We talked about the building of the museum-storage of the cognac factory "Alliance-1892" in Chernyakhovsk in 2011, when it was a project. Now the project has been implemented, practically without deviations from the plan; this summer he was shortlisted for the 2017 WAF award. I think I will not be mistaken if I say that now for Levon Airapetov and Valeria Preobrazhenskaya this building is one of their favorite architectural ideas, thoroughly thought out and implemented the way they wanted.
Cognac
Chernyakhovsk, the former Prussian Insterburg, is a small town, it did not grow too much in Soviet times. The cognac factory is located almost in the center, more precisely, south of the border of the historic center, just behind the railway line leading to the city station. This is convenient: French alcohol is delivered to the plant by rail in order to process it at the plant using French technology. Alcohol is poured into oak barrels, the allotted time is kept in them - at this time the cognac loses its strength and changes its taste, then it is blended and bottled at the factory. The building of the plant itself is located closer to the railway; it is a large, almost square-shaped hangar of light brown color, very neat, but industrial in appearance.
This is not the case for the barrel storage building designed by the TOTEMENT architects. It is located a little further from the railroad tracks, in front of the main and only entrance to the plant's territory, right behind the checkpoint: it meets all those who enter and at the same time it denotes the presence of Alliance 1892 in the green semi-urban space of the southern part of the former Insterburg. It is impossible not to notice it - the architects say that the director of the plant himself, despite the fact that he knew he approved all the drawings, was somewhat dumbfounded when he saw the result "live"; residents are now practicing names for the unusual building. Surrounded by three-storey houses with high hip roofs, the storage museum really looks unusual, and at the same time somehow very European: such, I'm not afraid of this word, an iconic structure would be in the order of things on the edge of the historical center of any German town.
A checkpoint was built next to the museum-storage - the building of the entrance to the plant; it echoes the two towers, but smaller and more modest, combines achromatic black and gray.
Chernyakhovsk, unfortunately, is not a rich city and at the moment it is rather shabby. The territory of the plant stands out against this background by its extreme well-groomed, and the production, which provides work for part of the city's residents, is well-established. In principle, the appearance on its territory of a "landmark" presentation building is a correct and understandable step in the development of the plant. Moreover, as the “masters of cognac” explain, there is such a specialty, yes - the barrels, in which the valuable drink is kept, are sensitive to the atmosphere and environment, in a word, “alive”. However, all masters of culinary and other arts sooner or later come to this kind of rhetoric …
In addition to artistic legends about a living drink, whose quality is influenced by absolutely everything, the storage of barrels has a number of strict rules. One of them: the room must be well ventilated, since oak barrels "breathe", releasing some of the alcohol outside. The drink inside gradually loses its strength, and the air outside is saturated with alcohol vapors and even becomes explosive. So let's talk about one of the architects' findings right away - they managed to avoid the construction of a complex and expensive ventilation system by calculating the movement of air flows: exhaust ventilation is installed in the upper part of the storage facility, and air intake grilles below. The ventilation costs were reduced by almost a hundredfold. In addition, the building is not heated: the storage facility is buried in the ground and the temperature in it is fairly stable, around 10 ° C, with acceptable seasonal variations.
Form
But no matter how much you talk about pragmatics - and after all, each function: storage and display, has its own pragmatics, the main thing in the resulting building is the image and form. It is small and industrial, but the museum, and the architects approached it the way one should approach a public building: they saturated it with plastics and associations. The building is acutely associative, and all the allusions are repeatedly thought out, comprehended by architects in words, drawings, models-sculptures, although not literal. “We are now talking about what it looks like, but it is interesting for different people to show and ask what they will see,” Levon Airapetov says critically.
roller-flight over the constructed museum building
However, one cannot but agree with the main idea: above the ground we see two volumes, one - a wide and wooden one, crowns a storage of barrels hidden in the ground - it looks like a woman: calm, in the outdated expression, “not idle”, that is, “pregnant »Many barrels. The second volume - a shiny metal tower with a cut, is installed above the glass ceiling of the tasting room-museum. This is a man"; “He runs around, catches mammoths and protects her from everything. - says Levon Airapetov, - But he himself is broken, so tall, but empty inside. He bowed his head, pondering what else to do. " Even when to work out the facades it was necessary to make them sweeps on a plane, the two towers turned out to be similar to origami figurines, female and male. Then we come to the Chinese "Yin and Yang", the sign of the connectedness and interaction of the female earthly and male heavenly principles.
Indeed, the two towers inclined at different angles look like generalized silhouettes of figures. Without any base, they "cut" out of the ground, connected, but separate, similar, but contrasting. They seem to be talking quietly in their own language - this is how husbands and wives sometimes communicate, only in half-words that they understand and almost inaudibly; but at the same time they seem to be looking around.
The hollow metal stele shines with light zigzag profiled metal and looks like a blade in general. Sheets of the outer shell are attached to a metal frame, completely open, not disguised in any way inside. In the future, moving pictures - birds, clouds, will probably be projected onto the frame. The wide slit in the entrance looks like a rift: as if a metal stele had split, or parted, opening the entrance to where it would seem impossible, because you enter - and you see the insides of the metal structures. Here you can see a metaphor for a production that is ajar for inspection. However, no matter how “empty” the metal tower is, it is the most effective accent, the main entrance, a kind of portal. There is glass in the floor of the tower, through which you can see a small underground tasting room, which thus receives a little daylight and an extravagant painting. The idea was discussed to arrange a small pool instead of a glass floor-ceiling, so that the sun's rays penetrate inside, refracting through the water, but they decided to abandon it.
The second volume is reclining, going underground with the "womb" of the storage: a small hillock forms from the west, as if the building was moving a little, settling down more comfortably under a dirt blanket.
The walls of the storage are brutal concrete, with traces of formwork; the ceiling, on the other hand, is a light metal truss. The barrels lie on the piles not in orderly rows, but a little unevenly, and the architects compare them with the laying of caviar. The "masonry" is illuminated by lamps: these are safe LEDs, but in the form of traditional "glass pears"; they are suspended on long cords not too straight. Architects see in the flickering lights a reminder of the autumn festival of grapes: “when the grapes are pressed, singing, playing music, and in the evening, there are many candles with moths hovering around them”.
There are no open holes in the “woman's” body, although there are panoramic windows and a “head” - the upper part of the volume with a wide embrasure looks at those entering, as if checking who has come. Behind the large "eye", turning sharply upward, the "tail" looks into the sky with the same panoramic window, so that, standing below on the ground, you can see through the skylight people on the balcony and the sky behind them. Such turrets were called watch-rooms in ancient times. Aside from the animate being, the wooden tower is similar to the metaphor of a wooden barrel: the walls are clad in 3mm cherry-brown mahogany wood veneer. Needless to say, the timber panels are horizontal and the metal profiling of the adjacent tower is vertical; they are nothing alike, but there is no doubt that they are relatives.
Museum
For modern wineries, the demonstration of production is, in principle, a current trend: customers, partners and suppliers should be impressed not only with the fine-tuned production, but also with the artistry of production. This requires a demonstration, a tasting, an image. Therefore, the repository is a museum, albeit in a closed area, not open all the time, but for groups and factory events. Nevertheless, the museum is a place of presentation and reflection, showing production from its most romantic side. Therefore, an important part of the building is observation balconies and platforms. The museum is specific: its entire exposition is a pile of barrels plus a tasting room; hence, the building itself has become a showcase, an instrument of contemplation, consisting of a series of points of perception. It’s not that you’re just allowed inside - the architects dose and stage the impressions, consistently revealing the nuances of the material. This process is akin to savoring cognac, but more speculative and abstracted.
The authors mention "Yin and Yang" for a reason. Speaking of two different volumes, at some point you might think that they are separate, but this is not the case. Two contrasting, but sculpted from the same "test" towers stand on a common pentahedral base of the vault, similar to a somewhat sloped, but recognizable quality mark: “Yes, of course we saw it; there was no purpose to draw such a sign, but it was also good that it turned out,”says Levon Airapetov. Between the two volumes there is a small courtyard, into it there are gentle steps, "stretched" like power threads, between the entrance to the "male" tower and the deepened console window into the "female" one. The lines of the steps are collected in a "bundle", and it may seem that the bundle of threads emanating from the metal tower "made a hole" in the wall opposite; and thus closed the outline of the building.
At the same time, the first, external, route of inspection appears here. Even without entering the courtyard, moving along, and not across the steps of the stairs, we can see both the tasting room through the window in the floor of the metal tower, and the vault through the window on the left - it flickers with the festive fireflies of the lamps of the storage room and it is obvious that it is warm inside and something is happening good.
Further the route bifurcates. In the courtyard there is an entrance to the largest hall of the vault, and in the far corner of the metal tower you can go down to the “museum” space of the tasting room. There is a smaller storage room under the courtyard, and from the window of the tasting room showcase its barrels are visible, successfully complementing the exhibition of bottles on the wall. The tasting room is located at the storage level, and after leaving it, you can go through the second room to the third, to the stairs of the first entrance, which connects most of the viewing platforms. The staircase stretches along the northern wall from the inside of the "wooden" tower from the floor of the storage to the entrance, above it forms a balcony over the cut-in view console - the one that invades the storage space and through which you can look inside from the outside. Further, the staircase leads to the head-"lookout" of the wooden tower, to the upper balcony, from where you can look at the entrance road, and, through the upper stained-glass window, at the sky. The silhouettes of those standing here are clearly visible from the ground.
As you can see, the inspection route can be easily divided into several segments; but if you go through it entirely, then the path twists into a kind of volumetric spiral, "screwed" into space, becoming its semantic axis - so that one even wants to suspect that the seemingly complex movement of volumes is strung on the main spatial spiral of inspection and is motivated by it, and hence, internally whole.
This immanent motivation is another important plot of the building, one might say that it is its semantic core, and not at all a “literary” story with a dialogue between a man and a woman. At first glance, it may seem that the architecture of the storage museum is due to the search for an effective gesture, but this is not entirely true, or rather, not at all. You can understand it more correctly only knowing that the most powerful energy of the form, which is certainly present here, is strictly limited and conditioned by the context, function and shape of the site. Levon Airapetov and Valeria Preobrazhenskaya talk about the key points that they find in the process of researching the problem; then, from the connection of the most important points with the necessary lines, a form is formed, given by the circumstances - it is then possible to creatively comprehend and "animate" it. But each line and plane remains motivated, by no means arbitrary. And the form is not as complex as it might seem: it becomes complex in the context of the mutual arrangement of the volumes and when opening the angles, but - in fact, as Valeria Preobrazhenskaya says, - the two walls of each volume are parallel, that is, the form is quite simple; necessary is simple. Here I really want to add: as in life, everything complex arises from the interaction of simple components.
The grid of lines connecting important points is the basis of the building, its conceptual plan. The architects somehow even showed this grid at one of their exhibitions; then they "scratched" it in the damp concrete on the wall of the tasting room - as a reminder of the thoughts from which the form arose. This sign looks like a symbol of an archaic deity, which in this case is quite appropriate: after all, what else can a museum-storage be, if not a temple of the wine god, more precisely, the gods, the incarnations of which, to some extent, become "sprouted" from the basement of the tower … Then the animation of the form becomes understandable, which is very strong in this project: two semi-abstract creatures simply grow out of cognac vapor, become the embodiment of both subtle, complex production and architectural reflections about it: concentrated, plastic, but passed through the filter of necessity. Now, for ten years now, it is customary to look for architecture outside of form: in ecology, economy, statistics, function, improvement, finally. Against this background, what TOTEMENT did is very bold, although it would seem that they just found a reasonable form - one that affects emotions, even “wakes up” them, revealing the viewer's gaze, but which at the same time is not at all redundant … It would seem that this is the basic task of architecture - to work on the form, to shape the interaction of human feelings with space. But few people are working with this topic now, probably because it is not easy.
