The Oceania shopping and entertainment center on Kutuzovsky Prospekt opened last autumn, reviving a part of Kutuzovsky Prospekt near the Slavyansky Boulevard metro station. If earlier, against the background of a dreary series of panel high-rise buildings, passers-by had to admire only the pseudo-Gothic turrets of a fragment of the unrealized "New Ring" of high-rise buildings - the residential complex "Edelweiss", now it is not so bad to get stuck near it in a traffic jam near an extended building of a new shopping mall. Overflows of metal "scales", huge screens-aquariums, complex plastic facades - all this creates an intriguing visual attraction, a new landmark on the main government highway.
There are more than one shopping center in Moscow, but this one is also curious because its building was the result of a project that won one of the first competitions held by the city's architectural council. In 2013, the council initially rejected the project proposed by the ASP companies, held a competition, as a result of which the proposal of A. Asadov's bureau was selected, which inherited a volumetric solution and dimensions from the predecessor project, including a three-tiered underground parking, as well as the idea of placing in one of the atriums a luxurious cylindrical aquarium of four floors. The idea belonged to the customer, defined the “oceanic” theme of the mall and contributed to its renaming: in 2013 the complex was called “Slavyanka” after the neighboring boulevard, now - Oceania. “The urban planning parameters had already been agreed upon, and our task was to make a shell that would be adequate to the place and surroundings,” says Andrei Asadov. “We could not influence the massive volume of the building, but we could neutralize it as much as possible, giving a feeling of airiness and lightness.”
The main tool for solving this problem was the facade - but not "just a facade", but a volumetric two-layer shell on a system of metal fasteners, in places taken to a depth of one and a half to - in places - ten meters from the "box" of the building, in a sense - a sculpture that envelops itself SEC, sculpting its shape, setting accents, controlling the imagery and impressions of both pedestrians and motorists.
A wide strip of perforated aluminum is continuous on three sides, viewed from the side of the avenue. An extended media screen strip is superimposed on the facade parallel to the track; the other three are placed in recesses and surrounded by a kind of perspective frames that turn them into paintings or "televisions". Two screens above a small triangular square in front of the main entrance even look like large eyes with rectangular glasses, looking at people on their way to the city. The surfaces here are turned at a wide angle, the line is concave, "embracing" the area; and at the same time the right eye-screen, the one that is larger, is directed to people leaving the underground passage of the metro - "meets" them, luring them into a shopping center or at least a cafe, whose tall glass showcase is located under a triangular console.
With the help of an aluminum shell, the architects also corrected the shape of the rear loading facade facing the square and the Edelweiss residential complex: it is here that the distance between the main volume and the external panels reaches 10 meters, and a complex system of load-bearing structures looks through a horizontal slot, as if opening up a complex technical stuffing of the building.
However, aluminum is not all-encompassing: on the rear facade facing Slavyansky Boulevard and vis-à-vis with a residential 12-storey building, it is divided into four rectangles protruding from the glass background plane. Although glass is not a window at all, but a screen covering technical areas - we are still dealing with a shopping center, an introverted building, as Andrei Asadov aptly put it. In the upper part of the facade from the side of the avenue, separate aluminum volumes also appear, as if "detached" from the main mother's spot and left to float freely.
The aluminum shell is made from Novalis marine grade aluminum panels, which are non-corrosive and streak-free, and are cut with round holes of three different diameters, forming a wavy pattern. The perforation is volumetric: the embossed elements are preserved inside the holes, but are deployed strictly perpendicularly and resemble ruffled fish scales. The mother-of-pearl coating of the metal changes color during the day depending on the angle of incidence of the sun's rays - from beige and gray to greenish and blue. At night, the holes glow, shimmering in different colors thanks to the color-dynamic LEDs hidden inside.
To the untrained eye, metal, which often turns pale blue, with a pattern forming large wavy streaks, will seem like a metaphor for water waves. Meanwhile, they have nothing to do with the ocean, but represent, according to the architect Andrei Asadov, "metaphysical wood - the most Slavic material, a tribute to the former name of the SEC [Slavyanka]." This is a fragment of a real wood texture in hyperscale, digitized and superimposed by parametric modeling on the entire aluminum surface. Although in the end it turned out that two ideas - woody and "watery" - meet and interpenetrate, allowing the viewer to both interpretations: from a tree drawing to "fish scales". The main thing is that the constantly changing relief texture of the metal gives the ground for looking, serves as a "catch" for the look.
The decision was largely inspired by a dialogue with the neighboring Vremena Goda shopping gallery, built by Vladimir Plotkin on the opposite side of the avenue, less than a kilometer from Oceania. Andrei Asadov calls it “the standard of stylish aesthetic architecture” and admits that he sought “to oppose this object with something different. To the extent that he is rational, we wanted to create something irrational. As clear and geometric as it is, so much we wanted to achieve something soft, plastic and indefinite."
A similar perforation was used by Herzog & de Meuron for the de Young Museum in San Francisco, but there it is simpler: it is devoid of volume, and the panels themselves are copper. “I am inspired by the works of Herzog & de Meuron,” Andrey Asadov admits. "They have each object made on one bright technique."
The second element after perforated aluminum of "clothes for an introvert," as Andrei Asadov aptly calls the shell of a shopping center, is glass. From the outside, it seems that the glass-based volume of the mall bears aluminum projections, which in turn carry media screens. In fact, of course, this is not the case. The upper strip of glass forms the panoramic windows of the restaurants; above it serves as a neutral background for the tenants' logos. And if the glazing at the top is structural, then on the first floor, closer to the audience, there is spider glass with curved glass at the corners. Two significant front corners are occupied by the cafe - their tall panoramic windows let in a lot of natural light.
Otherwise, the development of public spaces around Slavyanka-Oceania, on which the Arch Council insisted in 2013, turned out to be more difficult. The architects proposed a whole series of plots that turn the shopping center into a mini-city not only inside, but also outside, but not all of them managed to be realized and earn money - the interests of the shopping and entertainment center seeking to get a buyer inside and, if possible, "confuse", make them wander among the windows for a longer time, turned out to be stronger. But the traces of the urban spaces laid by the architects remain and theoretically can still work.
Since Oceania is located on a busy pedestrian path - when leaving the metro, people change to buses or go into the interior of the district - the architects initially laid three through routes, beating each facade, as well as a considerable difference in elevation: the relief here goes down 8 m along the avenue. The first route, through, allowing to pass the mall as a passage from the triangular square near the metro to the square on the opposite side along the esplanade, above the cars leaving the parking lot, was not implemented; although the park was landscaped.
The second route is conditional - a row of pseudo-showcases in the first level along the avenue serves to organize the facade of the street-backup as a city one; shops do not use these windows, but walking along the avenue is not very convenient - it is noisy, so a series of windows in large frames, echoing the frames around media screens, retains only a plastic and compositional meaning.
The third route, along Slavyansky Boulevard, has been completed. The main facade, to which, as we remember, the passengers of the metro come out, the architects not only organized around a triangular square, but also accentuated its right part - which serves as an unobtrusive indicator of the exit to the city "path". If, without entering the shopping center, we go around it on the right, then we will find ourselves on a gallery 3.5 meters wide - the street here slopes gently, the gallery is horizontal and gradually lifts off the ground, turning into a balcony. It runs along the facade for two-thirds of its width, allowing the entrance to the underground parking below it and thus offering pedestrians a path that does not intersect with traffic. However, you can also go below - along the basement part of the facade, which is not like the others, but is made up of ribbed triangular panels of aluminum "rustic". The gallery was conceived as a place where, hovering over the relatively quiet Slavyansky Boulevard, the café terraces will be located - for which it was made spacious enough, 3.5 m wide; but the cafe did not appear. Ground floor areas are the most expensive, it is more profitable to place shops there; however, the gallery still serves as a pedestrian path, making the street two-tiered, and the mall a little more open to the city, but just a little bit.
All spaces around the mall are united by landscaping - rather restrained, without fountains, but the concrete tiles of the pavement echo the main theme of the facades. “We tried to spread the theme of façade perforation into the surrounding space - we used concrete tiles for paving, consisting of two elements: a light square and a dark core. They are also of three diameters and repeat the pattern of wooden streaks on the facade, but on a slightly larger scale,”says Andrei Asadov.
As you can see, the task set for the authors of the project, first of all, the members of the Arch Council - to reconcile the two antagonists: a large shopping center and an urban public space - turned out to be not easy. In such a dialogue, the strongest wins, in this case a shopping center, which, according to the laws of marketing, becomes a city, closed on itself, folding the space inward. It is very difficult to open it. Nevertheless, the project, of course, was not designed only for urban space; the main task of the project of any mall is to make the building bright, intriguing, creatively digest, interpret the advertising super task so that it looks appropriate and not too annoying, or maybe it adds something to the environment - this task has been solved. It even seems that Asadov's bureau was able to use the notorious "Gruen's transfer" - a state of slight disorientation in space that marketers inside shopping malls are trying to induce among buyers - even on the way to it. The building turned out to be expressive, it evokes an emotional response, launches a chain of associations associated with water or not with water, excites the imagination, and at the same time looks more than appropriate.
