The project of Karen Saprichyan's GrandProjectCity bureau participated in the Archchel 2020 open international competition, the results of which were announced recently, on November 30. In total, 350 applications were received for participation. As a result, the organizers received about 120 works on three topics: the reconstruction of the city airport, the improvement of the Miass River embankment and the construction project on its bank of the congress center - in 2020, it should host the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization countries, which is planned to be held in Chelyabinsk.
Karen Saprichyan's bureau worked on the project of the congress center. The site where he should be located is a patch of greenery between the circus building and the junction bridge across the river, continuing the street of the Kashirin brothers. Historical Chelyabinsk is on the other side of the river, and here, mainly, is the territory of shopping malls and large post-Soviet housing.
According to the TK, in addition to a hall for 2500 seats, the congress center was supposed to include a large hotel, offices and a media center - the last architects of the GrandProjectCity proposed to be placed above the water, duplicating the bend of the neighboring automobile bridge with a wide crescent of a covered public space, in fact - a pedestrian bridge, transferred to the "Garden Island", with a library, media library and double-height exhibition space inside. It is fenced in by a load-bearing metal truss, and an open gallery is conceived on the curved façade facing the southwest, the river and the city center of the park. On the island, the pedestrian route proposed by the authors of the project begins from the media library: a thin bridge passes first over the water, then along the opposite bank - about half a kilometer to the Kirovsky Bridge, and the walker returns to the square of the congress center, passing under the glazed galleries of the long two-story buildings surrounding it along the perimeter.
The southwestern part of the gallery buildings is given to offices, the eastern parking lot, and closer to the media bridge, the outline is closed by the volume of the winter garden, which serves as a covered public square, complementing the three times more spacious open area. Together with the bridge, the gallery buildings form the letter "CH" in the plan - a symbolic response to the name of the city, and the farm facades, according to the architects, became a reaction to the semi-industrial environment.
The congress hall itself in the project occupied the northern corner of the territory: its multilevel roundings, decorated with a large palisade of white plates, serve as the main plastic accent of the interior space.
The facades of the 35-storey hotel tower are also mostly white, they consist mainly of a large white mesh with wide bevels, vertical proportions, uniting two floors. However, the tower is not just a prism; it consists of two tall and narrow plates, clearly appealing to the fantasies of the avant-garde, rotated 180º relative to each other: one end is circularly rounded, the other rectangular. The towers are connected by a wide glass bridge, large glass "cutouts" appear at the corners at the bottom - all this makes the tower slender, similar to a lighthouse and - also - to the letter "Ch".
The project was not included in the number of prize-winners. “In my opinion, there are more questions than answers to the competition,” says Karen Saprichyan. - The main question is how the jury was able to consider such a number of projects in a few days and agree on its general decision.
Project video:
