SPEECH has been working with the Luzhniki Bolshoi Sports Arena since 2013 or did you connect later?
Since 2013. The Mosinzhproekt company held a competition to select a designer, and we won in it. And then, under the leadership of the Moscow Stroycomplex, the chief architect of the city and the Mosinzhproekt company, we made the sections “Architecture”, “Technology”, “General Plan”, and also supervised the implementation of the BSA reconstruction project. In addition, it was SPEECH who worked on the reconstruction of Luzhniki's infrastructure facilities - in total, this project includes 16 facilities. These include cash registers, entrance and service pavilions, checkpoints, training fields with built-in stands, a children's sports area, and an outdoor sports service center.
IN the description of the project said about the preservation of the plastic of the roof - is the roof new?
The roof is the same. As it was made of polycarbonate, it has remained so, the only thing is that now polycarbonate is used that meets the new fire requirements of G-1. But according to our project, a visor was added, which provided the viewers with greater comfort both on sunny days and in the rain.
Am I correct in understanding that in order to optimize visibility from the stands and increase the number of seats to 81,000, you had to replace all the "stuffing" except for the outer contour of the walls? What difficulties did you face in the process and how did you manage to solve them?
Yes, the old stadium did not meet FIFA requirements. In particular, it had insufficient capacity, insufficient width of rows, insufficient number of bathrooms and buffets. In addition, too many seats in the stands had a limited view, and there were very few seats for people with limited mobility. Therefore, the key task of the reconstruction was, on the one hand, to preserve the appearance of the stadium as an icon of national sports - the historic wall and roof of the stadium, on the other hand, to fulfill all FIFA requirements in terms of area and capacity. In other words, our task was to fit all the necessary new functions into the existing geometry. This was the hardest part.
If you remember, in 2013, the idea of demolishing the stadium and building a completely new arena in its place was even seriously discussed - it was a great merit of the city of Moscow and its leadership that the historic building was preserved. The historical significance of this building, this monument to sports outweighed all other arguments. And our project was developed precisely with such a calculation in order to prove: fulfillment of all FIFA requirements is possible in the historical contour of the stadium. At the same time, in addition to the historic walls and the roof of the stadium, absolutely everything was dismantled - from the inside it is a completely new stadium.
The fact that the stands are closer to the pitch and the degree of their inclination is increased appears in all the news. Is this really a major technical innovation in a completed project? And if so, then all the same - is there something else?
First of all, the level of the field had to be left the same due to the proximity of the groundwater. To provide the required capacity of 81,000 spectators and space for various groups of spectators, the stands had to be moved closer to the field - this was done by eliminating the running and athletics paths that previously surrounded the football field around the perimeter. Instead of one tier of stands, three tiers were designed, and the ring of the middle tier was given over to skybox seats - one hundred seats with a capacity of 1950 people, as well as 300 VIP seats. And in the gap between the lower and middle stands, 300 seats were placed for people with limited mobility.
The main means of moving spectators inside the stadium are cascading stairs, which are separated from the historic wall by an inner street, thanks to which, by the way, the facade of Luzhniki is now perceived not only from the outside, but also from the inside. The staircases lead spectators to the distribution gallery at a height of 23 meters from the ground - this space also serves as a panoramic observation deck, which offers beautiful views of the city center and the Moscow City skyscraper quarter.
The graphic design of the frieze of the attic part belongs to the studio of Artemy Lebedev. Is this your first time working together and how do you measure the experience?
This was our first experience of cooperation, as a result of which I proposed the studio of Artemy Lebedev for our other two projects. In other words, we evaluate the experience of joint work as positive.
The frieze existed from the very beginning as an element that covers the outer support ring of the roof. But it was made of metal cassettes, which by 2014 had become completely unusable. Aesthetically, the frieze was very unattractive. But at the same time, it was clear that he was needed. And we thought for a long time about the image of this element and its implementation. As a result, the idea was born to make it not solid, but perforated, and using the perforation method to apply not just holes, but images of athletes symbolizing different sports that were related to this stadium, including during the 1980 Olympics.
Have you ever been rooting for a team, or is it just an architectural and technical skill to build stadiums for you?
I was really rooting for the Russian team at the 2008 European Championships. They became bronze medalists of the European Championship. I remember very well how we arrived at some huge restaurant in Berlin and were sick, I literally broke my voice. But I have no favorite teams and I am not a fan in the classical sense of the word.
Well-known are the Water Sports Palace, Dynamo Stadium, Krasnodar Stadium and BSA, as in some way the top, at the moment, in the list of SPEECH sports facilities. May I ask you to go back to the beginning and remember where you started with the typology of sports facilities?
It was the Water Sports Palace in Kazan that was the very first sports facility for us.
What would you call the main difficulty of working with a large stadium: constructiveness, the requirement for vivid imagery, organization of flows, something else?
Sports architecture objects are always very targeted and individual. If you are building an office building, all you know about it is that after commissioning a certain tenant will come there. Or tenants. But sports facilities are always designed for specific teams or for specific events, and their schedule, as a rule, is already scheduled for years to come. And this sets the highest bar of requirements, sets ambitious tasks for architects related to constructive solutions oriented not to today, but to tomorrow. And, of course, unlike other functions, a stadium is always a large-scale architecture. There, as a rule, there may be fewer decisions made once, but these decisions must be very accurately implemented in nature, since they have a greater degree of repeatability.
The architecture of the Krasnodar stadium, let's say, is latent-classical in the spirit of the 1930s, the Big Sports Arena, built in the 1950s, is also quite classic, in some way they even have something in common. What to expect next? A super-modern stadium-icon, or would you prefer to work in the classic paradigm of the Colosseum in the case of new plots?
It all depends on the context. Today, in my opinion, the approach to architecture as a cliche has completely disappeared - I mean a situation when an architect makes one type of structures and then tries to reproduce this type in different parts of the world and in different situations. There are such architects, but there are only a few of them, while for the most part modern architects still pay much more attention to the context in which they create their projects. And personally, I am convinced that if you think about the following structures, including sports ones, their appearance will primarily depend on where they will be located and for whom they will be designed. In any case, it should be an architecture that is thought out and efficiently implemented down to the last detail.
