We talked about this project: the Vitamin Research Institute, built in the 70s in the faceless style of Soviet offices in Nauchny Proyezd near the Kaluzhskaya metro station. By the time of the renovation, the institute no longer operated as a research institution, but leased office space.
“And after the complex of buildings was completely“changed”according to the project of the architects ADM, in the south-west of the capital, not far from the Gazprom headquarters, a unique business quarter Smart Park appeared, without exaggeration.
The starting point for the Smart Park concept was the environment. The business quarter is located in a park with an area of 2 hectares and in the warm season is so densely surrounded by greenery that visually the border between office buildings and nature practically disappears.
“We have strengthened this feeling by creating such a project so that the unity of buildings and nature would become an artistic device, a through-the-unique idea of the project,” says Andrey Romanov, “in accordance with this idea, we also chose materials: imitating alpolik wood, mass-colored fiber cement panels”.
From these relatively simple materials and glass, new facades were composed, which made it possible to transform the kurguz proportions of not very high-quality late Soviet buildings into more elegant, with a predominance of verticals, multilayer and relief. The composition of the facades, according to the architect's own expression, resembles furniture doors: the effect of open doors is created by panels placed transversely to the plane of the facade - either pivoted on a hinge, or open doors, although in fact, of course, they act as fixed lamellas, slightly protecting windows from oblique rays of the sun, but even more - creating a play of light and shadow on the facades. The theme is supported by the uneven width of the panels remaining in the plane of the facade: one might think that they are able to ride along the guides of metal I-beams. The "doors" do not move and do not turn, the technique is decorative, it endows the facade with intrigue, but does not turn into a mechanical toy (the latter, however, would have been impossible with a small reconstruction budget).
The metal "rails" - guides are also not located exactly where one would assume at first glance: it seems that the interfloor overlap should be located directly behind them, but in fact the floor is located higher - what seems to be the top of the window from the outside, in fact actually hides a window sill behind it. “This is mostly a decorative technique that allows you to create expressive plasticity of the facade,” says Andrei Romanov. Thus, we have before us a successful camouflage, a thing that, at first glance, is opposite to the modernist principle of displaying the truth of the structure, but consonant with another idea proclaimed by Le Corbusier of the independence of the suspended facade. Since the facade is a screen, it plays by its own rules.
Metal rails and wooden "sashes" make up a visual frame, deeper in the plane of the facade, inserts of fiber cement panels are folded into horizontal bands, forming a kind of lambriquin over the windows with curtains or, as Russian people in the 17th century would say, "forehead" (from the outside, green inserts look like the unconditional "top" of the window, although in fact this is the lower pier and the floor line is located just at the bottom of the green ribbon, such is the visual play). The vertical piers at the transverse entrance, the main building, turned out to be somewhat thicker, and there “wooden” panels alternate with green inserts.
The described mesh of the facade is the main plot of this reconstruction, supplemented by some details: "wooden" gratings in the upper part of the buildings and on the walls of the transformer station in the courtyard of the complex, the strict gray metal of the window frames, in the color of I-beams, light green rectangles of the entrance doors, the numbers of which are written in thin and very large numbers.
The buildings in the courtyard are lower than the entrance building, they go down gradually: from five to three and two floors, and are arranged in sections - the buildings are long, but they have many entrances, behind each is a hall with a staircase in the middle. Since the width of the buildings is also quite significant, the architects illuminated the stairs with a "light well": the exit to the roof is made in the form of a pavilion with glass walls, and since there are two or three floors, this pavilion allows daylight to pass through well. On the roofs of small buildings, tenants can also arrange terraces - the architects made a wooden pavement, aluminum railings.
The landscaping and lighting were implemented in such a way that the complex now looks very holistic, like a finished, well-drawn picture, thought out in details that another would certainly forget about. Thus, the lines of parking dividers and even seat numbers are neatly inscribed in the pavement, the alpolik gratings on the buildings echo with real wooden ones - around benches and ballot boxes.
When the ADM architects came here, the area looked like a wasteland overgrown with trees, which were preserved and supplemented with plantings.
Now the trees do not look like garden ones, but they are no longer wild, and first of all, entering the courtyard, you probably react precisely to this neat grooming of everything around. The second impression will probably be the difference in spaces: the first courtyard is larger and somehow more contrasting, on the one hand there are trees and shadow, on the other, on the other hand, there is a continuous pavement, buildings and more light. The second courtyard is long, light and transparent in autumn. Both the buildings that form it are low, two and three floors, but their floors are higher and the proportions of the grid are more vertical, they have more glass (here you notice that the massiveness of the first building was only partially overcome by decorative means). Together with not too abundant trees and the striped rhythm of the pavement, everything turns into one light, autumn-like transparent spatial pattern. The "adjacent territory" was also improved: a small parking lot in front of the entrance and thickets at the turn of the road; not formally belonging to the territory, they are now arranged in the same way: mown grass, curved paths, pavement - the mini-park has become a kind of signboard of the complex.
But all this is not the main thing. Having received a plot overgrown with trees (and even historically associated with the "vitamin" institute), the architects forced the buildings of the renovated office center to "mimic" the natural surroundings, and this was quite successful. A moving grid of ocher and green spots looks like a geometrically harmonized extension of a thicket of trees. Elves could have settled here, if there were modernists among them - the level of sonorous transparent lightness and silence, especially in the second courtyard, is not at all Moscow.
In order to better understand what actually happened here, you need to go to Nauchny Proezd and look around, but it is better to drive along its loop to Profsoyuznaya Street. Among the buildings of the Soviet and post-Soviet times, the former Institute of Vitamins looks like an amazing splash of living things. It also appears on the way differently - it does not grow in bulk, but as if it is woven from leaves and glare, sprouting in pixels inside the grove. As if he has a different “gene code”, as if he, as a representative of the autochthonous population, was always here and suddenly showed himself - for some reason you have no doubt that he is the local here. A great way to fit into context, I think.
