The parade-administrative center of Astana is built like a wide boulevard cutting the city from west to east: it stretches in a straight line from the Khan-Shatyry shopping center, built by Norman Foster, to the presidential palace of Nursultan Nazarbayev, across the river to Independence Square, a just planned alley Thousands of years - and closes with a new station under construction now. To the east of the station, or rather even between the future station and the large, already operating and popular golf club in the city, it was decided to build the Ishim Technopark. Its concept was developed by the workshop of Totan Kuzembaev.
The Ishim River is flat, very meandering by nature, prone to floods and the formation of backwaters, crosses Astana almost like its new axis: from northwest to southeast. But in the eastern part, its channel is straightened and directed to a new reservoir, built near the city as a rival to the old (1969) Vyacheslavinsky, located forty kilometers further. From the future technopark to the reservoir - 3.5 km, to the city center - 10 km, and the straightened Ishim channel runs close to the southern border of its territory. Thus, it is strung on the front city axis and at the same time turns out to be a part of the park, resort area, being a neighbor of a successful golf club and the adjoining luxury village, inhabited, presumably, by golf lovers. In a word, the territory, if you put it in order, is green and permeated with water. So it was decided to combine the technopark with the resort village.
The architects placed business and commercial buildings along the perimeter of the territory, which in the plan resembles a triangle, since it is adjacent to the intersection of two planned highways. The northern corner - almost a third of the entire area - is occupied by a building that combines the functions of a hotel and a residential building and is built over the bed of a narrow river, straightened following the example of the parent river Ishim and turned into a canal for draining the area. It casually steps over the river, passing it between the large towers - "pillars". Typologically, this is a variant of a horizontal skyscraper, endowed, however, with a mass of archaic associations: the building simultaneously resembles an aqueduct (but there are no semicircular aqueducts in terms of aqueducts), Stonehenge megaliths and a park ruin, as it is placed on a neat grassy meadow. It is quite geometric and entirely glass, but the ragged line of the roof, reflecting the contours of the surrounding mountains, is planted with greenery. The method of free associations suggests half-forgotten stories about flourishing settlements and wars with nomads, about Tamerlane and the destroyed irrigation of medieval states - as if we are faced with a remnant of a lost ancient culture, or, rather, its shadow.
Alzhas and Totan Kuzembaevs located three similar extended buildings (one of them is a training and exhibition center) along two roads and the third border of the territory. Outwardly, they are turned by man-made glass stained-glass windows, behind which the floor overlaps are clearly visible, similar to the ribs of a giant animal. The end walls are made of volumetric panels of the ventilation facade, reminiscent of the scales of a giant reptile or - a rocky texture in the section of a mountain. The roof and the inner facade of each building together form a densely vegetated slope with waterfalls, which ends in a long, gently sloping heel - quite concrete, but abundantly planted with large trees. The slopes are decorated with waterfalls in some places. The similarity with The Lost World is quite obvious and calculated: inside, surrounded by glass facades, a “bowl” is formed that protects moisture from the steppe winds for a piece of paradise nature. And that is true: inside it is planned to place an eco-park with a botanical garden and a nursery of rare plants of Kazakhstan, where a large amount of greenery and reservoirs will allow maintaining a comfortable temperature and humidity. Eco-technologies are planned to be used to the maximum: at least this will be fully automated power supply systems, heat collectors and solar panels.
In the middle of a park with rare plants and not a steppe humid microclimate, a row of villas will be located in an uneven horseshoe. From above, this chain of one-story houses standing on the ground, more precisely, on wooden platforms, resembles either mushroom caps - "witch's circle", or pebbles laid out by a nomad in moss for some magical ritual: in this case, the two largest ring-shaped villas in the center are the eyes of, say, the spirit of the earth. In other words, from above, the villas fold into a geoglyph, a kind of pre-Abrahamic, some kind of steppe temple, which resonates well with a megalith hotel.
Upon closer inspection, the villas are designed in a completely Totan spirit. The frame is wooden, the structures are frame, the plans are rounded (remember the pebbles). All houses are surrounded by wide terraces - in Kazakh, such awnings are called kerege. The wooden load-bearing walls of the house are in places covered with felt - tuarlyk in Kazakh, and by the way, felt is the main building material of the yurt. Outside, the terraces are covered with diagonal gratings, reminiscent in equal measure of a European pergola - yes, they can be covered with ivy - and the constructive basis of the Kazakh yurt (on which felt was traditionally worn). Still, Totan Kuzembaev is Kazakh, and from time to time he recalls this, equipping, for example, a yurt in Venice - well, here it was simply necessary to recall nomadic roots. Kazakh housing is taken as a basis, but at the same time, it is turned inside out a little: gratings on the outside, felt inside, and there is no dome. The similarity turns out to be indirect and non-literal, and maybe, to some extent, it even becomes a deconstruction of the image of a yurt, which is turned into a gazebo. Yet this is the resort part, the Garden of Eden, the essence of Kazakh nature, it is a sin to hide from it with felt, since we have already closed ourselves off from the external environment by buildings-rocks.
The architects proposed four types of residential villas. The largest, ring-shaped house-eyes are called "Mirabel"; their area is 500 m², in the middle there is a courtyard with a small pond. As already mentioned, there is enough water here, and under every other house there is also a small pond, or a source: the diagram clearly shows that each dô is standing on a spot of water. The smallest is the Ueno house with an area of 130 m². He is also the most minimalistic. The larger houses "Tikal" and "Fiordland" are designed for large families with children. All types of villas can be alternated in any order; each of them provides access to the ecopark, where, in addition to children's, playgrounds and sports grounds, it is planned to set up a botanical garden and a nursery of rare plants in Kazakhstan. Of course, the park will have jogging and cycling paths that will turn into a long ski trail in winter, tennis courts, grounds for public events, various restaurants and cafes, a fitness club, a swimming pool - in short, everything that a modern person associates with healthy and comfortable lifestyle.
