Like a self-portrait about an artist and an autobiography about a writer, your own home or workshop will tell more about an architect than any other work of his. According to one of the directors of the bureau, Oleg Shapiro, the scales in favor of the attic room in the ninth building of Artplay were finally tipped … by the railway outside the window. “When we saw that trains were running parallel to the fourth floor, at the same height, that solved the problem,” he says. In fact, this, of course, is not a basic factor, rather "the icing on the cake", but it also says a lot about what - for example, about the dynamism of the current owners of the office, readiness for non-trivial decisions, and even somewhere about romance (after installing windows with soundproofed, the clatter of wheels sounds muffled, as if at a distant station somewhere beyond the forest).
In general, the space most of all resembles a small town with streets, lanes, crossroads, houses standing at different angles and a central square with a "bell tower" - the staircase to the second floor plays its role. This imposing construction of the beloved Wowhaus' broken silhouette, originally conceived as an art object, is associated with a story that will surely become a legend here. Already when the staircase was half built, it turned out that due to incorrect measurements, a person who climbed to the landing will inevitably rest his head on the supporting beam. So I had to change the project right during the construction process - which in the end only benefited the result: now, being suspended on metal rods, the staircase looks even more spectacular.
Along with the stairs, the center of the office space is marked by the central multifunctional block - this is a model, printer, and bindery, and the long table standing here is often used for negotiations. This block differs from all other zones in the interior walls painted in a cheerful orange color (which are perfectly visible from the outside thanks to the window and door openings) - against the background of the general white-gray-beige scale, it reads like a bright burst of creative energy.
The central block is one of the few more or less closed areas in the office. The main “houses” from which the “town” was built and where the architects actually work are cubes sheathed with plywood without front and back walls. Initially, this is a legacy from the previous owners of the premises: before the Wowhaus, there was a showroom of lighting fixtures that were conveniently displayed in these boxes. The authors of the office project decided to partially preserve the structures, removing the back walls that covered the boxes from daylight, and visually uniting them with a plywood podium, under which all communications pass. "Boxes" evoke involuntary associations with theatrical or film decorations - or, on the contrary, with the amphitheater boxes, so it is not entirely clear who is on the stage: those who work at the desks, or, conversely, we, curious visitors.
Despite the fact that the space turned out to be completely open, permeable for light and movement, this is still not a classic open space (the format, whatever one may say, is not very comfortable for a person): thanks to the walls of the boxes and the design of work tables equipped with bookcases and papers, the employees of the bureau retain a certain level of privacy. In addition, the arbitrary arrangement of the boxes contributes to visual comfort - this "town" does not at all look built according to a rigid orthogonal plan.
Of course, in addition to workplaces and meeting rooms, the Wowhaus office has everything you need for life - a kitchen, a dining room, bathrooms, and even a library with upholstered furniture, a dressing room, and a yoga room. Now, however, the suddenly expanded department of development and contacts with customers has moved into it, but there is still time for yoga - early in the morning, until the marketers went to work. There is also an impressive presence of art in the office: there are not so many works of art, but they are significant in themselves, and are located with knowledge of the matter - you cannot pass by. The authors of the works presented are Maria Zatselyapina, Georgy Totibadze, Nick Veasey (an X-ray photograph of an aircraft by the famous British photographer moved with Wowhaus from the former office on Red October).
The three heads of the bureau are sitting in a separate office. Unlike other work sites, it is completely enclosed, but with glass walls, so everything is still in plain sight. The main attraction here is the almost legendary table by Oleg Shapiro, black, carved, covered with green cloth, donated to the architect by the machine-building plant where he worked in the 1990s, with a hint of a difficult provenance. The rest of the furniture is quite laconic - both the long table of General Director Anna Ishchenko, and Dmitry Likin's workplace at the far window, against the background of an impressive panorama of trains, and a “soft group” around a round table for negotiations. As you can clearly see through the glass walls, there is also a lot of free space here - you can talk while standing, stretch your legs, or call an employee “on the carpet”.
As zealous owners, the authors of the project did not allow the height of the ceilings to disappear, and a second floor appeared in the room, which made the space even more complex and interesting. In fact, this is an attic, with all its attributes - massive wooden rafters, a plank roof and an excellent view from above. The first room that one sees ascending the central staircase is like a meeting room hanging in the air, an ephemeral white box with white furniture. Also on the second floor are lawyers and accounting, part of the premises are leased to friendly companies. In addition to the central one, the floors are connected by another staircase - more precisely, an amphitheater, along the steps of which it is convenient not so much to go up and down as to sit on them. For this, it is mainly used - employees gather here to discuss important issues, or sightseers who have come to see the office sit down (Wowhaus is an open office in every sense), or learn Italian under the guidance of one of the architects from the Apennine Peninsula. The amphitheater - both this one and any other of those that the Wowhaus architects build in their projects - may well be viewed as a symbol of communication, a concept that is programmatically important for bureau managers. Lively, comfortable, multivariate, and in this case also creatively effective communication between people is the ideology that, in fact, is the basis of the project. “Architecture is a rather collective affair,” explains Oleg Shapiro, “and usually everyone sits separately. In the new office we have done everything so that people can get together and communicate. " The amphitheater, meeting rooms, as well as the “streets” and “squares” of the “town” themselves are intended for this, the width of which could well bring on the authors of the project an accusation of ineffective use of the squares. Probably the first in Russia who began to consider the "gaps between houses" as an inherently valuable object of architectural design, worthy of separate attention, Shapiro and Likin paid special attention to the design of "emptiness" in their own office.
As is often the case, moving to a new place of residence opened up new opportunities for the office. First, it became possible to implement an internship program, which allows young architects to gain experience in real design, and the bureau to look out for talented guys to replenish the team. A place for a table, at which interns work when they are not adjacent to one of the project teams, was found near the central staircase. Secondly, thanks to the fact that Wowhaus invited friendly teams to settle in the free spaces - the designers of the Polytechnic Museum exposition, the Plan B marketing agency and the KB 23 bureau, which deals with cultural programming - interdisciplinary ties have revived, and cooperation, having concentrated in one space, has become more efficient. "Third" and "fourth" will certainly happen: the office of the Wowhaus bureau looks and functions as a living developing space with considerable potential for transformation.
