It was the Atrium architectural bureau that once defined the look of the Yandex offices, which today are easily recognizable due to the combination of brightness and practicality. It all started in 2005 with an interior in an old red brick workshop on Samokatnaya Street. Then there was a space on Stanislavsky Street. In 2010 the company moved to Lev Tolstoy Street - to new premises in the Krasnaya Roza 1875 business district. And again "Atrium" has designed the internal arrangement now for seven new floors: their main "feature" is the tree-like internal blocks with meeting rooms, covered with shingles, and in some places "living" grassy walls.
The next, fifth in a row "Yandex" interior "Atrium", realized quite recently - this is a new part of the office in the same business center. However, this time the bureau, among several well-known Moscow architectural workshops, participated in a closed competition for the concept of a space for holding external conferences. The prize - the right to develop the second stage of interiors with a total area of twelve thousand square meters - was easily won by Atrium, proving that over the long years of cooperation, as no one else learned to understand and feel the needs of the customer and, moreover, to anticipate the direction of its further development. The image of the new interior turned out to be natural and at the same time very tonic.
The new five floors are located in the recessed glass building "Morozov". On the ground floor there is a spacious lobby: a waiting area for guests with a corian shell, live plants and a reception desk with the Yandex logo. Soft lighting. Bright multi-colored furniture.
In addition to the entrance group leading to the sculptural volume of the staircase and the accompanying vertical "green" wall with thickets of indoor plants, the floor houses an administrative block and premises for public events. Above, there are three floors of purely workspaces. And above all this, on the fifth and last floor belonging to the company, there is a conference hall and a sports and entertainment block. Desks are placed along the glazed perimeter of the outer walls of offices, while offices, meeting rooms and coffee points are concentrated in the center, where daylight is less needed. The architects tested this method of organizing space in the previous "Yandex" -project and over the years of operation it has fully confirmed its validity.
But the main character, or better to say, even the core of each working floor, is a bright plastic passage: it cuts through the space along an optimal trajectory, preventing you from getting lost in the maze of tables and chairs. Strings on itself capsules with meeting rooms, kitchens and smoking rooms. It can be compared to a corridor, not simple, but discrete, like corpuscles of light, since open and tunnel sections alternate rhythmically. In some places, only a colored stripe on the floor allows you to stay on course - but the next closed area with the knocked down edges of the walls, floor and ceiling makes a strong impression. The complex geometry of the aisles changes the pragmatically planned office floor, not only facilitating navigation, but also saturating the interior with human emotions - cheerful, akin to an amusement park. It turns out a hybrid of an open space with a corridor office - which in itself is not uncommon, but Atrium time and again succeeds in transforming the logistics core of the working space into an artistically meaningful attraction. In the previous, neighboring Yandex office, the transitions were flowery and multi-generational, but here they are planned more rationally and shorter.
It is important that each "corridor" is connected by one symbolic color, common for a particular floor. Yellow on the second, green on the third, orange on the fourth, blue on the fifth floor. The rainbow navigation is supported by a vibrant red accent, echoing the signature “I” in the lobby.
The second important difference from the early part of the office - there the verticals of almost the same type of capsule blocks passed through the suspended ceiling, as if growing, like hollow trees, into the next floor. In the new office, each block is deliberately detached from the ceiling - physically and with the help of lighting. They are very different and do not repeat themselves on the same floor: eight types of finishes create expressive and easily recognizable images. For example, capsules with unevenly outlined, as if blurred, porthole windows wrapped in shaggy gray carpet. Others are surrounded by vertical, carved wooden planks. Still others are covered with a raised pixel pattern of horizontal wooden bars, through which the glass backing and interior rooms shine through. One of the shell options is very functional: the capsule consists of deep shelves that employees fill at their own request. And the most impressive is the green hill covered with flowering and climbing plants from top to bottom with arrows of "cuckoo's tails" - the lounges inside seem to be the most comfortable. For the sake of fairness, it should be noted that behind the unusual shell there is always the most functional space, where even the smallest cabinet door is carefully justified. In addition, the variety of capsules is included, as we remember, in the navigation system: emotional, visual, spatial.
In everything, even in the little things, some witty design idea is visible. Perhaps that is why inside you do not feel at all that Yandex is a giant corporation, the first in the Russian Internet according to forbes, which employs thousands of employees. It is known that a cheerful creative space is one of the fundamental requirements of a famous IT company, which allows it to attract talented employees with pleasant conditions for effective work. “Atrium”, as already mentioned, has repeatedly and successfully coped with this task - after all, its style with its combination of unexpected sculpturality, different textures and bright colors suits the needs of old crackles so well.
It is clearly noticeable: the authors did not forget for a minute who they were working for. The glass entrances to the meeting rooms oases are made in the form of an arrow of the Yandex search engine. The cheerful names of the premises on the doors continue and support the game of colorful traffic lights: on the orange floor, the entrances are full of signs "Orange mood" and "Orange tie". On the yellow one - "Yellow tulips", "… pants", "… boots" - however, this is the latest initiative not by architects, but by users of the space they have created. The employees were actively involved in the game, thus accepting the new home. So the Atrium hit the mark again.
