The eight-story parallelepiped building with three underground levels has a rectangular plan and is designed in accordance with the recommendations of the hotel operator Accor, which manages the Novotel chain. The main floors are internally grouped around an elongated staircase-elevator hall, the rooms are lined up along the long facades, west and east, as well as along the north end - this is done to avoid the window-in-window look at the corner with the residential building "Chocolate", which however, by a fortunate coincidence, they are present there only in the northern part.
The building fills a gap in the red line of the Zemlyanoy Val, thereby restoring the development front, fitting into the rhythmic alternation of two-storey old Moscow houses and higher buildings, of which one is the Taganka Theater on the left, and the 1910s tenement house on the right.
And if the brand book of the hotel operator makes the internal structure of the building rather predictable, then the frequent and light vertically oriented grid of light stone forming the facades, as well as the three-part division into the basement, the middle and the attic, fits the hotel into the context of modern latent classics, which is quite expensive thanks to glass and stone, but appropriate for the historical setting.
Meanwhile, the building is still being built in the center, in an iconic place, in full view of pedestrians and cars on the never-resting track of the Garden Ring. Which implied not only delicacy, but also the search for a solution, to some extent noticeable. So in the process of searching, the architects considered many options, trying to emphasize both the northeastern corner, clearly visible from a distance and successfully shaded by the square of a small square in front of it, and the main entrance to the lobby, on the left side of the street facade, closer to the metro.
The context was also considered, primarily of existing buildings - the Taganka Theater, a recognized masterpiece of brutalism by architects Alexander Anisimov, Yuri Gnedovsky and Boris Tarantsev, Yuri Grigoryan's Shokolad residential complex and neighboring two-story houses of the 19th century. But also - and a still unrealized project
SEC Alexey Ginzburg on the opposite side of the Garden Ring.
The main version, proposed by Pavel Andreev, was built on a contrasting combination of two materials - a dark "middle" and a light L-shaped half-frame, separated by glass stripes, outlining the main corner. Or vice versa, a light middle and a dark frame. The building was interpreted as two-part: as if the six-story volume was covered with a large console on a support - this solution can be called one of Pavel Andreev's favorites, take at least the giant hinge console in the Vladimirskie Vorota business center project, which was later renamed Gold, or the project for the Refrigerator on Dubininskaya street. But the form also echoes the Taganka Theater, where at the intersection of the new building with a number of old houses, a brick strip-mass hangs over the decorative portico and pediment.
The second theme - accentuating the entrance, was solved as follows: two public lower floors, in the first lobby and a restaurant, in the second meeting rooms, inside are united by a staircase, and outside, visually - with a glass stained-glass window, cut obliquely towards the theater, but covered by a row of thin pylons forming a thin triangle of a loggia in front of the entrance. Its curtain rod visually continues the line of the top of the neighboring two-story house, and with an acute angle the loggia faces the stairs, into which Pavel Andreev turned the sidewalk slope with a three-meter difference in height.
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zooming 1/11 Hotel on the street. Earthworks. Facade option © Architectural studio "GRAN"
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zooming 2/11 Hotel on the street. Earthworks. Fragment of the facade © Architectural studio "GRAN"
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zooming 3/11 Hotel on the street. Earthworks. Master plan © Architectural studio "GRAN"
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zooming 4/11 Hotel on the street. Earthworks. Situational plan © Architectural studio "GRAN"
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zooming 5/11 Hotel on the street. Earthworks. Scheme of the plan of -1 and -2 floors © Architectural studio "GRAN"
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zooming 6/11 Hotel on the street. Earthworks. Scheme of the plan of the basement and first floors © Architectural studio "GRAN"
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zooming 7/11 Hotel on the street. Earthworks. Scheme of the plan of the standard and 7 floors © Architectural studio "GRAN"
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zooming 8/11 Hotel on the street. Earthworks. Scheme of the plan of the standard and 8 floors © Architectural studio "GRAN"
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zooming 9/11 Hotel on the street. Earthworks. Sections © Architectural studio "GRAN"
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zooming 10/11 Hotel on the street. Earthworks. Facades © Architectural studio "GRAN"
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zooming 11/11 Hotel on the street. Earthworks. Facades © Architectural studio "GRAN"
In the final author's versions of the project, the rotation of the plane of the first floors found a response in the central part of the facade - a hi-tech turned, on a number of round metal columns the projection-bay window created the impression of opening the volume like a puzzle box, where when one key was pressed, the rest of the mechanism began to move. It is easy to see that the turn of the plane not only enlivened the plastic and added plot motivation to the bevel of the line of the first floors, but also echoed the ruffled bay windows of the Taganka theater - their triangular protrusions make up perhaps the most recognizable feature of the Anisimov-Gnedovsky-Tarantsev building.
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zooming 1/4 Hotel on the street. Earthworks. Facade option © Architectural studio "GRAN"
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zooming 2/4 Hotel on the street. Earthworks. Facade option © Architectural studio "GRAN"
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zooming 3/4 Hotel on the street. Earthworks. Facade option © Architectural studio "GRAN"
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zooming 4/4 Hotel on the street. Earthworks. Facade option © Architectural studio "GRAN"
Meanwhile, the arch council proposed to “calm down” the project by bringing the contrasting parts to one light shade, and the ledge to a plane, which made the building much more neutral: from the L-shaped “console” there was only a thin glass vertical, emphasizing the inscription with the name of the hotel, and from the turning of the planes - the bevel of the entrance-loggia in the first tier. Columns made of metal turned stone and acquired a square cross-section, hi-tech dissolved. The building now holds the red line much stronger, but it is unclear whether this is good or bad. The project itself has definitely lost some of its expressiveness; whether Wednesday won is hard to say. But the question remains, if not the legitimacy, then the correctness of the Khudsovetovsky invasion of fellow architects and collective editing as such. Who should make the decisions: the customer? Author? Or a council? And who, as a consequence, should take on the primary responsibility? Will the idea remain solid after all the advice and meetings? In our practice, the answer to this question so far depends rather on a coincidence of random circumstances.
