The recent history of the creation of innovation centers looks rather confusing. At first, they were called DNA - houses of a new culture; they were supposed to become part of a single network with a hub in Skolkovo, to acquaint regional youth with modern technologies and contemporary art. Then the program was reduced to three centers: in Kaluga, Pervouralsk and Vladivostok. Kaluga DNA supervised the Strelka Institute, it was laid in the presence of the master of land art Nikolai Polissky and his sculptures; were looking for progressive artists. And then, in 2015, the State Duma deputies proposed to remake the centers into patriotic ones - to inculcate traditional values in them without any innovations.
Metamorphoses took place when the Wowhaus had already started designing. However, the architects managed to build a functionally rich and easily transformable building. It begins at one end with a modern dance hall, followed by a foyer, lecture hall, conference rooms and laboratory rooms, and at the other end it ends with a muffle furnace. In other words, the very structure of the center involuntarily repeats the trajectory of the development of the idea of Innovative Cultural Centers (ICC) over the past few years. Nevertheless, the original meaning remained in general terms: the city received a high-quality public space, which it badly needed.
Space neighborhood
The ICC site is close to the Tsiolkovsky Park - the territory of the Museum of the History of Cosmonautics. Its building is one of the iconic works of the 1960s, built in 1961-1967 by the architect Boris Barkhin; in 1961, Yuri Gagarin solemnly laid a copper penny in the foundation. Several rockets are also installed here, one of them is a copy of the Vostok-1 rocket, which burned down, but brought Gagarin's ship into space. To the northwest, on the edge of the slope, the second stage of the museum of the history of cosmonautics is being built (the authors of the concept are OJSC Voronezhproekt). The cultural center, built by the Wowhaus architects, adjoins the southwestern edge of the lawn square in front of the Cosmonautics Museum.
Before the construction began, the site of the cultural center was occupied by a secret military unit. In recent years, through holes in the fence, one could see a tire service, several destroyed buildings and an old linden alley along which soldiers once marched. On the border with the territory of the museum, only recently there were dilapidated barracks. Then they were demolished, but they did not have time to build up the vacant lot. And it is very good, because the place is of a specific nature, high, with steep 40-meter slopes on the sides, and even adjacent to a museum with a park, that is, which has long received the status of recreation - it turned out to be suitable for a new cultural center.
On the opposite side from the museum, the ICC is bordered by rows of massive mansions of wealthy citizens, densely occupied the slope in front of the Oka; Fortunately, the slope is steep enough that luxurious but not very stylish dwellings do not obstruct the entire panorama of the opposite shore.
From the west, a descent overgrown with trees leads to the Yachensky reservoir, which is called the Kaluga Sea (its embankment this summer became the subject of an All-Russian
competition for improvement of KB "Strelka"). After the completion of all the work, it will be possible to go down the stairs from the ICC to the embankment of the reservoir.
Spatial node
According to the original program, written in 2013 by the Strelka Institute, the area of the building was supposed to be about 10,000 m22… Wowhaus carried out a landscape analysis, setting themselves the task of preserving and increasing the species potential of the place, preserving the existing points and, in general, taking into account the maximum parameters. In addition, as a result of political upheavals, the functionality of the building was reduced; so less than a third of the planned areas is left - 3 600 m2.
The western slope of the site, which descends to the reservoir, turned out to be landslide. They did not strengthen it, but got out of the situation by redistributing the load: one-story volumes of the educational part of the building descend closer to the slope along the relief. The event-rich parts of the building - a multifunctional hall, rehearsal rooms and an exhibition hall - were designed in the southeastern part of the territory facing the city. Between the light northwestern and large southeastern "wings" there is a preserved linden alley - it turned into a green courtyard, opened towards the Oka.
“The architectural idea of the building was to create a knot of two intertwining spatial 'ribbons'. In one, educational functions are concentrated, in the other - public. Street spaces are built in between the ribbons - a courtyard with an amphitheater and an inner green courtyard,”says Anastasia Rychkova.
It is impossible to say what the building plan looks like: it seems to be the apotheosis of free planning, subordinate both to the classical principle of modernism from the inside out and to another principle of "growing" architecture out of context. Volumes and planes are constantly turning at small angles, as if they are trying to "sit down" more comfortably on the relief, each in its place. The building reacts to all external and internal plots so sensitively that as if it itself consists of intertwined - not so much “ribbons”, as various options for public space and creative pursuits. Facades, space, plastic, materials - these are only components of the canvas of these mise-en-scenes. I even want to understand it as a performance building, a mime, frozen, but ready to come to life at any moment, to involve the audience in their “performances”. Which, one must think, was required from an innovative cultural center. So we have before us not only a space-plastic "knot" of two tapes, but also an event-related knot of scenarios of being outside and inside.
Outside
Approach and detour scenarios are no less important, since the ICC is located in a picturesque place, but “on the outskirts”. There are two planned routes leading to the building from public transport stops on Oktyabrskaya Street. From one of them you need to move diagonally through Tsiolkovsky Park. The park is connected to the building by a ramp-staircase that turns into a lightweight concrete bridge - passing through it, we get to the level of the second floor of the complex. On the right is an observation deck with a postcard view of the Cosmonautics Museum. (The project did not provide for this viewpoint, the complex was closed by an alley of poplars, as the backstage and visual contact between the Museum of Cosmonautics and the building of the ICC should not have happened, the architects clarify). Further into the courtyard descends a large wooden amphitheater, vividly reminiscent of the one that Wowhaus built in the courtyard of the Strelka Institute in 2010.
Ahead is the entrance to the second tier of the foyer of the ICC and to the cafe. On the left is the exhibition hall, further behind it are inclined steps like a ziggurat of extended stained-glass windows that illuminate the foyer - a kind of shed lanterns. Outside, they, with a degree of convention, continue the step of the steps of the amphitheater.
If you go down the amphitheater and then turn around, it seems that, growing up, its steps at some point begin to "dance" and shine, rejoicing that they have approached the sky. If you look from the altitude of a quadcopter, it is also obvious that the amphitheater and the “lanterns” are one plastic whole, as if they had smeared the volume of the building with a ribbed knife, taking out a stepped descent to the slope.
The metal lattice structure of the skene in front of the amphitheater - the basis for a cinema screen or scenery - is reflected in the glass console of the second floor, which is deeply moved to the north. The "nose" of the building practically hovers above the ground, resting on a single V-shaped support. He looks towards the Yachensky reservoir, to the right is visible the Vostok-1 rocket. Part of the second floor is a spatial truss, due to which it was possible to achieve a significant overhang of the console. It will house a panoramic cafe.
Thus, at the park entrance, the "party" part of the center unfolds, so to speak: exhibitions (vernissages), lectures, cafes. The space is two-level, easily permeable - here you can walk everywhere, even along the console there is a metal balcony. It is already clear that the townspeople are vividly mastering the scenarios of the movement.
The large amphitheater, however, is not the only one here: to the left of the pedestrian bridge on the slope there is another group of wooden steps connecting the level of the park with the level of the complex - the Wowhaus architects do not change themselves.
On the opposite, southwest side, down the slope under the open sky, there is a 200-meter parkour area - the only equipped area of this kind in Russia. The architects invited the Kaluga parkourists to the bureau, asked which elements they needed: some of the elements were made concrete, and the other - portable, in those places where networks run underground. To the southeast, behind a wooden wall, there is another playground; a skatepark was planned here, but it has already been transformed into a playground; and with her another amphitheater.
The second entrance from the city side is along the lane, which was allocated by the city administration for the entrance to the new complex. The architects plan to turn it into a full-fledged passageway, a new urban axis, oriented towards the entrance to the ICC. And if the northeastern park entrance is rather informal, then from this side the building "disciplines itself" and begins to look almost like a theater: a thin wooden pylonade appears on the facade, which hides the main stage box. The strict square in front of the entrance also serves as a fire passage.
Another facade - the multi-facade principle, as we remember, is fully implemented here - the courtyard facing the Oka becomes; the preserved alley makes its composition a bit diagonal, but all the same, the space retains a resemblance to a manor house: a row of trees, a "calm" layout … However, the abundance of black metal stairs brings it back to our days; and this, too, is a favorite Wowhaus technique: architects are planning to surround the courtyard of the Moscow
Stanislavsky Electrotheatre.
Inside
In a parallelepiped with a "painted" portico, there is indeed a theater. More precisely, a universal theater hall is a modern stage space that can be transformed like
Stanislavsky Electrotheatre; here, as well as there, you can change the position of the stage and the audience seats, or you can use the entire hall as a stage space, leaving the audience with a balcony. Decorations and lights can be suspended from any part of the technical ceiling. In order to make the hall high enough while observing the height restrictions, from the very beginning that part of the territory was chosen for it, the surface of which was located below the others. Therefore, before entering the hall, you need to go down (and not go up, as is usually the case) a few steps down; an elevator is provided for people with limited mobility. (I must say that the entire space of the Center is barrier-free. Wherever it was possible, the stairs were replaced with ramps. By the way, there is a prototype ramp quite nearby: in the Tsiolkovsky Boris Barkhin Museum between the upper and lower levels).
The second after the universal hall (or the first, as you see it) spectacular space inside is the foyer. It is deliberately complicated, not only because it is here that the “knot” of spatial and functional “ribbons” is inevitably tied, but also because the architects tried to make it boring, adapt it for various additional functions, so as not to resemble pompously empty theatrical foyers. The space is double-height, a significant part of it is occupied by a system of stairs and overhead passages of the second tier. The spans and landings of the stairs are under the steps of shedovy lights illuminating them - the same ones that visually continue the steps of the main amphitheater from the outside.
The effect is akin to a loft - an artistically reimagined industrial building, mainly due to the black metal and diagonal strings that support the inclined planes of the sheds, zigzagging the light wall. According to the architects, the design of the skylight is as thin as possible: it was possible to achieve a thickness of 30 cm (theoretically, the thickness of the floors should be half a meter).
The staircase not only organizes the space, allowing you to move, for example, from the rehearsal dance halls on the first level up to cafes and exhibitions. The planes supporting the stairs divide the foyer space into a public part and a more intimate part, where parents will wait for the dance class students. The planes are already being used as exhibition space.
Pandan staircase is an oval "cocoon" of wardrobe trimmed with wooden plates; it plays the role of a sculptural element of the interior. The space of the main foyer flows into the buffet area with another, fourth mini-amphitheater: only 2 steps, but they face the courtyard with a view to the Oka. The amphitheater can be used for anything from seminars to coworking. Further, behind the orange wall (a rare splash of color here) begins a line of small workshop rooms and sports sections - the very lightest northern wing, which stands on the edge of the slope.
If we take the wooden "cocoon" aside, the interiors, as well as the facades, are laconic. Their goal is not to distract from the natural beauty and not stand out, only providing a connection between "inside" and "outside": revealing the views and letting in daylight. There is a lot of light inside, let's take at least the foyer, illuminated from three sides.
Old and new
The word "innovative", I must admit, has been stuck in my teeth for 10 years, if not more. Although it must be admitted that for the territory of the ICC in the city they chose a corner not only picturesque, but also already possessed an aura of innovations thanks to the Museum of the History of Cosmonautics. As if provoking a comparison of modern innovations with those of the sixties. What can more loudly hum us "time, forward" than a rocket or a fantastic egg, a collective image of an alien ship, in the museum building of the architect Barkhin?
It is easy to see that the innovativeness, or in Russian speaking the novelty of the Kaluga ICC, is completely different. It is not iconic at all; apart from a couple of touches, there are few sharply visible forms in it. In some places it even dissolves in nature, not to mention the fact that, delicately using the relief, it obeys it, streams through the landscape. You expect to see geological or fluid forms - but they are not there either. Obviously, the novelty is in lightness, subtlety, transparency, maybe even unobtrusiveness with which visitors are guided along the route and offer easily replacing scenarios of actions. This kind of novelty is not very well formalized due to the lack of a catchy shell, but is densely saturated with scenario adaptability, the possibility of changing the action and scenery, probably in tune with the clip consciousness of generation Z or the focus of generation Y on communication. There is little struggle and impulse, but there are many options for movement and stay.
I would like to compare the neighborhood of this building with the space museum with the antithesis that is sometimes present in science fiction, where the action unfolds in parallel on some ship plying the open spaces and on an earthly villa. Both are the future, but the ship is the novelty of feat, and the villa is the novelty of contemplation and movement, not of the body, but of thought. Here it turns out similar: the museum and the rocket remain in the sphere of the space fiction of the impulse, and the innovation center seems to be in a sense its antithesis, the opposite; a contemplative innovation of a post-industrial society, for which a person is more important and where a bold performance or exhibition is no less an innovation than a flight into space. However, they are connected - at least by the light gesture with which the building of the ICC throws its glass "head" towards the Vostok rocket. So it is not surprising that by the end of the work the builders began to call the building of the ICC "space". ***
Anna Senatova
artistic director of the Innovative Cultural Center of Kaluga
“An innovative cultural center is a dream come true, no matter how pretentious it may sound. The development trajectory of the project resembles a cardiogram of a person who was healthy at first, and then survived clinical death and miraculously survived: there are such optimistic amplitudes (the appearance in Kaluga of representatives of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, Strelka, presentation of the project at the Tsiolkovsky Museum of the History of Cosmonautics, round tables, focus groups, lectures, local culture festival). Then - the amplitude calms down and turns into a thin straight line: the patient is dying … Yes, there was such a thing: the project was practically suspended, the curators of all three DNAs - Pervouralsky, ours and Vladivostoksky were removed, the topic was closed. Long straight, no hope. Then - all of a sudden - the theme of reviving the project sounds again, at first carefully, now under a new name: the Innovative Cultural Center. Weak amplitude, then a growing one, and - even, vigorous pulsation! Active support of the ICC theme by the Governor of the Kaluga Region A. D. Artamonov. Change of contractors-designers, endless meetings, meetings, a long time later - a luxurious, absolutely not Kaluga, WOWHAUS project.
Their drawings and layouts miraculously embody the areas of activity that we would like to develop in the ICC, but, as before, they seem unrealizable. It took four years from the moment the topic appeared to its implementation in reality. This is not so much within the framework of ordinary human life, but, as it turned out, very much within the framework of the life of the project. Part of the working group fell out irrevocably: this is life! Others came to their place, now almost everything conceived is beginning to be realized.
Alas, the theatrical theme had to be postponed: the transforming hall was left without its main content. We do not lose optimism and are negotiating with Moscow directors: the ICC project is interesting to many, and the stage is the dream of any professional from the theatrical environment. It was not immediately possible to embody the theme of modern choreography, but now we are proud of another victory: we have created an Innovative Ballet Theater - our own, staff, on a professional basis! The study area is being filled: a media studio is working, classes are being held in the workshop of architecture, design, art; "Animation Workshop" will open soon; the theater studio for teenagers "KOT" (Who Love Theater) is actively working; lessons on pottery, tiles and abstraction in ceramics are held with a "full house" in the Ceramic Workshop; The ProLog Documentary Film School is about to start its work. In the near future there is a city club dedicated to the themes of architecture, town planning, and urban planning. In less than two months from the start of work, this is a fantastic volume. Thanks to the ICC team: the efforts and passion of these people are producing amazing shoots.
Now a lot has come true, something is in the making, something is still in the project. The most important thing is the extreme popularity of the ICC in the city: the new space attracts a very correct audience. Students, young families with children, middle-aged people, active and interested in life older people are our target audience. Good faces, active discussions, clever questions at lectures and film screenings, the demand for topics and directions - all speak in favor of the project. Is the current ICC different from the intended DNA? Yes, in many ways. It is more “earthly”, less “metropolitan”, more inscribed in the reality of the regional center”.
