall and catering establishments. The offices act as "connective" tissue - they are located along the outer radius of the "hoop", while the inner one is a public bypass gallery, from which the relief of ancient Arkaim is visible at a glance.
Perhaps all this could look too serious and even pretentious, if Totan Kuzembaev had not woven another theme into the architectural image of the complex - namely, the theme of the branded Tatar treat, chak-chak. “I wanted to sweeten it somehow,” he throws up his hands. Chak-chak is, as you know, balls of dough, which are first fried and then poured with honey, respectively, the finished sweetness, firstly, has a characteristic golden hue, and secondly, all in a hole. In order to convey this intricate texture as accurately as possible, the architects used golden glazing and Arch-Skin composite material. There are no windows in the traditional sense of the word - the entire facade is uniformly perforated, turning the surface of the building into a kind of lace. The central tier is completely revetted, but on the spheres you can still find two continuous stripes: the architects deliberately decided to mark the floors in order to make the structure of the complex better "read" from the side.
Naturally, a building being built in an innovative city itself must use advanced “smart” technologies. The project provides for an energy efficient building layout that uses thermodynamic heat pumps, solar panels and energy efficient lighting sources, as well as presence detectors. And although the showroom project remains a concept so far, there is every reason to believe that it could organically complement the landscape of SMART City Kazan.
