For the sake of fairness, it should be noted that the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy park is only a stone's throw from the plan: there are railway tracks between it and the projected complex. On the other hand, a one-hectare plot is squeezed by a motorway passage and residential buildings on Akademik Ilyushin Street and Kochnovskiy Proezd, and it was not so easy to fit 50,000 useful square meters into it. Of these, 20 thousand are for the hotel and office functions, and the remaining 10 are given to trade.
“The result is a kind of“rocker”, a dumbbell house with two counterweights - a residential and office tower - and a connecting plate of the stylobate - a shopping center,” says architect Andrei Asadov on the concept. And, probably, two volumes of the same height, reaching the maximum possible in this place 75 meters, could really balance each other, like buckets or dumbbell weights.
But not with the Asadovs: spirals, intertwined ribbons, snakes, mollusks, stars - the work of the bureau is almost always large-scale spatial figures, changing beyond recognition from different points of view. The literally narrow framework of the building spot forced to look for other ways of expressing the "corporate" dizzying dynamism - and this resulted in painstaking (and somewhere even jewelry) work with the plastic of facades. The close proximity to the "Airbus" - the gigantic residential building of Vladimir Plotkin, has also affected here, against the background of which the projected complex even ceases to seem massive. “Next to Airbus, I wanted to make a thing, on the one hand, large, and on the other, more plastic, more pronounced in the material,” says Andrei Asadov. If the stone (in this case, clinker ceramics) is rough, inhomogeneous, with hollows and bulges, the relief nature of which is also picked up by the line of the facades. And if it is glass, then the edges are iridescent in the sun. So the towers turned out to be by no means equal: relatives, but not blood ones, like husband and wife - each tower with its own character. As for the stylobate, from the point of view of facade materials, it has retained its status of a connecting link: it is lined with the same clinker ceramics, but accented with extensive glass inserts.
So it turns out that a fine-cut crystal grows from the "living" rock - it was placed just at the point where the streets of March 8 and Academician Ilyushin meet, where the glass 18-storey volume is clearly visible from distant points of view. The difference in finishes also emphasized the multifunctionality of the complex: the residential tower is a stone "fortress house", and the office tower is transparent and more open. By the way, such a pronounced crystal shape - and, as a consequence, differences in the size and configuration of floors - became possible due to the absence of the need to rigidly zoning office spaces. Around the functional core, slightly off-center, they are organized according to the principle of free planning.
In the "stone" tower with a height of 21 floors (the number of storeys differs due to the difference in heights between the floors), the planning decisions, on the contrary, are strictly regulated. On the lower floors there will be a hotel with rooms ranging from 35 to 90 m2, and on the upper - apartments (45-250 m2). And not the ones that are so often disguised as housing, but apartment-type suites for long stays.
Finally, retail premises occupy the second, third, and a fragment of the fourth floor of the stylobate part. The first floor is almost entirely occupied by parking. If you look at the cross-section, it becomes clear what a challenge the architects faced with the placement of the required number of parking spaces. Three underground levels - in spite of the fact that they stretched out under all the buildings, and two of them were designed as two-storey ones - were still not enough. As a result, the first floor had to be partially used for parking (plus thirty places to four hundred and seventy).
Although, taking into account how little remained of the site after the complex was placed, one or another improvement option was planned for all free street areas. Somewhere it is just asphalt or concrete tiles. But along the northeastern border of the building, from the side of the projected passage and the main entrances to the complex, there is a green strip of lawn, rows of benches and lanterns. And near the hotel building, on a mini “piazza” formed by the beveled corner, there is a curvilinear hedge made of a shiny cotoneaster.
However, the main "oasis" is located not on the ground, but on a green roof - on the fourth floor of the shopping center. In conditions of dense development and an understandable desire of investors to profit from each meter of expensive land, such green roofs become a real panacea. In our case, office workers and hotel guests receive a full-fledged green space. And in an area with predominantly typical buildings, one more architectural dominant will potentially crystallize.
