The Sportpark project was created by the architects of the ASADOV bureau for the City on the Tushino River-2018 - a residential complex on the site of the Tushino airfield, inscribed in the peninsula between the Moskva River, the Moscow Canal and the Skhodnya River. The area arose around the Otkritie Arena stadium, the home base of the Spartak football club, built in 2014 by the club's owner, Leonid Fedun. The city authorities initially approved not only the residential, but also the sports orientation of the complex. The developer "Tushino-2018" was supposed to realize here and transfer to the city several sports facilities, for which he held a closed tender, in which he invited the team of the Asadovs. The ASADOV bureau project did not win, but a beautiful, universal idea for the future architecture was born.
The site is a quadrangle of irregular shape, located between a park area with a stadium and future residential buildings. It had to accommodate a water sports complex, tennis courts, an ice arena and a multifunctional gym. The architects placed four glass volumes in the space, and then decided to combine them with a single roof-pergola - a wood-glued mega-structure located at the height of the playing field. There are several entrances to the megastructure. A partially covered area is formed on the sloping side in front of the entrance.
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zooming 1/4 Multifunctional sports complex "Sportpark" © Architectural bureau ASADOV
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zooming 2/4 Multifunctional sports complex "Sportpark" © Architectural bureau ASADOV
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zooming 3/4 Multifunctional sports complex "Sportpark" © Architectural bureau ASADOV
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zooming 4/4 Multifunctional sports complex "Sportpark" © Architectural bureau ASADOV
In the center there is an ice rink, framed by pedestrian galleries, on the right there are swimming pools, on the left - courts and sports complex. A wooden pergola can be either open or closed with glass. Under this "sky", as Andrei Asadov calls it, one can not only play sports, but also walk along the inner streets formed by low pavilions, the silhouette of which resembles the streets of an old northern European city - the archetype of a traditional street is strong in culture and, as it turned out, does not contradict sports futurism.
At the human level, it looks like a town of small houses with pitched roofs, with roofs of different heights, sharper or flatter - the silhouette can be anything, since it is under the common "sky". The facades of the houses are either completely transparent, including the pediment, or deaf, or with a stained-glass window - in all cases, the plastic is modernist, and not a traditional wall with windows. Inside there are changing rooms, technical rooms, commercial infrastructure. Similar "houses" with gable roofs, but without one wall, also cover the stands around the rink.
Tall glass partitions with wooden vertical bindings are cut into the houses, this gives the impression that this is a town in a pine forest, and the pergola casts shadows as if from tree branches. Glass and thin "pines" reach the "sky" and separate the interior from the street, at the same time connecting with it: the town is perceived as its continuation, the streets enter directly under the pergola.
Glass is a border that does not exist. The town is either internal or external, ambivalent space. It was assumed that in the evening the Sports Park would glow with a warm light. Inside, a person would see the cityscape behind glass, and at the same time be protected from the elements.
Not that these techniques were not used before in shopping malls, train stations, markets (where there is also a combination of small volumes and megastructures covering them), but here they are combined with wood and gable roofs. Moreover, a wooden pergola - openwork, knitted, with an emphasized uneven edge - has become a thing of an urban scale here.
The architects of the bureau ASADOV have turned to wooden architecture before (“we love wooden buildings,” says Andrey Asadov). IN
the tennis center in Kuntsevo, the entrance area was made of wood-glued structures. After that, there was a sports complex in Zhukovka-XXI with triangular flying roofs, covered with wood. When asked about the fire safety of a wooden structure, Andrei Asadov notes that a properly processed tree retains its bearing capacity for many hours after the start of a fire, in contrast to metal, which loses it in an hour and a half. As for the price, a wooden structure is often no more expensive than a metal one. “All our elements are functional,” Andrei Asadov emphasizes, “just the structure of the main roof, which in one way or another had to be built, we made wooden, and the interior premises, which were still needed, we preferred to decorate not with simple boxes, but with houses silhouette. Perhaps, in terms of economics, our solution seemed exclusive to the customer. Our project did not win, but we really like it. There is a strong universal idea in stock. It will come in handy in the future."
Usually sports facilities, if they are not intended for the Olympics or the World Cup, are doomed to be hangars. The fact that we managed to get away from the boxes is a great achievement and a groundwork for the future. The image has become softer, more environmentally friendly. A wooden pergola is a universal "sky" for a town or village under it, whatever is there. In our climate, moving between houses without going outside and without getting your shoes dirty is a pleasant opportunity. The pergola should have been clearly visible from the upper floors and could become the fifth facade. The weaving of the pergola is varied and changes like a pattern on a sweater: laconic slats are preserved over pedestrian galleries, and over sports facilities the pattern becomes dense and intricate. This was done not only for the sake of decor, but also for the sake of functionality: at the request of the customer, the architects reduced the glazing area by means of skylights, giving them a triangular shape.
Now about the formal context of the Sports Park. The mega-structure that hides the inner streets is a city within a building. A city within a building is a modern architectural form, distinct from a traditional palace or a classical ensemble with their organic symmetry. Freer, like a real city, containing a kaleidoscope of forms, but human-readable "fabric" with streets and buildings, united by a common "sky" or other large form, which has a beginning and an end. Such megastructures are found, for example, in Skolkovo (at Herzog and de Meuron - in the University building, at Valoda and Pistra in the Technopark), in exhibition architecture, for example, in the Milanese fair of Fuksas. And wooden nets can be found in park and greenhouse architecture, for example, in the glass-and-wood "Parthenon" in the Citroen Park in Paris. In the Sports Park for Tushino, everything is combined in a wonderful way: large, technological objects, complex urban structure and delicate wooden architecture.
The glass-wood mesh - and, in fact, both the pergola and the walls "with pines" are exactly like that - this is a completely natural image. If we talk about imitating natural elements, then glass in architecture is likened to water or air. And the tree itself is nature, it plays by itself. Plants in tubs add similarities to a greenhouse, park pavilion. The image of ecological architecture can be expressed in different ways: in vertical gardens on the façade, or in burying a building into a green hill. The town under the openwork wooden pergola is another convincing and promising image of green architecture. Ecology is one of the dominant ideologies in the world. Some thinkers like Noah Harari even believe that nature displaces man, becoming the center of the universe, and the world becomes nature-centered, and not anthropocentric, as it has been since the Renaissance. The revenge of nature for the violence against it in past centuries leads to a kind of bias in the opposite direction, ecological "fascism". In this sense, it is important that the archetypal houses with pitched roofs in the Sportpark project are agents of a person, his scale, thinking and perception. It's more harmonious.
