The project for the development of the territory east of Novaya Bashilovka, west of the Dynamo Park, appeared in the middle of the 2000s - then, at the initiative of the stadium management on a site of about 7 hectares, the contours of which resemble an asymmetric torch expanding from the intersection with the Third Ring towards Nizhnyaya Maslovka, build an IFC, consisting mainly of offices. At that time, several workshops were working on project proposals, but a significant number of options were made by the architects of TPO "Reserve": various shapes and densities, among others - a large zigzag of a volumetric meander that filled the entire territory like a labyrinth. There were a lot of other options (a few illustrations can be found here). However, after the 2008 crisis, the Dynamo management lost the right to manage the territory, which passed to the investor, VTB Bank, the stadium was named VTB-Arena, and the buildings around it became known as VTB Arena Park. The function from a predominantly office environment was replaced by a predominantly residential and hotel one, and the density, I must say, compared with the previous project, has been reduced by about half, to 400 thousand m2, the project as a whole has declined. SPEECH received the status of general designer, but the architects divided the design of the volumes approximately in half, alternating different options within the framework of the general design code, which implies internal streets, courtyards in the residential part without cars, spatial interaction with the park and facades of light limestone.
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zooming 1/5 VTB Arena Park multifunctional complex © SPEECH
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zooming 2/5 VTB Arena Park multifunctional complex © SPEECH
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zooming 3/5 VTB Arena Park multifunctional complex © SPEECH
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zooming 4/5 VTB Arena Park multifunctional complex © SPEECH
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zooming 5/5 VTB Arena Park multifunctional complex © SPEECH
Construction, I must say, did not develop so quickly: for several years, residents of Moscow, constantly driving here along the Third Ring, had the opportunity to observe the growth of concrete frames and their gradual facing. Now the construction of the complex has accelerated, it is more than half ready. In the fall of 2017, the buildings of the 5 * hotel and the Hyatt Regency apart-hotel, designed by SPEECH architects, were opened, in the summer of 2018 - the next row of three office buildings to the north, between two transverse avenues. The construction of the Arena Park residential complex continues on the next pentagonal plot, three of its houses, along the western contour of the plot, were commissioned this spring. Five U-shaped buildings here are reserved for apartments, one corner, almost square in plan and facing the TTK - office. Everything - hotels, offices and housing - is located on a common spot of a two-storey parking lot.
We got used to the Arena Park, due to the fact that it is located on one of the most prominent places in Moscow, the intersection of the TTK with Leningradsky Prospekt, over the past 2-3 years it began to seem that it was always here. Meanwhile, several topics are connected with it: the growth of the scale of Moscow development, the sensations arising inside and the architectural one itself - two "hands" playing one plastic part. The complex is expensive, the facades are stone, the architects were able to afford quite resource-intensive solutions here, work with material and form.
Growth time
The altitude has definitely increased. Moscow is growing upward quickly and decisively, behind Leningradka to the south - Tsarskaya Ploshchad residential complex by SPEECH bureau, up to 19 floors, opposite the masterpiece of Moscow modernism, Andrei Meerson's House on Legs, 14 floors plus supports. In the future, the Nordstar business center, 42 floors, a little further than the City. The city has grown, now the five-story buildings on the side of Marina Raskova Street, which by the way were not included in the renovation program, look like a pause, a blind spot.
Sergei Tchoban views Arena Park - the development along Bashilovka - primarily as an urban planning response, a group of volumes that counterbalance a large, though not quite tall, urban dominant - the building of the reconstructed Dynamo stadium. SPEECH architects developed a master plan for the entire Dynamo area, including the park and the stadium, and led the stadium reconstruction project, the first version of which was proposed by Erik Egeraat and then redesigned by David Manika.
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zooming VTB Arena Park: improvement Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming VTB Arena Park: improvement Photo: Archi.ru
“The stadium is a large and noticeable, somewhat“exalted”volume,” says Sergei Tchoban. - This kind of iconic architecture requires decent wings - a "corset" or "frame", but in the vicinity, on the contrary, there are many voids, "subsidence" of the building. In addition, the routes of Leningradsky Prospekt and the Third Transport Ring in this place are very wide, the distance between buildings on different sides of the avenue is almost 200 m, such spans also require architecture of a significant scale. In my opinion, now the houses of the Tsarskaya Ploshchad residential complex, on the one hand, and the Hyatt, on the other, do a good job of holding the intersection, they work like two “bastions” at the corners of the interchange. Perhaps the Hyatt could even be slightly taller. Their architecture, on the one hand, is background, restrained, and on the other, it is rich in details, which allows the human eye to perceive the facades better."
Quiet city
Surprisingly, despite the proximity of two noisy highways, the complex, if you move from the TTK to the backup and go inside, turns out to be quite quiet inside, probably due to the fact that the track is far enough, and between the buildings it is relatively calm, given the location of the site in overall, and a well-maintained town. It even has several ground parking lots. To the left, to the north, Dynamo Park, at the end, along the Leningradka flyover, a long Dynamo square, equipped as a result of the 2015 competition. In the summer there is perfect peace, only expensive cars with people in suits drive up and participants of some festivals, designed to diversify the five-star life, run by. Several restaurants were opened, one built an impressive terrace on the side of the park.
Sergei Tchoban considers one of the achievements of the 2010 project, in addition to halving the density of the previous project, the appearance of gaps between the buildings. Indeed, the zigzag-"snake" has gone, divided into separate buildings, between which appeared "lumbago" - caesura, in the direction of the park and the highway. One of the rays, between the houses in the western part of the residential complex, is directed to the center of the park.
Landscaping by modern Moscow standards is ordinary, although not cheap: grass, lighting, including those built into the paving, the rhythmic alternation of light beige and dark gray slabs responds to facades where limestone is adjacent to dark stone and glass. On a sunny day, some facades cast glare on the asphalt that rhymes with the pavement. Walking around and inside is quite pleasant and easy, perhaps due to the close proximity of the buildings - they generally managed to capture the scale of the historic city of the 18th – 19th centuries, emphasizing the typological similarity with the texture of natural stone. Such an image is now often voiced in advertising booklets, it has become a kind of byword, but it is not always possible to catch the right intonation. Here, perhaps, it worked out. Moreover, from the track it is not felt at all, it is necessary to take a walk inside.
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zooming VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency, entrance Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency, glass volume of the conference hall Photo: Archi.ru
Two pianists
Working together, delicately alternating volumes, SPEECH and Reserve played the same “card” as in Wine house and several other projects: some classicists, others modernists, some appeal to the archetypes of heritage, others do not destroy them, but lead to more daring, algebraic, fresh solutions. All this is within the framework of general respectability, the texture of dense white stone and glass, and even a similar color.
“The color of the stone in our buildings is lighter, almost white,” notes Vladimir Plotkin. Indeed, the stone is whiter here, and between the bodies there is a grisaille-watercolor play of shades, as if strokes, slightly different in tone, creating a barely noticeable, but possibly perceptible vibration at the level of the subcortex. Indeed, if everything was equally white or predictably beige, it would be more boring.
The stone - in the case of the Hyatt travertine building - was reinforced for the Russian environment. Russian winter is harmful to travertine, moisture in caverns freezes and can destroy them, damage the structure of the stone. The caverns were vacuum filled with resin and reinforced from an inconspicuous back.
Art Deco +
The first block of buildings completed, as we recall, in the fall of 2017 is the Hyatt hotel and apart-hotel, designed and built by SPEECH. Two buildings are built in a trapezoidal "rest", the wings are spread to the north, on the roof of a two-tier stylobate. Between the buildings there is a completely glass, almost mirrored, but rather large and weighty, two-tier passage with a wavy top and a conference center inside. It hangs over the entrances to the hotel - on the left, and to the apart-hotel on the right, forming a protection from the rain - a kind of massive "canopy" common to the two buildings; mirrored glass reflects the paving and captures additional light and alters the sense of space with mirrored ceilings and walls, playing with perspective.
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zooming 1/7 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov. Interior design: Ara design
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zooming 2/7 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov. Interior design: Ara design
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zooming 3/7 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov. Interior design: Ara design
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zooming 4/7 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov. Interior design: Ara design
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zooming 5/7 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov. Interior design: Ara design
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zooming 6/7 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov. Interior design: Ara design
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zooming 7/7 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov. Interior design: Ara design
In the glass section of the hotel entrance, one can clearly see the interior of the spacious lobby and the spectacular spiral staircase without additional supports - the axis of the entrance space, illuminated from above through the oval dome on the second floor.
“In our country, there are almost no new hotels with high entrance halls and clear space of public areas, often everything is cramped and confused. - says Sergei Tchoban. - I think we managed to fill this gap, create a high, representative space, where it is easy to navigate and understand where the conference room is and where the pool is. We brought all the technical structures upstairs, freed the hall from the lift shafts and connected the entire "backbone" of the building centrally into a system of enfilades, visible, opening one after another horizontally and vertically. It turned out quite impressively: the pool hangs over the entrance and is illuminated with natural light from above and from the ends, the entire swimming path received daylight, one of the views - to the "wave" of the conference hall. The fitness center has a gorgeous view of Leningradsky Prospekt, the bar on the top floor has a large terrace. Inside, the hotel does not look boring, but representative, ceremonial, which is important for hotels of this class and star rating. Not surprisingly, Hyatt hosted the 18th World Cup final."
The spectacular staircase of the hall (its interior and all public spaces were designed by Ara design) is surrounded by wide round columns, which are faced with stripes of marble that look like flutes - a technique known from the Moscow metro and American Art Deco.
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zooming 1/3 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov. Interior design: Ara design
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zooming 2/3 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov. Interior design: Ara design
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zooming 3/3 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov. Interior design: Ara design
The style of Art Deco, generalized and tuned to the perception of the 21st century, but quite recognizable, is subordinate to the appearance of both buildings, although they differ in nuances. A combination of stone, glass, thin bronze-golden metal frames, framing all the elements of the lower tier, and angular "eights" inserted into the frames of the windows of the upper tiers, work for the similarity. They are echoed by dark yellow vertical stripes between the windows, definitely reminiscent of flutes, and with “flutes” - friezes of horizontal stripes of stylobate, beige and black, evoking not classic, but retro-technogenic associations, reminiscent of design objects of the 1930s - 1960s -x, radios and hippie buses. The building turns out to be entirely subordinated to the scheme of vertical and horizontal stripes, which "hold" its volume quite rigidly, as part of a mechanism, flutes are associated here with the tracks of some conveyor - perhaps this is determined by the proximity of a road junction, because the closest neighbor of Hayat's facades is the Leningradka overpass … And the semicircular bay window at the corner of the TTK resembles not so much a constructivist "nose", for example, as in Shchusev's People's Commissariat for Land, as a turn of a mechanical tape or a hinge. A hint of classical architecture is so intertwined here in the imagery of a technical plan that they have grown together, it is even difficult to separate one from the other.
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zooming 1/9 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov
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zooming 2/9 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov
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zooming 3/9 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov
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zooming 4/9 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov
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zooming 5/9 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo: Archi.r
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zooming 6/9 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 7/9 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo: Archi.r
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zooming 8/9 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov
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zooming 9/9 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov
The upper tier of the first building is designed as a terrace under a large stone canopy, and some of the technical structures are designed as wide rounded stone pillars, reminiscent of both the traditional "steamboat chimneys" of the house-ship and the sculptural ventshafts of Le Corbusier's Marseilles unit. This form, if, of course, throw your head back and look at the top of the hotel, quite clearly appeals to the prototypes of classical modernism. In Andrei Meerson's "House-centipede" there are no such forms, but one can imagine that the volumes on the roof of Hayat echo his oval staircases-towers.
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zooming 1/3 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 2/3 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov
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zooming 3/3 VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov
The architects connected a rectangle and a circle in the shapes of the Hyatt buildings, - explains Sergei Tchoban, - a combination typical, according to the architect, of pre-Petrine architecture. The connection resulted in generally orthogonal, despite the trapezoidal expansion, volumes, and a strict grid of facades, as well as two semicircular bay windows that form the southern facade with the help of a symmetrical stereometric figure, somewhat reminiscent of a stretched expander. Note: The bay window visible in the Third Ring is not the only one, it has a pair on the opposite side. The combination of a rectangle and a circle also resulted in a streamlined rounded shape of the corners of volumes and pilasters - which makes the building look decorated, very solid, or even high-quality "hewn", like a good decoration or piece of jewelry - a feature inherent in Art Deco architecture and, possibly, which most clearly underlines the relationship of the Hyatt building with it.
The second body, the one that makes the first step into the site, is not so rigid with intertwining verticals and horizontals. A wall appears here, windows are horizontally united in pairs by shallow panels, flutes are outlined more subtly - associations with the "post-constructist" architecture of the 1930s are stronger here. Although the kinship of the buildings is obvious: it manifests itself in the general solution of the stylobate of two high public floors, decorated with blades of black stone, dividing wide, display-type windows with a bronze-metal frame, a wide frieze of striped stone encircling both buildings above the stylobate, as if they were tied with a ribbon … It must be said that the topic of "being tied with a ribbon" is important in this case, we will come across it in the future.
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zooming VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency Photo © Sergey Krotov
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zooming VTB Arena Park: Hyatt Regency, second building Photo: Archi.ru
Modernism
Two office buildings designed by Vladimir Plotkin occupy corner positions in the third line, flanking the third office building of SPEECH architects. And they demonstrate a different, in many respects opposite - as it was intended - to show two "hands" - an approach to form. In addition to the noticeably lighter, almost white, color - there are no rounded corners at all, all the corners are straight, in some places sharp. This is how the famous poems about the oval and the angle come to mind. The corners themselves are stone in the previous buildings, but here they are often opened with a corner window, and where the windows at the corners could not be made, niches-panels, denoting them, appear, marking the unity of the construction logic. Profiling is minimal, it is not there, no cuts, fillets, steps, panels.
Windows and piers alternate in a checkerboard pattern, but in the eastern building their height is one floor, the rhythm of the western facades unites two floors into tall slender ribbons, and here a thin horizontal shelf appears between the two-tiered ribbons, of the simplest contour, without profiling. The building seems to be composed, like the tomb of Hatshepsut, from pillars stacked on top of each other. Such experiments, with many pilonades, are known in modern architecture, they read the latent classics, but in a very laconic version.
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But the pilonads - not every one, but through one - they also experiment with the width of the openings, decreasing and increasing the openings in one direction and then in the other direction with a smooth gradient. By the method of associations, this construction resembles a metallophone, over which a hammer was held up and down - as a child, it always seemed to me that when the sounds were made at the same time, the keys changed slightly under the pressure of the hand. The tower also resembles the Jenga game, where you have to pull cubes out of the structure: the alternation of gradients gives the impression of stable instability, swing. If you twist your head, looking at him, he will be dizzy. The effect is organized by the op-art method: the interfloor lines, as a result, do not seem horizontal, as if the floors inside are "overwhelmed". But if you shake your head, the glamor passes, nevertheless, not all stripes are gradient, and through one, if each floor were such a gradient, the sensation would be, one must think, too strong.
The game is picked up by a pair of transparent "pergolas" lattices carved into the body of the building, at the bottom - as a corner gallery, at the top - as a framing of the terrace; and above the entrance in the second tier. Basically the same grid, but the volume is "taken out", and in the northwest, where the corner of the building is sharp due to the configuration of the site, it is removed, as if for the convenience of pedestrians, in order to "shortcut" the route. Not that this significantly reduces the path, but the very resulting feeling of relativity of mass, the absence of rigid predetermination is interesting - the volume is not a strict cube, something can be taken out of it: remember Jenga. Width gradients work for the same relativity, for the shade of instability. To some extent, the approach is the opposite of the solid, unbreakable symmetry of a 5-star, that is, a serious and respectably stable by definition, hotel. There - a double bass, bass and weighty, here - some kind of light clavichord or even a theme from "Alice in Wonderland", a book that, as you know, was written by a mathematician playing with linguistics. Corner cases appear as a kind of mathematical game, abstract enough so as not to cause any doubts among the superficial viewer, but gradually swaying, relieving the serious seriousness of neighbors, turning the stone - by sensation - into paper or plaster, materials for a logic game.
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Techniques, from a laconic grid to a cut or "taken out" corner, are found in the works of Vladimir Plotkin. Let us recall, for example, an office building on Krasin Street, where a gallery of the first floor is arranged using a cut method with a transparent lattice. And the game with smoothly variable width of the windows resembles the central projection of the Wine house. But the differences are also obvious: there was not even a trace of instability in the building on Krasin Street, perhaps just a little, to facilitate the whole. Here, figurative instability, openness on the verge of fragility of a thin tree in the wind, and several corners as if blown out by the wind, became the basis of the plot. Let's compare again with a hotel: it is not just very structured, detailed, stable, it is also repeatedly "tied" with horizontal stripes. The fragile volume of the Reserva hull is barely grasped by thin shelves and, as it seems, stands on the moral core of some kind of inner stubbornness.
The second, eastern, building of TPO "Reserve" uses the same principles, but there are more stone surfaces here, the checkerboard order is strictly observed - no optical rocking, the cutouts of the entrance loggias are more massive, the upper pergola is only outlined with black inserts. The surface is solid, there are no profiling at all, not even thin shelves. But the stone piers between the windows are surrounded by thin indents and look like dominoes, evenly lined up with an overlap around the windows, which is also anti-classic, because, although it does not hide, it masks, and therefore aesthetically ignores the interfloor horizontals. The body is heavier and more solid, its stereometry is more serious, the rules are stricter, although the chess rhythm of the windows is still opposed to the "classical" cage, in which it is customary to place windows one above the other.
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If the first building looked like an unstable structure of thin pilonades, then the second one was like a block of limestone, neatly hewn, with openings cut "along a line". Which is understandable - he presents his version of the complex to the city, to the cars driving along the ring, it should be simple, clear and “work” from a distance. And the slender, slender, waving western building faces the park, hence the differences in the interpretation of one theme.
Neoclassical or modern?
The SPEECH building, flanked by two Reserva towers, is sharply different. Finding themselves between minimalist propylaea, the authors went from Art Deco in depth and turned to Art Nouveau for support. Moreover, rather not even to the architecture of Art Nouveau at the beginning of the century, there is no direct similarity here, but to his poster and engraving, which made it possible to enlarge the form. Modern, as you know, was a total style that sought to capture all types of art and paid more attention to design, decoration, all kinds of wrappers and posters. For some, these are cute little things, but for style, it was a way to penetrate people's lives and commerce everywhere. What am I doing? - but to the fact that the middle case, if you think about it, looks like a gift box in pleated paper, tied with ornamental ribbons. The ribbons, I must say, are not even modern, but neoclassical: garlands with a laurel wreath relief remind of Max Klinger and also of a 1917 apartment building on Krasnoproletarskaya Street, a stone's throw from the SPEECH office, where they frame the entrances, there is a feeling that the architects are simply noticed them, walking past to work, and developed the theme, turning it into the main one and "crossing" with modernity due to the enlargement of the element.
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The garlands probably give rise to a double "bandage" of the body: they themselves are intertwined, and at the same time they encircle the building.
The "pleating" is very large - these are rows of triangular bay windows, one part made of stone, the other, wider, made of glass. The corners are rounded along a large diameter, their combination with wide flat verticals resembles the Sytin printing house "Utro Rossii" and the banking buildings of Kitai-gorod. But not quite: the zigzag tied with "ribbons", nevertheless, does not directly resemble any other building of Art Nouveau. A three-sided bay window could easily have appeared there, but a triangular one is unlikely. So, on the one hand, the similarity, and on the other, a rather high degree of generalization and defamiliarization, cause a rather unexpected effect on perception; it seems modern, which was turned like a whirligig, and its facades "went" clockwise - a feeling built approximately like the wall-curtain of Giulio Romano in Palazzo del Te, found by Mannerists and popular in modern architecture because it is associated with our idea of the dynamics of architecture, art based on static, but carried away by a hint of movement.
The further development of the theme in the houses of the residential complex follows the same principles, except that the tension of comparison is somewhat blurred - the “hands” and approaches differ markedly, and the material, proportions and composition are barely, which ensures integrity. The altitude rises to the north, and the composition, which began with the trapezoidal "peace" of the hotel, ends with a similar house with open wings, facing towards the wings of the hotel, that is, inside the territory. Four U-shaped houses-frames are opened to the common boulevard, but they also retain their own courtyards. "Reserve" adheres to a thin minimalistic lattice, reveals glass corners - SPEECH varies classic motives and ornaments.
There is one more peculiarity: with all the immanent difference of approaches, emphasized in the subtleties, the buildings are placed side by side, rather tightly, and in some things, in addition to similar material, they "interpenetrate". For example, you can recall that the zigzag facade in other cases is a favorite technique of Vladimir Plotkin, so it appears not only in the house-memories of Art Nouveau, but also in the entrance lobby of the Reserva building opposite - as if one building was imprinted in another. But in perception, reflections are also essential. The glasses here have a fairly high specular coefficient, of course they do not shine like a Christmas tree, but they reflect perfectly, and walking between buildings we see one of them in the glass of the other, which is quite interesting, especially where three different cases are placed side by side. One approach is literally superimposed on the other, and here it becomes obvious the importance of a single code, proportions and similar material, the presence of a certain common base. Note that the proximity of different facades within the framework of a close height and proportional structure is a feature of the historical city, but interaction through reflections is more of a modernist technique, which spread in the era of high-quality, and preferably well-washed, glass. In this case, we observe how this modernist principle penetrates into a complex built on the principles of new urbanism, helps to build relationships between different plastic approaches, scatters sunbeams around, forms a kind of new, in essence, conglomerate, a variant of the city, which is one definition: classic, modern - you can not describe. Which is right, there are at least two approaches here, both play at a good plastic level, and the themes enter into a dialogue on equal terms, even setting different paths for such a dialogue.
