The park was designed by the companies AM PROEKTUS and Lap Landscape & Urban Design, members of the ATOM ha group. This is not the first joint project; the companies have signed an agreement on joint work with Russian projects. In Voronezh, the authors won a tender held by the Hamina Group of Companies.
The GRAD park territory is located near the Moscow - Voronezh highway, at the entrance to the city, and serves as a continuation of the City-Park GRAD shopping and entertainment complex. It is rare for a park to be adjacent to a shopping complex. However, the mall is unusual too. His customer, Evgeny Khamin, is a passionate person who is trying to bring innovative urbanism to Voronezh. If he rebuilds a sports complex, then not into a banal housing, but by developing a sports function. If he builds a school, then an advanced one, where the whole city seeks to send children. He even wrote a book on the development of Voronezh.
In the GRAD mall, the entertainment part is not an appendage to trade, but independent city attractions - a concert hall for 2000 people, an active city venue where concerts are held every week, as well as an oceanarium and an indoor hall with attractions. Here you can spend the whole day with your children. Park GRAD, designed by Mark Safronov, develops the strategy of the free time economy declared in the mall. It will have several more important "magnets" for attracting citizens - an ice rink, a ski track, a go-cart, a pond, a sculpture garden safari, a lecture hall, restaurants and an open area for concerts for 10,000 people.
The territory of the park is bordered on one side by a shopping center, on the other - by a forest through which you can get to the Voronezh Sea, the cleanest part of it.
In recent years, parks that combine natural and architectural elements have become popular. The park is understood as a show: a place of recreation, arts and entertainment. They are also being built along the highway, for example, the landscape company i! Melk has equipped a park with plants and entertainment along the famous Strip Boulevard in Los Angeles. The same Dutch brought the fashion for park shows to Russia, one of the first examples - “
Tyufeleva grove i! Melk at Zilart. But it is much more modest than the Voronezh GRAD in terms of the number of citywide entertainment. Voronezh GRAD combines large sports and entertainment facilities suitable for a variety of hobbies.
It is planned that an amusement park, a promenade park will appear next to the mall, and an ecological path will connect them with the shore of the reservoir, about 3 km of path through the forest. The first part of the project - the promenade park - occupies an area of 7.5 hectares, in plan resembling a right-angled triangle, whose long leg is adjacent to the wall of the shopping center, and the main entrance is planned at an acute angle, next to the entrance to the mall.
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zooming 1/5 GRAD Park. Routes © ATOM ag
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zooming 2/5 GRAD Park. Small architectural forms © ATOM ag
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zooming 3/5 GRAD Park. Ornamental grasses and flowering plants © ATOM ag
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zooming 4/5 GRAD Park. Trees and shrubs © ATOM ag
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zooming 5/5 GRAD Park © ATOM ag
The authors interpret the Promenade Park as a public space, a system of large and small paths, mainly looped and united in a kind of "eight", which unites the entire territory, being supplemented by paths of different directions and degrees of tortuosity. “There are no dead-end branches, you can go somewhere all the time,” says Mark Safronov. Indeed, everything is planned in such a way that, while floating around the park, on the one hand, it is possible to change the angle of view and the situation all the time - and at the same time, it is easy to get from one part of the park to another. The main components of the promenade are: a skating rink, which in summer becomes a concert venue; a pond with attractions and embankments; and a central round square with a fountain.
The skating rink is divided into a skating area proper, a dance floor with a disco and a stage. The rental office building, clad with wooden slats, forms the entrance to the site, and from here you can go up to the rooftop bar.
Above the skiing level, a go-kart track is laid; in winter it turns into a ski track. In summer, the skating rink becomes a concert venue for 10,000 spectators.
At first, the authors suggested using the European idea of the gradual formation of the park: build the first version from inexpensive materials, analyze the response of visitors, adjust the concept on this basis, add something, remove something. But the skating rink and the concert venue require a one-time laying of the entire infrastructure and the "test period" had to be abandoned. On the other hand, the skating rink will use the refrigeration machines of the shopping center: in summer they work for sales areas, and in winter they are idle - now they will be constantly used.
The pond consists of two parts. In the shallow, 10-15 cm deep, fountains and a summer lecture hall are planned. In the main, deeper part of the pond, there is a pier with boats, an embankment with restaurants and a sunbathing area. A greenhouse is planned in the restaurant area, with a vegetable garden with edible herbs. On the opposite side there is a wild, reedy shore, where you can "sit with a fishing rod" about the greater distance from the city.
In the central part of the main pond, the authors proposed a blende observation deck: a concrete gutter, the pedestrian path in which is located below the water level - a kind of bridge, deepened into the water, but dry. You walk along such a gutter, the water is just below your shoulders, on the one hand, you can splash to your heart's content and find yourself near the water surface, as if you are swimming or, although you are sitting on the footbridge, dangling your feet in the water, it is closer than usual in the city. On the other hand, if you look from the outside, it seems that a person is walking up to his chest in water - also a kind of attraction for passers-by, or, more precisely, a change of point of view from the banal to the unusual, ostran I which, as Viktor Shklovsky said. Perhaps this is one of the most interesting features of the park: now it is important to offer something not quite ordinary, bridges are especially active in this role, starting with the half-bridge in Zaryadye. But the deepened bridge in the pond seems to be an innovation for Russia.
Nearby, there will be a summer theater with an installation that can serve as both a theatrical scenery and a media exhibition. Nearby is a hostel for students, including those studying modern park management. There are not enough qualified professionals in this area in the region, and the customer provided for the possibility of training employees. The summer theater, among other things, can be used as a lecture hall.
A light and music fountain was conceived on the square, turned, at the request of the customer, into an installation with a plan of Voronezh oriented to the cardinal points. In addition to an open urban space, an alley with shade-giving lindens, birches and maples should appear on the square - an expensive thing in our times, so the architects had to convince the customer of the need for each tree in the alley. “As landscape architects, life was ruined by Galitsky Park in Krasnodar,” says Mark Safronov. “Many people cite him as a cool example, but not everyone is ready to understand how big his budget is.”
The appearance in the program of the safari park, as well as the associated zone “barcode and summer festival”, was partly a forced measure. In the course of the work, it turned out that three underground pipes with a diameter of 160 cm were laid along the territory of the park, supplying the entire Voronezh with drinking water. Their security zone must be constantly available for emergency services - you can plant flowers, but you cannot build anything capital. Therefore, under the shading there are pipes, in the neighborhood is the territory of the flower festival. Plants are temporary, unpretentious, and the name "Lunar Garden" comes from the basic colors - white and green. But the flowers can be constantly changed, so this area will become the most unpredictable in the park. Safari Park - these are animal sculptures; they are also planned to be changed from time to time. The embankment zone is separated from the safari park by tall grass, and there are also hidden areas with sculptures - this is one of the ways to saturate the park with events: walking, you discover new compositions.
In the second stage of construction next to the park, a farmer's market is planned - a representative of the typology that is current in our time trends of anti-globalism both in Europe and in Russia (by the way, Mark Safronov also participated in the competition for the reconstruction of the Moscow Danilovsky market). After all, there is such a market in Yasno-Polye, and now there will be one in Voronezh. The covering of the square in front of the market will smoothly transition into the wall and then into the roof, keeping the diamond pattern.
But the main role of the park is precisely the city-forming one. Voronezh is dynamically developing and energetically being built up, and the GRAD park is not in vain named that way - it should become the nucleus, the starting point for the development of the territory around which the new city "Solnechny" is planned. For large cities, the emergence of local centers is important, drawing attention away from the historical part and providing satellites with a full-fledged social life. And it's good when the territories of such centers begin to form in advance, and not after the fact.
