The laconic sixteen-story plate of the Sputnik Hotel was built on Leninsky Prospekt - if you go from the center, then soon after Gagarin Square, on the right, in the late sixties. By this time, the square of the Kaluzhskaya Zastava was decorated with a spectacular semicircle of two Stalinist houses (1940; 1950), in the courtyard to the west, the architect Vlasov erected an openwork-perspective tower of the Palace of Labor (1936), and large brick frames of residential buildings were lined up along Leninsky Prospekt (1959-1960). The place is inhabited and important for the city: the junction of the Third Ring is adjacent to the beginning of Neskuchny Garden, imposing residential buildings - with many academic institutions, the very names of which are not clear to everyone. The Kaluga outpost was renamed into Gagarin Square after the death of the cosmonaut, however, the topic of flights "settled" here already in 1961, since after the flight Gagarin entered Moscow exactly along Leninsky Prospekt. The name of the hotel - "Sputnik" - definitely refers us to the same space theme.
The hotel stands on a hillock, retreating from the route of the avenue's backup, in front of it there is a lawn and a parking lot, to the left, to the west is a public garden, a little further away is a block of Khrushchev's time; on the right, almost right next to the hotel, there is a tower-house of the late nineties.
The architects of ADM were given the task of reconstructing the hotel building, adding a new hotel and trade building to it, while preserving the square. They placed a low, but extended volume of the shopping center along the red line, thus supporting the front of the residential buildings of the avenue. For the new building of the hotel, called Staybrige, there was a place in the third row, at the back of the site, behind the plate of the reconstructed Sputnik, which will be renamed Holiday Inn.
The architects have preserved the existing square. But the space between the shopping center and hotel buildings was turned into a well-groomed city square with a picturesque mosaic of various paving, blue spruce trees, lawns at the pavement level, thoughtfully laconic city furniture and umbrellas of summer cafes - in a word, it was carefully arranged, as ADM does practically in all of his projects, building up layers around buildings that are not in Moscow's comfortable, in all respects well-groomed urban space. Meanwhile, the inner area is not at all at ground level, but on the roof of the premises of the basement tier - the relief here decreases from north-west to south-east by three meters and the architects leveled the site by means of substructures, having received a flat surface on the roof, and useful areas under the roof - an additional volume, which is cut off in the western part by a sheer glass wall facing the trees of the square. Behind the glass wall are conference rooms.
Part of the design of the hotel square is the deeply extended visor of the entrance lobby of the former Sputnik - the Holiday Inn hotel: under it taxis will be able to drop off guests so that they do not get caught in the rain. Wooden slats echo the reception areas on the ground floors of both hotels and, interspersed with strips of lamps of the same configuration, resemble piano keys. Lamps are inseparable from the ceiling, and you can't help but wonder if not all the stripes here are capable of glowing? But no, wood is also important, there is a lot of it behind the transparent walls of the first floors, it adds to the whole space, both inside and outside, a bit of suburban comfort.
In addition to the features of the relief, it was necessary to take into account the close proximity to the residential building. In an effort not to disturb the insolation of his apartments, the architects cut diagonally the northeastern corner of the mall - which was the starting point, although, of course. not the only reason for the emergence of its smooth, wave-like sculptural form. One gets the impression that the ribbons of the horizontal floors have been well shaken, creating smooth waves of different amplitudes on the facades, so successfully enlivening a long horizontal line, so effectively, albeit quite moderately, hanging over each other. Forming below, on the pavement, comfortable canopies for summer cafes, also capable of protecting pedestrians hurrying to the metro. The curves of the upper snow-white floors are emphasized by the smooth rhythm of the thickening - thinning hatching from the glazed terracotta strips, which further emphasize the resemblance to the wave. Since the permitted height of the volume on the red line ranged from six to eighteen meters, a large open terrace appeared on the roof in the eastern part of the shopping center.
The sidewalk in front of the building will in some places reach twenty-five meters wide: the glass wave of the first floor, in contrast with the overhanging "snow blocks" of the top, trimmed with black granite, recedes into the depth of the volume, increasing the extension of the consoles and provoking a promenade along the windows. In the middle, the undulating front of the shop windows is torn by a wide cave-like opening - the shiny rounded corners pull inward - the passage leads to the hotel courtyard, this is one of the main entrances (two more - from the east, from the side of the park, and the entrance to the underground parking of the shopping center is located on the western wall, closer to the avenue; the transport scheme is quite elegant).
Entering the opening between the windows of the shopping center and finding himself on the already familiar inner square of two hotels, the visitor will probably immediately recognize the wave motif he noticed on the street facade - in a more restrained version it will be repeated by the depressions on the facades of the new Staybridge hotel building in the depths of the site and rounded corners. This building was planned to be twenty-two-storey and triangular in plan, but after
consideration at the council, where its height was proposed to be reduced by three floors, became a plate. However, its facades have retained both rounded corners and a thin stone cut with an elegant variation in the width of the lintels and a module that unites floors into groups of three - all these verticals balance the flowing horizontal, giving the volume both stability and respectability. And at the same time building a figurative, hint, connection with the Novatek building located further along the avenue.
The central and emphatically geometric link between the two undulating volumes is Sputnik, dressed by the architects in a new shell of dark terracotta panels combined with glass surfaces covered with thin vertical stripes of silk-screen printing. The former "Sputnik", three floors below the volume that stretched out in line behind its back, retains its historical scale and in the new company looks the most regular, horizontal and geometric. Its seriousness is emphasized by the predominance of a dark tone and the solidity of the alleged "backbone" of the building manifested by the facade mesh: meanwhile, the thin vertical strokes of silk-screen printing stripes, as well as the slight asymmetry of the rhythm sewn with wide strokes, make the old volume a contrasting, but completely organic part of the new complex that has grown around.
