In our time, many stadiums are being built, similar to giant bubbles, nuts, flying saucers or caravels - lattice structures of supports covered with "sails". The FC Krasnodar stadium, built in three years, 2013–2016, not far from the center of this southern city, is not like that for the club of the same name. It resembles the Colosseum, and was nicknamed so during the construction period. And it represents the clearest example of traditionalism in the construction of sports facilities - a new incarnation of Art Deco, building links between the Roman arenas of the early Common Era, respectable projects of the 1930s, such as, for example, the Olympic Stadium, built in Berlin by the project of the architect Werner Mark in 1936 - and the experiments of our time. In the kaleidoscope of searches for the actual form, such traditional stadiums occupy a special place: they stand firmly on their feet, staring at eternity.
The oval volume of the building is strict and closed, the rhythm of the fluted pylons does not change throughout the entire length of the facade, the openings between them are closed with strips of metal plates, completely masking the internal structures. Everything is very strict - compared to the new building in Krasnodar, the above-mentioned Berlin stadium seems to be a free improvisation. For example, the outer bypass gallery in the Berlin stadium is open and blown out - in Krasnodar, the pylons are more frequent, the gaps between them are covered with glass - as if the building was wearing dark glasses. The collection of the refined classics, known to us from the architecture of the 1930s, in this case is brought to some other about the largest, seemingly unattainable maximum. Paradoxically, in this case, the novelty and modernity - belonging to our time - lie in the maximum discipline of form, exclusively straight lines, flat surfaces, ideal "drill training" of architecture. The building is super-, and maybe even hyper-classic, closed in the stereometry of the archetype of the antique arena. Approaching such a facade, you yourself somehow begin to check if there are any torn off buttons and if your shoes are clean.
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zooming 1/7 Interiors of FC Krasnodar Photo © Mikhail Chekalov, project © Maxim Rymar archistudio
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zooming 2/7 Interiors of FC Krasnodar Photo © Mikhail Chekalov, project © Maxim Rymar archistudio
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zooming 3/7 Interiors of FC Krasnodar Photo © Mikhail Chekalov, project © Maxim Rymar archistudio
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zooming 4/7 Interiors of FC Krasnodar Photo © Mikhail Chekalov, project © Maxim Rymar archistudio
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zooming 5/7 Interiors of FC Krasnodar Photo © Mikhail Chekalov, project © Maxim Rymar archistudio
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zooming 6/7 Interiors of FC Krasnodar Photo © Mikhail Chekalov, project © Maxim Rymar archistudio
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zooming 7/7 Interiors of FC Krasnodar Photo © Mikhail Chekalov, project © Maxim Rymar archistudio
One would expect a literal continuation of the theme "dictated" by the façade in the interior of the stadium's public areas - a vast space that includes changing rooms and a spa complex for players, a conference room for announcing the results of games, a mixt-area where interviews are usually given and which serves as the hallmark of the stadium, VIP-boxes, cafes, and other spaces needed by players, spectators and journalists. One can easily imagine how a theme set from the outside develops inside, making the stadium a classic "to the bone."
But no. In front of the St. Petersburg architect
Maxim Rymar set the task to create a cutting-edge interior, reflecting the strength and technicality of modern sports, as well as figuratively embodying the team's symbols, so that the logo does not repeat itself obtrusively, but is “dissolved” in space, color and texture.“Modern football is a very technical sport,” emphasizes the architect, “this applies to both the perfect practice of techniques and the technique of shooting and showing competitions.” In addition, the Krasnodar club itself has become one of the symbols of rapid progress in sports - if only because it is dynamically developing and has entered the Premier League in a few years.
So, the imagery of the interiors is based on the three corporate colors of the Krasnodar team: black, green and white. White is found on the ceiling and floor, in the spa area and in the guest locker rooms, which are required by FIFA to be neutral for the psychological comfort of the guests.
The leitmotif and the main emotional component was the black acrylic stone HI-MACS® Black S022, effectively underlined by the lines of green LED backlighting. Black walls bend in places, become matte, then shiny, varying texture and shape. The approach is quite bold: black is loved by designers and almost guarantees the notorious "stylishness", but requires a careful approach, since it absorbs light, reduces space and makes it play on contrasts. Here, it is black that is responsible for the futuristic image - the similarity of the interiors with some kind of modern device, more precisely, a fashionable device, an example of technology, with all its being directed towards the future. Take, for example, the dressing room of the host club: a wall covered with embossed horizontal stripes leads inside, among which, at hand level, is a luminous green thread, as if a guiding line. In the corner, the wall turns smoothly, and it seems that it itself directs the athletes to their "home". Looks like a spaceship corridor with a nav line; every now and then you wait for weightlessness. The wall goes inside, here the sportsmen's wardrobes are the same striped and black, above the black table in the even milky-white glow of the ceiling a circular ventilation insert repeating its shape "hovers". Everything looks like a well-coordinated mechanism, an automated space, whose laconicism is deceiving, since the walls can be lit up by media screens at any moment.
A contrasting but essentially the same impression is produced by the SPA center with a Jacuzzi made of white acrylic stone HI-MACS® Alpine White S028 with illuminated - shining - steps. Perfect whiteness and absolute blackness create two graphic poles. “The use of artificial materials and the laconic-futuristic imagery of the spaces in the lower tiers were a deliberate, key decision,” explains Maxim Rymar. Here, where athletes relax and train, everything around convinces them that they are superheroes in an unusual space. And the green line leads them to victory. Thus, a new semantic core arose in the lower tiers - a counterbalance to the solution of stone facades.
The interaction of two themes: classics and futurism, has become the main plot of public spaces, a space intermediate between the outer facade, which represents the arena for the city and the inner one - the field and stands, where everyone has no time for architecture. So it is not surprising that the plastic dialogue between the external and the internal, old and new, unfolded here. In addition, a designer performance, which is necessary to resolve a thematic contradiction, is capable of entertaining the audience at the same time.
It should be emphasized here that one of the most important components of the traditionalism of the facade of our neo-Colosseum is the facing material. Noble fawn and spongy travertine, the stone from which many buildings of ancient, Renaissance and Mussolinian Rome were built. Favorably different from the Jurassic limestone in a more porous and lively texture, and served in such a way that the building seems not to be faced, but hewn out of stone.
Understanding the significance of the material in the building design, Maxim Rymar turns it into a starting point for plastic dialogue. “In the inner corridors of the VIP boxes, one wall is made of roughly chipped travertine,” says the architect. - It is placed under glass, as if there is a brutal core, powerful, wild, and it is museumified. The rough stone fur coat contrasts with the smooth facade, and the stone found in the interiors is subject to a kind of stretch, it is either embossed or smooth, which allows you to form a gradual transition and not lose the theme set in the external appearance of the building, consistently lead it through the interior to the very its "core". The authors of the gmp architects project positively assessed our approach as developing the concept of the building. " The method of imputed history, a pseudo-exhibit, which is relevant in our time, really works, attracts attention. And although the walls-showcases gravitate towards the VIP-boxes, from some galleries, in particular from the entrance, they can be seen. The stone is illuminated with oblique light and is diagonally divided into square blocks, which serves as another hint of the club's emblem, which, among other things, features a chessboard.
Then it was required to form the very "stretch", the sequential intersection of materials. And here the main character was the stone: natural beige travertine and artificial black HI-MACS® acrylic. If in the lower zones the main contrast is black and white, then there are two stones, one from the past, the other from the future. They are found in different combinations: sometimes one side of the pillar can be limestone, the other black. Or travertine floor can be, and black wall, reception or bar counter.
But the main episode of the interaction of the two types of stone is the oval supports, part of the supporting frame of the building, which are quite large and are found everywhere. Their shape has a rigid geometric foundation: a parallelepiped with ends rounded along a compass. For these columns, Maxim Rymar proposed a symbolic motif - an ornament of hexahedron recesses, similar to the net of a football goal and partly on the line of seams of leather balls.
The main advantage of the proposed design, in addition to being thematic, is well suited for both black and travertine columns. The supports are the same in terms of volume and relief, but not material, which serves for a very subtle but clear indication of phenotypic kinship in its own way and makes it possible to build a dialogue-comparison. We are so different, but we are similar, - the columns-sculptures repeat to us, emphasizing the key counterpost of the internal space. The columns seem to pass the baton of relief from material to material, gradually introducing it into the genocode of both black and beige walls, since we meet not only columns, but also travertine niches with a hexagonal relief, and black walls with the same ornament.
The differences are emphasized by the illumination: the longitudinal joints of the black columns shine green - as if they were “activated” just about either falling into two halves, or joining completely. To make the luminous strip quite bright and deep, it was necessary to tint its background and highlight it by placing diodes along the edge of the line on the inner surface of the black platinum.
The travertine, starting from the rough relief of the fur coat, receives a white backlight - light rays emphasize the relief and provoke touch, to compare the neat man-made notches of the hexagons with the natural holes of the stone. On the other hand, at the top, the white backlight looks like a heat seam - as if the pillars crash into the ceiling and melt it. Black relief, on the other hand, reacts hypnotically to oblique light: a regular ornament is perceived as a bewitchingly correct trace of a machine cutter - without a natural "backing" it especially feels the correctness of the lines.
“The solution required a lot of research and testing,” says Sergei Prokopenko, head of Acryl Group, the company that supplied and processed all of the HI-MACS® in this project. - At our production facility in Rostov-on-Don, large and high-precision molds were created for thermoforming large sheets of artificial stone (3.68 x 0.76 m).
Then, by heating the acrylic stone in a large-format heater, the sheets were formed into the required shape using a membrane press. After that, a drawing was applied to the outer surface of the blanks - by milling using five-axis CNC machines. No other company that participated in the tender was able to offer a high-quality design in combination with a curved surface. In addition, we selected a transparent matting coating for the surface: it allowed us to achieve an even texture and emphasize the relief."
About 6,000 square meters of acrylic stone were used in the stadium building. At the time of completion, in 2016, it was the largest order for both the Russian representative office of LG Hausys and the Acryl Group of Companies.
Artificial acrylic stone lends itself to both cutting and milling, and thermoforming: it can be bent using a membrane or pneumatic press at a temperature of 160 °. Chemical bonding with special glue allows for a visually seamless surface. “LG Hausys now supplies about 1 million sheets of HI-MACS® artificial stone a year all over the world. Until recently, unfortunately, there have been few interesting Russian objects involving large-scale use of this material. The interior of the FC Krasnodar stadium is one of the first such projects, and now their number is growing,”says Viktor Voropaev, head of the artificial stone department at HI-MACS in Russia.
“Almost all elements are unique,” says Sergei Prokopenko, “Acryl Group prepared a large amount of technical and working documentation, we worked on calculations, assembly drawings and visualizations, constantly coordinating them with the customer. All this is done in an extremely tight schedule. Parts of the project changed in the course of implementation, assignments were given in portions. The project involved many of the company's full-time employees from five different cities, as the GC has five production bases.
The urgency and frequent changes in the details of the idea demanded the mobilization of all the forces of the production company. To speed up work in production, a mini-conveyor was created between work centers. The material was processed in three shifts, the CNC machines were not turned off. Considerable difficulties were associated with the installation: for work in the cold season, the unfinished premises had to be heated, constructing additional temporary structures.
Meanwhile, the group of companies "Acryl", closely cooperating with the general contractor for the construction of the stadium, a Turkish company Esta Construction, completed many related tasks for the stadium. In particular, they also worked on the structures of frame and veneered furniture, made showcases, mounted subsystems of columns and ceilings, made decorative and structural elements of stainless steel and lighting. ***
One of the features of the mesh pattern of the columns is its carpet atectonicity, the absence of a developed top and bottom. Than it is successfully combined with "space" black. But the universal symmetry of the hexagon is not alien to classical art, so that on travertine the drawing looks classic, and on acrylic it looks bionic-neo-modern. It would seem that, having found the optimum in the form of a grid, it would be possible to completely abandon the response to the flutes that are actively present on the facade.
But no. The author largely abandoned the emphasized tectonicity, but not the reception of repeating stripes given by the façade. They got two incarnations: in the vertical shading of bright yellow oak lamellas, smoothly flowing around the walls of the cafe and the support - and in the already mentioned horizontal stripes of black HI-MACS® stone: in the dressing rooms and in the respawn counter. Wooden stripes echo with flutes, building an elegant rhythm of thin verticals, emphasized by an oak texture that is comfortable for the eye. Black stripes are opposite, they are not comfort, but the impulse and flow of demanding modernity. Meanwhile, being present in the interior together, they not only resonate with the facade, but also create a certain balance, picked up by steel slats above the main entrance. They are lined up with the same frequency and rhythm, but they allow themselves both verticals - above the doors, and horizontal, on the ceiling. However, both of them are somewhat blurred by the wavy reflections of spotlights-"studs", forming a slender checkerboard plane of light above the heads of those entering.
The metal in the conference room behaves a little differently, it is matte and barely shines. Here, the black stripes, for the only time, turn into flutes, working on the slenderness of the columns and the severity of the background behind the stage. Travertine in the responsible place of the announcement of the results of the games also behaves unusual: it bends like a living wave, like a curtain.
So, a difficult task gave rise to an emotionally tense interior filled with color, texture and light juxtapositions and counterpoints. There is not unity and struggle here, but some downright whirlwind of opposites - it can hardly be pacified by strict geometry and uniform alternation of mise-en-scenes. Which is probably adequate to the mood of any football match. Emotional turbulence is equally characteristic of both big sport and the confrontation between classics and futurism.
But it is interesting that the result, the expensive and complex modern interior of the FC Krasnodar stadium, is perceived primarily through the prism of modern cinema. Either the corridor will remind you of Solaris, or the black stone will seem like a dragon's glass, or the harsh changes in color and light will remind you of a “distant, distant galaxy”.
Perhaps the most important link here is Star Wars. On the one hand, the comparison is likely to help the players feel truly invincible. In the famous film, the juxtapositions of the forms that we are used to associating with the future and the architecture of the classical direction are precisely lined up. Probably this is the best in modern cinema, the most lively and developed, an example of such a combination of opposite, from the point of view of plasticity, things: traditional archetypes, for example, the Senate hall, the palace or the same arena - with the streamlined metal of ships and robots. Which, in turn, was invented there so well that it was entrenched in the minds of several generations. Even now, the black columns of the mixt-zone lined up in a row with strokes of green illumination seem like robotic soldiers: they are about to begin to move and levitate along the lines drawn with white light on the ceiling and black mosaic on the floor.
The film is also important because Star Wars began filming in the 1970s and the source of their world was the futurism of the sixties that was established by that time. So in the interior of the stadium we find many examples of "classic" modernism and futurism. For example, the shape of the columns is not oval, but rectangular with rounded ends, with accented seams of panels and their illumination - not everywhere, but only along the axis - from this area. The columns do not branch, bend or even tilt, their shape is predictable. No extremes "in the spirit of Zaha Hadid" are observed: the author, with all the acuteness of color and texture comparisons, in terms of constructing volumes, keeps himself within strict limits, does not allow extremes. The row of wooden slats of the cafe resembles a sliding curtain of a sixties cabinet along curved guides. The retrofuturistic roll call reminds us that the dream of the future, like the Colosseum, already has its own history.
Dominating the interiors of the stadium, Euclidean geometry helps to build a logical dialogue with the very strict forms of the building. What must be recognized as the right decision - walking along the edge of the abyss, and this is how the dialogue of black acrylic and travertine is perceived - it is important to take care of common sense and iron logic. Since they become the basis that allows not only to collide, but also to reconcile opposites - which, in fact, is the essence of art.
