The building of Valery Gergiev's Zaryadye Concert Hall opened on the city day - a year later than the entire park. Moreover, at first, in the summer, it was opened temporarily to host the Moscow Urban Forum, then it was closed for revision and reopened in September. Of course, the postponement of dates does not always indicate the complexity of the construction, but here is the same case: the hall is not only a part of the ambitious Zaryadye Park project, but also a large, technically complex project in itself. For Moscow in the last two or three decades, it is almost unique in the sense that it was fully implemented by the authors, Sergei Kuznetsov, Vladimir Plotkin and TPO "Reserve" with the active participation of the chief architect of Moscow, Sergei Kuznetsov; rather than handed over to someone after concept approval. So, a large-scale public building appeared in Moscow, built by one of the best Russian bureaus, with natural acoustics of the world famous Yasuhisa Toyota, with a transformable hall and a luxurious, huge and bright foyer. All this, in general, is a breakthrough, especially against the background of the almost complete predominance of residential complexes in the architectural context of the country.
We talked about the project in sufficient detail. The Concert Hall is part of the Zaryadye Park; the function itself was inherited from the hall of the Rossiya Hotel, demolished in 2006-2010, and was adopted as mandatory for all projects and competition tasks, from Sir Norman Foster's office urban area project to the project of the Diller Scofidio + Renfro consortium, which won the competition for the park. Meanwhile, in the DS + R project, the building was only outlined, although it was placed directly under the glass crust, the climatic attraction Transsolar; it was immediately planned that it would be designed as part of the park, but separately.
“Initially, Valery Gergiev intended the project of Santiago Calatrava for this place,” says Vladimir Plotkin. "But the ridge characteristic of this author did not correspond to the concept of the DS + R park and did not like the mayor of Moscow." In 2015, TPO "Reserve" took up the design: the work turned out to be very intense and voluminous, starting with tracking all the nuances and ending with many meetings that took place almost every week.
The building, like any modern public building of this scale and tasks, is designed for and evokes an emotional reaction - this is definitely a wow-effect architecture. The space of the foyer, white, high, solid, seems to be a lens that accumulates light inconspicuous from our latitudes, absorbs and intensifies the rays during the day, "gives off" at night - it glows entirely, refracting by strips of glass lamellas.
It seems like a giant crystal layer between the outer world of a quiet passage behind the Kitaygorodskaya wall and the inner world of the concert hall - a "cave" permeated with white ribbons of balconies that spill out into the foyer with flexible prominences of stair railings. This was one of the key ideas at the very early stage of formulating the concept of the project, as illustrated by the sketch by Sergey Kuznetsov.
In the north, quartz veins are found in granite rocks, and it is quite a strong impression to see in a dense gray mass something light to whiteness, translucent, shining. On the whole, the effect of the Zaryadye Concert Hall is exactly that - something bright is placed in a huge artificial mountain. A diamond in a ring works in a similar way, but let's not talk about diamonds. The main thing is that the building seems to be pulling from the depths of the conventional "Pskov Hill" threads of a certain light - probably the image of music, almost coming out and visible as in a showcase.
It is all the more surprising that all this was achieved with relatively restrained means, without preference for wow-techniques of the architecture of attractions. Nonlinearity is present in the building, but its inner dialectic is dominated by the laconic purity of the classical or even thaw modernism of the sixties, which simultaneously expresses the author's preferences of Vladimir Plotkin and becomes a contextual memory of the Rossiya Hotel. And somehow you suddenly begin to see in the hills of Zaryadye heaps of garbage overgrown with grass from the demolition of a large building, and in the new concert hall - its “underground” branch, like a branch from a stump of a felled tree. It is quite curious, although this, of course, is only a fantasy.
In fact, both design and circumstances are important for understanding the specifics of the modernist discourse reincarnated here. First of all, a guitar-shaped hall. Russian acoustics consider a simple rectangular hall to be the best option, and a specialist who worked with the building earlier, Yasuhisu Toyota, also suggested creating an empty pocket above the ceiling of the auditorium for better sound. Toyota rejected the idea of a pocket and suggested a "waist". In TPO "Reserve" there were two fundamentally different versions of the stylistic approach to the interior of the hall: at first, Vladimir Plotkin considered the more laconic "chopped" form preferable, but Valery Gergiev chose the second option, bright, with ribbons on balconies. The authors made this decision and now they think - "it's even fortunate that everything worked out that way."
What happened is this: the balconies of the hall and foyer, stair railings, café bar counters and round pillars merged into a single frame, both bearing and figurative. All of it is completely white and its volume is not exactly hidden, but not accentuated, with the realized lighting it is rather leveled. There are two approaches to the shape of white objects: in oblique light, they can clearly show their texture and plastic, and when illuminated from different sides, on the contrary, they can become an almost luminous spot, an element of a graphic image, more de-materialized than plastic, image. Lightweight, not massive. The interiors of the Zaryadye hall tend to the second approach. There is no massive flow of forms here, as, for example, in Frank Gehry, there is no plastic invasion or a mass of heavy pouring flow, as in the Ryabushinsky mansion, even the bright white acrylic stair railings seem more like a wing of unearthly matter. In other words, digital and relevant, fashionable and modern, evoking an involuntary "ah!" the drawing of the hall did not subjugate the idea, but dissolved in it - it revived with its dynamics, but retained the graphic quality and with it lightness, shifting the accent in the word curvilinear to the line. This is how air currents and smells are drawn in the cinema, like wisps of fog spread.
Dilution is helped by only the light reflected by the white surfaces, but also by the shading of inserts in the balconies of the foyer, illumination of the laminated ceiling and flexible ventilation "gills". Glass slats on the outside and thin ribs echoing them on the inside, and even silk-screen printing in the form of rhombuses on the outer glasses work for the same "dashed" graphic effect. On a sunny day, this effect is supplemented with a grid of shadows from the bindings of stained glass windows. Another type of shading - light-shadow, consists of notches, motivated by the requirements of acoustics, appears in the halls; in spite of the practical necessity, these horizontal grooves-stripes on the inside work in unison with the vertical light stripes on the outside, even making them a kind of para-pandan.
And one more variant of shading is vertical "pleating" of the outer walls of the main hall facing the foyer. Closer to the stairs, one facet of each prism of the folded pseudo-curtain turns out to be mirrored, which gives the effect of maximum decay, greater than even just a large mirror - it only creates a double of space, but here, thanks to the alternation with mirrors, strips of wood seem absolutely flat and floating in space in surrounded by a kaleidoscope of reality. In the middle, closer to the front doors, the mirrored halves smoothly fade away, so it seems that the “curtain” wall collects itself before our eyes, as it happens in a drawn virtual space.
Inside the hall, regular "pleating" is echoed by many dark mahogany ribs, but in the interior they are less strict and more chaotic, which, on the one hand, is useful for acoustics, and on the other hand, it looks like shading with charcoal or unevenly combed corduroy, since it gives deep plush shadows. It turns out that there is mahogany on both sides, but on the outside it looks more like silk or, because of the mirrors, like moire, and inside it looks like suede. So the wall is disguised as a curtain surrounding the frame of the balconies. Meanwhile, according to the requirements of acoustics, all panels of the inner walls of both halls are of great thickness, up to 20 cm, for the sake of correct propagation and reflection of sound. By the way, again, for the sake of better acoustics, instead of two small halls, the architects made one, but a high one.
Another acoustic requirement removed from the agenda the bold idea of the architects - to reveal the view directly from the main hall to the Moskva River, making the southern wall glass, for the sake of which the axis of the hall was turned to the south, parallel to the axis of one of the wings of the floating bridge (and not perpendicular to the main facade, as is usually done). According to the original idea, there was a glass wall behind the stage, letting in the panorama of the Moskva River into the hall as a kind of decoration, as shown in one of the first layout sketches.
But it turned out that with a glass wall that would cover and open the panorama, it is impossible to achieve the correct sound. Therefore, a stone-faced wall appeared on the southern facade of the building - the frame of a large multimedia screen for broadcasting concerts (or just commercials). So the intended window from the hall turned into a “window to the hall”. And the framing stone is not only drawn with the crystalline planes of the perspective frame, but also covered with relief rows of stone stripes, similar to the mark from a cleaver on a marble block - similar traces, only much smaller, from a real instrument, can be seen on the marble of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, if you approach close.
So, shading helps white, light and glass to de-materialize everything, to make it light and even lighter. It also neutralizes the pathos of volumetric plastics: inside we are not so much among the volumes, but among the lines, as if inside a tulle decoration, everything is painted on layers of translucent fabric; the effect, of course, is not quite the same, but akin: the walls do not surround, but part, like the curtains, proud of their transparency. Transparency is fundamental - the architects chose the glass of the facades as permeable to light as possible. The idea was not just a large stained glass window and a panorama of the surroundings, but a membrane wall, a barrier as imperceptible as possible, growing out of the ground while the floor repeats the slight slope of the relief, smoothly descending towards the Moskva River from north to south. As smoothly as the slopes echoing the relief, ramps and stupa-ramps sprout in the floor, they go along the facade, making a movement along similar to the circling balconies - with only a slight slope, setting up a leisurely movement for a walking step. It must be admitted that this attention to the natural relief and paving has become in recent years one of the important topics for TPO "Reserve", it is not for nothing that the drawing of the bridge park was transferred, as we remember, not only to the floor, but also in the form of silk-screen printing to glass.
The effect of the transparent barrier and the affinity of the floor with the relief was carefully calculated and very dear to the authors. It was implemented in many ways, but not completely. The architects have verified the layout of the hexagonal floor slabs, the pattern is exactly the same as in the park, with the layout of the slabs outside. But the park was completed quickly and somehow it turned out that the slabs outside were laid at a different angle and the effect of the integrity of the paving inside and outside disappeared, only the resemblance remained. In addition, the floor of the first-floor foyer turned out to be five centimeters higher, and the effect of a single surface suffered. In addition, for the sake of safety, metal handrails were screwed on the sloped sections of the floor so that no one tripped; handrails have appeared in the middle of the stairs, where they also look superfluous.
And yet in Moscow, perhaps, there is no other building where transparency, panoramas and "overflow" of spaces would be so masterly and at the same time, beaten on a large scale. Double-glazed windows - 6 meters high, 3 m wide, on the sharp southeast corner the glass is rounded, here the console is "hung" on steel cables, but not open in the spirit of hi-tech, but disguised as white rods, similar to columns, but thin. Here a view of the river and the Kremlin opens up, compensating for the loss of the southern window in the main hall. Despite the slight difference in levels, the mutual visibility of the street and the foyer is obvious and does not require proof. All this is high and very light, lighter than outside - fluorescent lamps are working on the effect, the very strokes, lines and dots.
I would like to talk about the points separately. Small lamps are built into the ceiling and the lower planes of the balconies, not in a regular manner, but picturesquely scattered. In the evening, the reflection of the interior is projected onto the dark space outside, spotlights look like soaring stars, echoing real luminaries invisible in the city - the effect is almost cosmic. And at the same time, it seems that the building is throwing bright theatrical sparkles around itself, like a kind of magic wand, producing points of light scattering in space. Inside the building, dots also multiply in reflections and give everything an almost elusive, but magical glow. It is supported by thin circles-horos of chandeliers, dotted with small bulbs, each with a translucent white wing.
The intermediate space of the foyer, its simultaneous belonging to the street and the building, is also emphasized by the fact that the walls of the administration offices, located in the third tier, are designed in the same way as the outer walls - made of glass with lamellas and silk-screen printing; as if part of the outer wall had receded inward. Or, as if being in the foyer, we are partly inside, but partly still outside. The reception is also convenient for the staff, they get daylight from the lobby as from the atrium.
A curious transformation has taken place with several columns. When the builders began to cast the concrete handrail along the facade, the architects were able to stop this process in time and even insist that the concrete be destroyed with jackhammers. But the parts adjacent to the columns turned out to be too difficult to disassemble, and they were disguised: now several columns received a smooth expansion at the bottom. An element reminiscent of Gaudí and completely alien to Vladimir Plotkin with his Pythagorean approach to shaping. And meanwhile, the unplanned "trees" fit into the general context: it seems that the columns were influenced not by the randomness of the construction process, but by the curvilinearity of the horizontal lines, that "sprouting" from the floor with cones, they echo the curves of the balconies; all the more since the rods holding the console in the southern part from the side of the river received a similar expansion, but at the top - it masks the mount, echoing with the columns, convincing us that, perhaps, this was intended. Nuance.
It is very interesting to look at all this, to disassemble the resulting space "by the bones", the building is both integral and complex, not so much a theater building as a theater building, it seems to be in the process of assembling and this assembly takes place thanks to our participation, in the eyes of every spectator. The immersion in the space of lines is echoed by another effect - let's call it "a town in a snuffbox." The main hall is transformable in many of its parts. Although it is not given to him to open the southern wall to a glazed panorama, the balcony behind the stage is sliding apart, increasing its depth. The parterre chairs can be removed, the orchestra amphitheater on the stage too, up to a flat floor. Mechanisms hidden in the underground floor - very deep and spacious - are responsible for the transformations. Everything here is hung with belts of conveyors and it may seem to an amateur that the space in the subway under the escalator should be arranged somehow this way - in any case, I sometimes dream about it like this in my dreams.
In a word, this is a huge complex structure - theater in general is an art that has welcomed mechanization since ancient times; but here it is not Deus ex machina on stage and not even Meyerhold's circle - we all find ourselves inside the mechanism, it is under us, and you can feel it: along the cracks in the completely flat floor and swaying underfoot when several people enter the hall. Everything, of course, is reliable and has been rechecked many times, but the feeling remains - there is no need for scenography in the concert hall, they listen to music here, but sometimes it seems that you yourself are inside a giant scenery, and the building does not forget to remind you of this. No wonder, by the way, Sergey Kuznetsov
mentions the underground hall of Zaryadye as one of the most difficult tasks of recent years.
The “mechanized” character of the hall becomes the nucleus for many of the above-mentioned features of the architecture of the concert hall. Being inside a mechanism, or virtual space, or a giant stage design are related things, they make our sensations fabulous, staged, which complements the emotional structure of a person who came to the concert. The pleating of the outer wall of the hall, by the way, looks like not only a curtain, but also a huge gear (the same "snuffbox"), and the alternation of wooden plates with mirrors can remind some of Vladimir Plotkin's studio works - those of them that were made on a computer and where all the elements fly and rotate like in a hadron collider. The imagery of a frozen mechanism is characteristic of many of Plotkin's buildings; this is not a technique, but a theme. As, for example, in Skolkovo Park, the whole house seems to be wrapped in a giant conveyor belt. It is interesting that the "mechanical" theme is often combined with the "metaphysical", as if not too manifested, but readable elements of the classics compensate for it. Here in Zaryadye we see the correct circumference of the main entrance, a glass exedra on a scale more impressive than the Basilica of Maxentius. Well, the power of the "mechanical" theme is quite understandable - with such and such a "reactor" as a transformable hall inside a mountain. ***
Meanwhile, the main effect is probably as follows. In its emotional background, openness, overflow, work with light and matter, the building of the Zaryadye Concert Hall, especially its foyer, resembles iconic things of modernism: the Sats Theater, the Palace of Pioneers on the Lenin Hills, even (especially with ribs and glass on the floor) the Kremlin Palace of Congresses … And it may seem that here much that the authors of these buildings dreamed of has been brought to perfection in a technical, and somewhere in a figurative sense. In general, everything is the same, but the glasses are taller, more transparent, whiter is white, the light is brighter, the edges are thinner. At the same time in Zaryadye, there is a certain restraint of the luxury of the possibilities of modern technologies, which, despite the presence of bends, are placed in a rather strict stereometric framework - and a finely calculated, targeted use of these technologies to reveal the image outlined in the sixties. I don’t know what to call it, this is the opposite of the neo-modernism of the 2000s, maybe neo-neo? And as a kind of point, the author's signature - large brass handles on the doors to the hall, completely from the sixties interiors, only larger and as if even more chopped. At the same time, there is some flexibility here: the author of the 1960s, probably, would have built a glass prism with deliberately sharpened corners into the hill, but here there is a bevel, a console, rather a crystal, and certainly not a prism.
That is, the building not only plunges us into the semblance of a three-dimensional graphic work, makes us feel differently space and ourselves in it, but also partly immerses us in history - it even looks like a remake, and maybe it works akin to the new Star Wars series, removing the naivety of the old films, but honing the idea embedded in them to a new level. The architecture of the concert hall, it seems, deliberately finds itself on the verge of neo-modernism and "classical" modernism, gropes for the tones of both, operates with them, creating something new. In this duality, perhaps, there is also a certain response to the nature of music: art, where emotions are especially abstracted from reality. As you know, music is both emotions and mathematics, the most abstract art, and in this the concert hall built by TPO “Reserve” can be understood as a “portrait” of music. Well, or one of the possible portraits of her. In any case, the balance of emotionality, designed for a person and his perception and abstraction, leading to the "music of the spheres" is observed.
