The Mercure hotel was built in the capital of Mordovia on the initiative of Vladimir Gribanov, president of KS Bank and at the same time vice-president of the Russian Figure Skating Federation: he wanted to give the city, which attracts not only many tourists, but also athletes, a modern hotel capable of receiving guest teams, with the proper quality of hotel service. While the client and the architect were trying on each other, discussing the future hotel, it turned out that Russia, and Saransk itself, would host the World Cup. Then the project reached a new level: the head of the republic became interested in him, he found a free site in the very center of the city, agreed with the hotel operator Accor Hotels and invited consultants from the Arup company.
Thanks to the initiative of Arup specialists, A. Len architects faced, in particular, a new task, which they did not have to solve for all 27 years of the office's work - the building was built with the expectation of a short period of autonomous functioning in case of a main network disconnection. “A diesel generator has been installed, which will allow the rooms to be illuminated and heated for three days,” the architects say. “There is also a small supply of drinking water, 10 cubic meters.” Of course, this does not provide a completely independent operation of a hotel like a space station, but, for example, it will help compensate for sudden breakdowns of urban infrastructure.
"Mercure" is located in the city center, at the intersection of Bolshevistskaya and Kommunisticheskaya streets, at an equal distance of 330 m from the temple in the name of Admiral Fyodor Ushakov, canonized in 2000, and the bright red and white sports complex "Saransk Arena" built in 2012. Around - a scattering of sights and diverse architecture: a thick beet-colored musical theater, the Main Post Office with cathedral ambitions, the building of the Mordovian State University, very similar to the Moscow one, but made in "alukobond"; etc. Kommunisticheskaya Street, heading east, leads to another sports complex, the giant Mordovia Arena, built across the Insar River for the World Cup'18. So for athletes, the intersection where the Mercure is built must be very convenient.
Taking into account the unevenness, if not to say the variegation, of the context, the architects decided not to react to the environment - "whatever one may say, it is impossible to bring it all together." Meanwhile, "according to the rules, the hotels of the Mercure chain must tell a story and reflect the cultural heritage of the cities in which they are located," says Sergey Oreshkin. So the search for imagery in thinking about national motives and the color of Mordovia was not easy and quite long, although the idea of a wavy facade, as can be seen in the sketches, appeared almost immediately.
Some drawings show that the facade could have resembled red and white embroidery with a cross or a bright surface, but at the meetings the head of the republic was asked to reduce the expression.
The black and white version also did not fit, then the architects settled on a combination of white and blue - blue reflected, albeit in a more saturated version, the postmodern post office building on the contrary, which can be understood as a variant of contextual binding to the area. The two buildings took on the role of a kind of propylae, although besides the blue color and a similar height mark - a little less than 50 meters, the maximum for this place, of course, there is nothing more in common between them - rather, they represent two completely different periods and directions.
So, after numerous discussions and changes in the project, the theme of the traditional Mordovian ornament was transformed into small diagonal veins between white horizontals. Gone are the ornamental mesh on white surfaces, which turned out to be too expensive. A similar technique "A. Len" successfully tested in
The Russian center for science and culture in Kabul, only there, on the white aluminum facades, an ornament was applied, characteristic of the white-stone architecture of Russia.
And it's a pity - the folklore pattern of rhythmically grouped four-leafed leaves would give the facade a multidimensionality, both plastic and semantic, which is clearly noticeable, in particular, in the options for evening lighting, where the lights of an ornament similar to the glow of icons of modern electronics "run" along the ribbons of the facade, but based on repetition of a traditional motive.
However, in the Mercure building, the patterns were preserved at the level of a more local, individual perception from the pedestrian and guest level: now we see ornaments on the pylon of the entrance group and in the print of the windows on the first floor.
On the other hand, the national decorative theme is reflected in the interiors of the hotel's public areas, developed by the Sundukovy Sisters design studio - it is the only one in Russia that has a license to design interiors for the Accor chain. The main source of inspiration for the designers is the museum of the Mordovian sculptor Stepan Erzya, also located a stone's throw from Mercure. There is a lot of wood in the decoration and decoration, the main colors are green and brown, like a museum. The foyer is decorated with wooden sculptures by local artists and paintings on the subjects of Mordovian mythology.
In the drawing of the building facades visible from afar, only thin diagonal bridges between the ribbon horizontal rods have been preserved from the motives of the national Mordovian ornament. Together they form a flexible skeletal structure that outlines the volume with confident lines, rounding corners, forming undulating transitions and protrusions.
A person familiar with the context of modern architecture, at the first glance at the Saransk "Mercury" will remember the famous Moscow
Dominion tower, designed by Zaha Hadid. There are definitely similarities, as well as a lot of differences. The pattern of white stripes, in essence inherent in modernist architecture in general, and the diagonal work on the similarity. But let's remember that the search for the image of the Saransk "Mercury" began with a "braid" of wavy stripes of floors. Sergey Oreshkin's hotel is more compact, more vertical, its outline is "molded" more densely. The roll-overs with Zaha's business center are obvious, but they lie in the plane of the general trend, the desire to create an acutely modern, non-linear form. “Yes, I wanted to build a bionic architecture in the center of Saransk, noticeable and completely belonging to our time,” says Sergei Oreshkin.
The sculptural, movable form is not cast in concrete at all, but is realized by the frame-monolithic method, filled with bricks and cladding with aluminum panels made of Russian-made composite material. At night, the "lines of force" of the building are emphasized by the façade LED lighting.
The stylobate, marked by the diagonal white stele of the entrance, is perceived as a large, wide pedestal of the building. It houses a lobby, restaurant and bar, as well as a conference room, a fitness center with a small spa and hotel administration offices. The seven floors of the hotel are grouped into three layers, separated by two "waists" and slightly shifted in different directions - they serve as a metaphor for the three steps of the sports pedestal. Improved numbers are located in the protruding parts of the tape layers - so that the volumetric structure accurately reflects the internal structure of the building.
The hotel has 115 rooms, and due to the nuances of the outline of the external walls and differences in the size of the windows, the layouts are different: each room has received an individual design - also with elements of "fluidity": "the work desk flows into the headboard, which passes into a part of the wall with a built-in floor lamp ", - explains Sergey Oreshkin. The smooth lines are contrasted with the ornament of triangles, squares and hexagons on the floor, walls, tiles. The hotel is four stars, until five it lacked two formal features: a swimming pool and a more spacious conference room.
According to Sergei Oreshkin, the implementation turned out to be close to the renderings, the architect is satisfied with the work with the customer and the result as a whole: “The result is a noticeable architecture that hit Instagram and Pinterest and is surprising: is this Russia? We have three such objects -
Badminton sports complex, SKA sports complex and now Mercure is our brightest hotel."
