The Ekaterinburg company SKB Kontur is a unique phenomenon for our country. Created in 1988, it has developed rapidly, without stopping even during crises, and is currently the leader in software development. Having come some time ago to the realization of the need to create its own cluster, where it would be possible to collect the divisions previously scattered throughout the city, the company took up the development of a vast territory in a new district of Yekaterinburg - on the Shirokaya River. The first stage of the complex, a ten-story office building, was built two years ago, but the company's growth significantly exceeded the pace of construction, and by its completion it became clear that there was not enough space again. That is why a competition was announced for the development of the adjacent plot of land with an area of 16.8 hectares. The Moscow bureau T + T Architects became the winner.
According to the terms of reference, the territory, close in shape to a trapezoid, was to accommodate from three to five office buildings designed for 5,000 employees, as well as an educational center, an apart-hotel, a corporate kindergarten, a shopping center and an indoor climbing wall. Of course, parking was also assumed, and the number of parking spaces was declared at the rate of one car for two employees - which means that if we imagine buildings of similar volumes, the parking would be one and a half times higher than the main building.
T + T Architects solved this problem by "spreading" the parking spaces on the ground, that is, by making irregularly shaped two-level stylobates with exploited roofs, over which the main buildings rise. The garages that mimicked the terrain in this way are practically not striking - which is what the designers wanted: least of all they wanted the complex to greet the guests with rows of cars overhead, shyly covered with lamellas.
The four office buildings of T + T Architects - unlike the rest of the contestants - were proposed to be placed along the rounded base of the trapezoid, where the site of the peripheral transport ring is planned to be built. This, of course, is a long-term work, but the Shirokaya Rechka area is being actively built up, and the architects are already thinking about the future street gaining rhythm and compositional harmony.
In one corner of the trapezoid, where it is quieter, closer to the adjoining residential development, an apart-hotel will be located. in the other - an educational center, between them a kindergarten. On the side of the road separating the complex from the first stage, an impressive volume of climbing wall will appear. And the entire central part of the territory, as much as 10 hectares out of 16.8, should be occupied by a spacious park, the location of the alleys of which will emphasize the diagonal compositional axis of the complex - from the educational center to the climbing wall, which stand out from the compositional canvas with their height.
A reservoir is planned in the center of the park - an advantageous landscape element in itself, which in this case is also supported by practical considerations: the area in question is watered, swampy, so that the artificial pond will also perform a drainage function. And in the intervals between office buildings, the "tentacles" of green spaces will stretch to the future highway, interrupting the rhythm of urban verticals with a green dotted line.
The city-planning decision of the capital's architects turned out to be logical, convincing and functional - which, of course, made an impression on the organizers of the competition. But beyond that - as always with T + T Architects - it also has its own philosophy. IT-company - already in this very concept are contained the concepts of modernity and communication, creativity and dynamics; what can we say about SKB "Kontur" with its rapid pace of development and unprecedented care for employees, whose value for the company its management does not tire of emphasizing! Therefore, the architects decided their complex as a huge space of communication, developing on several levels at once. The park, with its radial paths flowing from each of the buildings to the pond, has become the largest, but there are at least two more. All buildings are connected by a single passage that runs along the second level of the parking lot, so you don't need to go outside to move from one to the other. And the most interesting communication space from an architectural point of view should be the atriums, which form the core of each of the buildings of the office complex.
The hull plans are anything but standard rectangles. The facades do not repeat the bionic forms, but they rhyme with the silhouettes of parking stylobates. The absence of hard corners is also, by the way, in some way a tribute to the philosophy of the company, one of the main corporate values of which is freedom: the employees have irregular working hours, they are not tied to their places, they can spend at least the whole day in the park with their laptops. Or they can be located in the atrium, where the connection between floors, departments, subdivisions is expressed especially clearly.
It was important for architects that an element of prestige was added to the values initially declared by the company - dynamics, creativity, respect for employees. Such a spectacular architectural device as an atrium, with all its complexity for developers due to the loss of space and energy consumption, works perfectly for this image moment. The volumes to be “removed” from each of the buildings are proposed to be made different in shape, in different ways and to arrange the resulting space: somewhere it can be a spiral ramp, somewhere crossing passages, somewhere, for example, a wide staircase or glazed "lanterns" of meeting rooms. “In an ordinary building, employees are isolated in their department, corridor, on the floor,” says the chief architect of the project, Nikolai Makarov. - And such an atrium is conducive to communication. This is a kind of analogue of a social network, an environment that encourages the emergence of social ties."
At the stage of the competition, the design of facades was not part of the task of the architects, but they thought this point out as well. The main plastic solution for office buildings is solid glazing with blank walls. In some places, the floors are cantilevered relative to each other, the combination of dark and light colors of the facade panels on the edges of the lintels enhances the relief.
The design of the climbing wall's facade is based on the imposing silhouette of Mount Manaraga, which is called one of the most beautiful peaks of the Ural ridge. The building is faced with perforated panels, repeating the famous shape of a strongly dissected ridge (Manaraga is translated from one of the local languages as "bear paw"): in daylight, the silhouette of the mountain is formed by black dots on a white background, and in the evening, when electricity is lit inside, the grid works in the light and from the street you can see everything that happens inside. The climbing wall in Kontur-Park is intended not only for the physical development of employees: it will be quite a serious structure, where it is even planned to hold international competitions.
“We tried to create not just a research center, but a creative space, a repository of talents, and make it as effective, monumental and ceremonial as possible,” concludes Nikolai Makarov. It is such a project that most adequately meets the atmosphere and needs of the largest Russian and international company, within whose walls creative energy is seething, and the people who work in it invariably remain the main value.
