Zaryadye Park is probably one of the most resounding Moscow projects in recent years. Now its construction is in full swing, and the volume of the Philharmonic building - the only large building of the park, located in its extreme eastern part, next to Kitaygorodsky passage - is already clearly visible both from behind the fence and on satellite imagery, where you can see a giant horseshoe-shaped bowl auditorium.
Scale - 23 800 m2 total area - the building was promised to Valery Gergiev, who is considered its curator and has already called the Philharmonic "a hall of the XXI or even XXII century." The philharmonic project was presented by Sergey Kuznetsov and Valery Gergiev at the St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum in 2016. In general, it has already been shown more than once at various All-Russian conferences, so its parameters are well known: it is planned to open the Philharmonic Society in 2018; Japanese engineer, celebrity Yasuhisa Toyota is engaged in acoustics; in his portfolio of fifty music halls, he worked for the Elbe Philharmonic of Herzog and de Meuron and for the Parisian Jean Nouvel, as well as for the Mariinsky Theater. The building appears to be a kind of techno miracle.
On the other hand, vanishingly little has been said about the architecture of the new Philharmonic, and this is almost the first really fresh and modern public building in the country over the past twenty, if not more, years.
The project of the philharmonic society was developed by Vladimir Plotkin and TPO "Reserve" with the direct participation of the chief architect of Moscow, Sergei Kuznetsov. Actually, the group of authors has two leaders - Kuznetsov and Plotkin; and Sergey Kuznetsov in this case acts simultaneously as the head of two design teams: the Zaryadye Park and the Philharmonic. The project required three years of painstaking work with many almost weekly approvals, clarifications, improvements and dozens of nuanced options.
The Philharmonic building is integrated into the Zaryadye Park, which is now being built according to the project of the consortium Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Hargreaves Jones and Citymakers accompanied by Alexander Asadov (see.
competition projects 2013). The consortium, as part of the optional part of the 2013 competition project, proposed to include the volume of the Philharmonic in the relief of the park, creating a green hill above it, and covering it with a "glass crust". This made it possible to subordinate the volume of the philharmonic society to the public space of the park. “Any detached, non-contextual building could turn Zaryadye into a square in front of the Philharmonic,” the consortium representatives are convinced. (It should be reminded that the Philharmonic Society was a separate building in the second place competition project "Reserve").
So, the Philharmonic is subordinated to the concept of the park in two main parameters. Firstly, from the western side, the building appears to be “buried”, continuing the height of the “Pskovskaya Gorka”. The hill is not real, most of the old hill was dug down after 1812, now an underground parking will be located inside the "revived" hill, which is convenient for the Philharmonic, since the western wall hidden in the artificial relief will adjoin the parking lot - on this side, in particular, there is a VIP- entrance to the concert hall, for those who drive up in limousines.
One glance at the profile of the park is enough to understand: the memory of the hill is only an excuse, the purpose of the artificial relief is not at all the reconstruction of the historical area, the hills are becoming part of a rather energetic plasticity, which is closer to nonlinear architecture than to garden ideas. So the roof of the Philharmonic is not so much dug into the hill as it is built into the volumetric scenography of the park, subordinated to its waves.
The second element inherited by the Philharmonic building from the concept of the Diller Scofidio + Renfro consortium is a curved glass canopy, the so-called "glass crust", raised above the green roof on branched metal supports at the edges by 5 meters and in the center by 10 meters. Under the bark, a climate slightly more moderate than Moscow should be formed - due to the energy-efficient solutions of the Transsolar company, which, in addition to solar panels, include a complex project of natural ventilation: in the summer, the transom of the glass canopy will open, capturing the coolness, including due to its curvature, in winter, the “crust” should accumulate warmly; all of this is part of the weather attractions of the future Zaryadye Park. The height of the upper point of the bark bend is about 27 m, it reaches the apple of the cross of the Church of St. George on the Pskov Hill. The "bark" echoes the curve of the roof and strengthens it, it becomes a glass part of the hilly relief and finds support in other elements of the landscape, which will not let you forget about the man-made park. "Glass crust" is only the largest of its kind structures, a kind of apogee, and not only in height. In some ways, it looks like the scallop of a wave rolling onto the shore, or vice versa, on a seaside elevation somewhere in Scotland or Normandy, where the hill grows, grows - and suddenly stops, washed away by the sea. The height of the cut is about 18-19 meters, approximately on a level with the neighboring six-storey apartment buildings, so that the "cliff" of the Philharmonic's facade at the same time forms a section of the street hidden behind the restored Kitaygorodskaya wall.
So, it would seem, we have a building-mountain, something from the field of sculptural and geological searches of modern architecture. But on the cut, where the actual facades of the building begin, facing the street, the passage and the city, it becomes different: light, transparent, icy. And rational, economical in expressive means. At the base of the volume, it is easy to read a glass parallelepiped with faceted glass lamellas, then - each cut, ledge and ledge are carefully motivated. The building is sensitive to the subtleties of the site and the environment, but seeks to bring them to an accurate, laconic statement, which makes it mathematical or even algebraic - this is the fruit of the work of a ruler and compass, a pure enlightenment ratio.
The reaction to the city was the arched square of the main entrance at the northeast corner. Its axis looks strictly at the arches in the Kitay-Gorod wall, through which visitors will enter from the nearest metro station of the same name. Cars from Kitaygorodsky passage can also enter through the same arches - for them there is a turning circle in front of the entrance, from where you can enter the underground parking of Zaryadye, or, turning around and dropping off passengers, drive along a section of the Kitaygorodsky wall and then return to the driveway. The lawn inside the car circle is the geometric center of the façade arc, which thus opens up directly to the visitors. Further, the arc is divided exactly in half along the axis: in the left half, the glass volume of the top protrudes above the entrance with a console, in the right there is no ledge, but there is a balcony along the facade, along which, according to the architects' plan, visitors could enter from the park, from the hill and from the roof, right on the second floor of the Philharmonic Hall. “If the administration supports this idea,” the architects agree. One way or another, the building has an alternative entrance, from the outer balcony to the inner, theatrical balcony.
Plastically, it turned out similar to a wardrobe with a sliding door, where one half was moved to the left. The white stripe of the concrete floor of the balcony continues to the right towards the hill, under it is the entrance to the parking lot, next to it there is a staircase to the hill. Strictly speaking, even if the entrance to the second floor is not opened, the balcony can be a place for walks and another view of the square in front of the Philharmonic - from above. It also reminds of the history of the place. I think for many, the ramps remained a personal memory of the Rossiya Hotel: they had to walk on and under them, and it was not that very pleasant, because it was cold, but it was remembered. It was very strange to see, bending over the parapet, the darkened space of the former Zaryadye. These were probably some of the very first hinged ramps in Moscow - part of the imagery of the architecture of the sixties, inspired by the arrow of a flying motorway. So, the area allotted to the Philharmonic was previously occupied by a couple of eastern ramps, and they were dismantled just before construction. The balcony of the Philharmonic Society, and even the arch of the facade itself - seem to be a memory of those ramps, a tribute to genius loci - but unexpectedly they remind not of the Zaryadye, which city defenders traditionally grieve about, but of another, which no one still feels sorry for - about the Zaryadye of the sixties. By the way, the suspended pedestrian bridges to the river from Diller Scofidio + Renfro support the same theme: in the balcony of the Philharmonic, you can also see the spatial continuation of these bridges.
At dividing the arc in half, the calculations of the main area do not end. Its most spectacular element is a bundle of three metal supports, pointed upwards, supporting the "bark" lattice over the square, a kind of antiportic, similar to a part of a mechanical wing - it is installed exactly on the line of a quarter of the facade arc. The left half of the arc is divided in half and a support is installed on this axis. At first glance, it seems that the support is arbitrarily shifted closer to the promenade, but not.
The group of doors of the main entrance is also moved closer to the driveway, but just barely, just to avoid a strictly central location. The arc is divided into 12 sectors, and since the number is even, there is no central sector and the doors move one step to the left, avoiding the central point and not arguing with the paired symmetry of the upper part. It turns out classically, like a portico with an odd number of columns, but some mobility of all elements of the composition is outlined, organized like a game of tags, where any part can be moved along the guides, but strictly within the grid. Walking down the street to the Philharmonic or past, a passer-by will not understand that something is symmetrical here, on the contrary, outwardly the composition seems arbitrary; the facade is constantly changing its properties depending on the angle of view.
If the first axis - the arches of the facade - is defined by urban planning and connects the building with the flow of spectators, then the second comes from the inside. This is the axis of symmetry of the main auditorium; needless to say that the outer axis meets the inner one exactly at that very point in the middle of the arc, which turns out to be the speculative knot of all constructions.
Further, the construction develops as follows. The grid of columns of the main lobby is subordinated to the arc of the facade - the lobby opens like a fan in front of the entrance, its space seems emphatically wide. What is enhanced by an abundance of light, in abundance penetrating through the glass walls, since the space is three-light.
To the south, in the main part of the building, two orthogonal grids intersect: one, with a step of 8.6 m, is parallel to the axis of the main hall and defines the eastern part of the building, the second, smaller, with a step of 7.2 m, is parallel to the western wall (the same one adjacent to the parking), the construction of the office premises concentrated in this part is based on it. Meanwhile, the line of the eastern facade is dictated from the outside - it is parallel to Kitaygorodsky passage. The angle between it and the axis of the main hall is 10 °, and this is how the first floor is cut in front of the southeastern, second entrance facing the embankment. This break in the facade unobtrusively leads the pedestrian to the small external amphitheater and suggests turning. At the same time, it reflects outwardly the real location of the auditorium. Above the head of the walker, a triangular console smoothly rises, built on the same principle as the console in the recently completed
building TPO "Reserve" on Krasin street.
The southern wall is strictly perpendicular to the axis of the main hall. From this side, the hall is closest to the outer contour, here an organ is installed on the inside, and a media screen for broadcasts is outside. The screen is surrounded by a volumetric frame - its shape could be arbitrary, but it is also motivated from the inside: on the left is a grid of office spaces, which, as we remember, is rotated at an angle (26 °) to the main axis; the exit of this mesh to the façade turns into a wide slope, the only stone element of the façade. To the right of the screen, it is echoed by the slope of the glass volume: a shallow ramp is hidden inside, leading from the first floor to the second, curved along the facade and opening views of the river and CHPP-1, a monument of constructivism.
Outside, the glass corner turns out to be a pointed and even slightly upturned "nose" -console over the southeastern entrance. Its contours in the southern projection resemble the silhouette of the Montreal Pavilion and resonate with the sixties associations caused by the ramp of the northern facade - the building seems to draw in itself the things that it wants to remember, forms a cultural series for itself.
Allusions are supported by strict shading of glass lamellas placed at the glass joints - this is the most common technique of classical modernism, as well as transparency, and a row of rare columns visible through the glass of the facade, and the faceting of the facades with simple, strictly motivated surfaces - add up to the image of "thawed" architecture, and provoke thoughts about the fact that the hotel was demolished, and the "mycelium" remained from it, and the younger, however much more delicate and well-mannered, relative "sprouted" out of the ground in the eastern part of the park. It is not without reason that Vladimir Plotkin is the author of the design of the exposition of the large exhibition "The Thaw", which is now open in the Manezh.
But the building is by no means retrospective; rather, it is tuned in to a dialogue between modernity and the ideas of classical modernism. The actual manifests itself in it in different ways: in the contextual subtlety of the plan, in the variety of facades designed for a view from the city. And in the ornamental silk-screen printing of white translucent rhombuses on the glass of the main volume, which helps to partially "de-materialize" the volume, dissolve it in space, and, on the other hand, collect, emphasize the integrity of the form, masking the floors. This ornament, like the pattern of the floor slabs, is inherited from the pavement of the park and the shape of its benches, and is intended to emphasize the connection between the Philharmonic Hall and Zaryadye as a whole.
No less modern is the abundance of public spaces of various kinds, surrounding the Philharmonic in a dense ring. In the DS + R concept, the amphitheater was located to the north, in the place of an arched square. It was replaced by the square itself with a "dry fountain" (a fountain without a bowl - ed.), A balcony on the second floor and a staircase leading to it. Now it is a ceremonial, solemn entrance complex, in contrast to the amphitheater, which is conducive to relaxation.
A wide sidewalk begins from the square - a pedestrian promenade along the main eastern facade of the Philharmonic. The glass wall of the first floor here, as well as on the other sides, is completely transparent, without any specularity. The architects specifically looked for glass of high transparency, and the floor of the lobby inside and the sidewalk outside are at exactly the same level and even descend along the slope of the relief at the same angle (here there is about a meter of drop to the river). “We wanted to make the border between internal and external space, as much as possible, almost invisible,” says Vladimir Plotkin. - Make the plastic of the lobby clearly visible from the outside, and turn it, thus, into a "second facade" of the building, separated from the city space by a transparent thin wall. So that there is almost no barrier between the outside and the inside, and people here and there are practically in the same space."
Indeed, the sculptural relief of the interiors, as opposed to the severity of the glass surfaces of the external facades, is very active - about it a little later, but the very idea of a “double facade”, voiced by the architect, is interesting. From a distance, the interior should also be visible, translucent and intriguing, despite the ornamental silk-screen printing. Maybe it will look like a block of ice - some bubbles and streams are always visible in them. In this case, sculptural plastic turns out to be part of a showcase, this key concept of modern times. And the everlasting role of any theatrical foyer as an intermediate space-layer between the city and the hall itself, the core of the building, becomes especially expressive. It must be said that architects have been "sick" with the idea of comprehending the hall as a kind of core in a box of glass walls since the glazing became of sufficient quality, but in Moscow this idea has never been embodied yet. The idea is good, it enriches both the city and the Philharmonic at the same time, moreover, the instinct of peeping through windows and looking at shop windows is one of the basic ones, it greatly enriches the emotions of a citizen. In a word, now, walking along the facade, we will be almost inside.
The promenade leads to the Church of the Conception of Anna built in the middle of the 16th century and to another square - the Corner of Kitai-Gorod itself. It is in this southern part, where it was required to delicately arrange the transition to the site of Anna's church, that the first, small amphitheater appears, as if it had moved from north to south. It is designed for 150 people and faces the media screen of the southern facade of the Philharmonic. On the left, this mini-amphitheater is duplicated by a descent and ascent ramp to the boom of a walking path hanging over the embankment. But the square in front of the amphitheater, smoothly turning into the Ugla square, will accommodate up to 1000 people who can listen to concerts while standing.
The main amphitheater is planned on the western slope of the green roof, where the architects of the DS + R consortium proposed to move it, since the consortium is responsible for the solution of the roof, since it is part of the park. The amphitheater is an additional open-air concert hall, the stage of which is located on the slope of the Pskov Hill. Although the view from here to the sunset and the Kremlin towers will be amazing without any concert. The jagged lines of the benches are reminiscent of ancient Greek theaters - especially those that were affected by earthquakes that displaced some of the stones from their places. The semblance of a theater-ruin should, probably, not only enhance the impression of a grassy roof, but also designate the image of a certain “great” theater. Only the opposite is true: a "ruin" on the roof, an ultra-modern hall underground.
The hall is really deepened into the ground quite strongly: the floor of the stage is 4 meters below the zero mark, under it there is another 4.8 meters of technical substructures. The hall is, of course, very complex, it is not for nothing that it is advertised as a miracle of technology. The entire parterre, together with the stage, can be mechanically transformed into a flat stage floor - in this case, it will be possible to watch the performance from the balconies stretched along the two long sides of the box. Alternatively, the orchestra pit can be lowered below the stage plane. The stage itself can be flat or lined up like an amphitheater, a kind of syntron for musicians. Behind the stage, there is also an amphitheater for the audience, however, for modern philharmonic halls such a circular arrangement of spectator seats is rather a rule. The height of the main hall space is about 20 meters, plus another 5-6 meters is occupied by the trusses of the structures under the ceiling. The hall was designed with natural acoustics in mind. There is one more rehearsal hall, which can also serve for performances - with 400 seats; it is located in the north corner of the building. Plus an amphitheater on the roof: in total, the Philharmonic will be able to accommodate more than 2,000 spectators.
The interior, in contrast to the "crystal" laconic and transparent, and I will allow myself this definition, the sixties facades are fluid and flexible, which follows the latest trends in the design of spectacular theater buildings. Entering the three-light vestibule, the viewer finds himself as if inside a stream of lines and light, which can be understood as a metaphor for the flow of music (it’s even scary to recall frozen music here, for it is banal, but the effect is pretty close). The flowing white ribbons of Corian balconies and stairs, abundantly illuminated through the continuous stained-glass windows of the facades, and accentuated by lines of light, form a spacious frame together with rare white columns. Not only daylight is admitted inside, but also elements of the facade: glass slats and ornamental silk-screen printing, emphasizing the transitional nature of the lobby space: on the one hand, we are already inside, on the other, only a thin glass membrane separates from the street. The elongated hexagons of the floor slabs, going back to the paving pattern of the park, are also designed to indicate the integrity of the space, to connect it with the park.
The theme of the flow of internal space, similar to air flows, is reinforced by the specificity of the organization of flows and stairs. At the entrance we are greeted by two symmetrical staircases, pressed against the edges of the main hall and leading to the second tier. Their white Corian volumes with beveled parapets look like streams of milk pouring in a spiral, as it happens in commercials: the staircase "flows" down, rounds, and below it grows out of itself a bench. Of course, they are perceived as sculptures - the heir to the Corbusse stairs stretched out in space.
The second, smaller atrium is formed in the southeast corner. Here, two systems of ramps are twisted along the walls: one is pressed against the southern wall and the hall, the other is stretched along the eastern facade. Moreover, this second group is motivated by the relief: as we remember, here it goes down a little towards the river, from north to south. The surface of the descending sidewalk inside is continued by the same descent, the inner promenade is separated from the sidewalk only by a transparent wall, so that people walking here and there will move in the same plane. But inside, the slope of the floor is built into the system of descent and ascent, which connects the wardrobe on the -1 floor and the second floor - it turns out that it is "linked" with the relief and at the same time plays an independent role inside. This is another way to gradually connect the external and internal space with each other, to supplement the transparency of the wall with the logic of organizing flows.
In addition, the many ramps intended for walking before the concert are reminiscent of the Roman MAXXI Museum of Zaha Hadid - everything there is generally built on moving along the ramps; even the horizontal ventilation slots that line the ceilings are similar.
But this is absolutely not Zaha Hadid, and not even a completely non-linear architecture. There is no redundancy in shaping, in pursuit of form. The bend is allowed to become "the icing on the cake", and then only occasionally, no more; all the plastic is framed and, which is characteristic, is not too sculptural, but rather de-materialized by light, white color of the main elements, many lines and achromatic tonality in general (from color - only natural brown wood color). Plane and line prevail over volume, mass and plastic, and when illuminated by daylight from glass walls, they turn into a projection, into a graphic, more than a sculpture. In a word, the rules of the show architecture for the modern philharmonic are, one must think, almost inevitable - otherwise they will not understand, here they are considered through the prism of the convictions of a rationalist architect. Purified, purified, dematerialized as much as possible; are trusted by the rules of classical modernism: and the ramps, in all honesty, remind more of Le Corbusier in Tsentrosoyuz than Zakha.
The duality of form and plane, plastics and lines is reflected in the interiors of the concert halls: the main hall becomes the quintessence of the “fluidity” of the lobbies - which is logical, it is their spatial and semantic center, the whirling of white ribbons in the hall grows.
Rehearsal rooms are traditionally simpler: instead of bends, there are asymmetric "diamond" edges with an acoustic function.
And this is what turns out. In the seventies and eighties, there were two images of theatrical building: a curl theater with a baroque form and brutal mass, which probably goes back to the Wright Guggenheim Museum and the Sydney Opera House. And the theater-temple, with a grid of columns, as a rule, extremely elongated, to the state of a weaving basis, is white, light, almost immaterial. Both typologies are still alive today, competing and interacting with varying degrees of success. For example, the Nouvel Philharmonic in Paris is the representative of the first, and the Portzamparc Philharmonic in Luxembourg is the second. By the way, the latter with the Moscow building has a lot of things in common: the main angle with the nose of the visor, and the white color, and the stairs curling inside. It is quite obvious that the Moscow Philharmonic is inclined, based on the preferences of the authors, to the second type, relatively speaking, the temple, but pays tribute to the first, especially inside and perhaps because this ephemeral building had to grow out of the brutal volume of the hill … This is a case of meeting of two approaches, their rational combination, one must think, for the general benefit.
