The Moscow Concert Hall "Zaryadye", located in the natural landscape park of the same name, is a unique project and one of the best concert venues in the world.
The hall was inaugurated in 2018, on the City Day. In 2016, he received the Moscow Architectural Council Prize in the nomination "The best architectural and urban planning solution for a public object", and in 2019 he was included in the short-list of the WAF (World Architecture Festival) international festival.
Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS + R) from New York worked on the Zaryadye park project, and the concert hall was completely designed by Russian specialists under the leadership of the Chief Architect of TPO Reserve Vladimir Plotkin and the chief architect of Moscow Sergei Kuznetsov. The acoustics of the project was carried out by the world-class specialist Yasuhisa Toyota, the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev made an invaluable creative contribution to the project of the concert hall.
“In general, we actively use the latest software products, we try to be at the forefront in this area. For me personally, for my practice as an architect, this has always been relevant. I have always tried to use the latest software solutions, since the 2000s, when these products first began to appear on the market.
Now all the projects that I personally oversee in one way or another are done at the absolute peak of the technologies that are available at the moment. And this is bearing fruit - the Moscow Palace of Rhythmic Gymnastics is now on the cover of the latest version of ArchiCAD.
And the use of new technologies pays off. When we worked on the concert hall in Zaryadye, even our American colleagues admitted that this is one of the most technologically complex projects in their practice. Few have ever realized the concert hall, which is located under the park and the glass bark. Naturally, this is practically impossible without advanced technological capabilities.
If one breaks away from reality, then a lot can be realized. But in the end it all comes down to how exactly this or that project will be implemented. BIM technologies make it possible to consider not only the possibility of implementation, but also to keep track of terms, costs, a wide variety of technological issues - up to installation, revision and maintenance. It is possible to work without BIM technologies, but it is they that allow us to solve the issues of timing and cost.
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The authors of the Zaryadye Concert Hall spoke about the details of the project, which became the largest in the practice of TPO Rezerv and was carried out in the usual software environment for the bureau.
Moscow TPO "Reserve" was one of the first to actively use ARCHICAD in architectural practice.
“The company is now 32 years old, and 25 of them are with ARCHICAD,” says Vladimir Plotkin. - He is irreplaceable, I don't know anything better. Architects quickly adapt to it, it fits well with spatial thinking."
External architectural solution: glass "crust"
External architectural solutions were primarily subordinated to the location of the concert hall: it was supposed to be located in an artificially created hill in the park, fit into the landscape and become its organic part.
The building of the hall is covered with a hill, and the hill is covered with a translucent glass "crust" with solar panels, proposed by DS + R at the stage of the competition in 2013. A special microclimate has been created under the "bark", trees and herbaceous plants have been planted. In the space of the complex there is a walking area for park visitors and an amphitheater for 1,500 seats.
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zooming 1/4 Zaryadye Concert Hall. Section © TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 2/4 Zaryadye Concert Hall. Section © TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 3/4 Zaryadye Concert Hall. Section diagrams © TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 4/4 Zaryadye Concert Hall. Eastern facade © TPO "Reserve"
“The main attraction is the bark, which is both a part of the park and the second roof of the complex. We designed the roof and created its geometry. The glass "crust", and there is not a single repeating element, was designed in ARCHICAD ", comments Vladimir Plotkin.
Work on the "crust" was carried out in collaboration with American colleagues and the German company Transsolar, which was responsible for the microclimate under the glass roof. And, despite the fact that in the process of working on the project, the shape of the "bark" changed, and the entrance was located on the other side, the new concept was welcomed by the DS + R bureau. In order for the air to circulate in a certain way, the parameters of the "crust" were adjusted in accordance with the calculations of engineers from Germany. “There was no misunderstanding, the communication was friendly,” notes the chief architect of the Rezerv TPO.
Internal architectural solution: foyer and Great Hall
The total area of the complex is almost 24 thousand square meters. In addition to the "bark" roof, the concert hall and the park are connected by a foyer - high, light, airy.
“The lobby area has been made as transparent as possible - being on the street, you can watch the life that goes on inside the building. The main idea was to make the interior plastic work on the facade plastic. And so it happened. Even the slope of the floor in the foyer follows the relief of the street: there is a difference of the order of a meter or one and a half,”explains Vladimir Plotkin. And the floor of the foyer is paved with the same hexagonal tiles as in the Zaryadye park itself.
The building has four ground and two underground floors, two halls: the Big one for 1600 and the Small one for 400, plus a complex of artistic rooms.
A large hall must simultaneously meet several requirements: not only have excellent acoustics for classical music concerts, but also be able to accommodate modern projects of various genres. “In an acoustic hall, the surfaces in the stage area should be reflective, dense, there should be a ceiling. In the theater hall, the opposite is true: there is a stage box with mechanisms for changing the scenery,”explains Alexander Ponomarev, chief architect of the Great Hall project. As a result, solutions were found to adapt the stage space to any genre.
In addition to solutions related to the ceiling, the lower mechanization is an important element of the multi-genre hall. Thanks to the unique engineering equipment, in just 40 minutes, the parterre in the Great Hall is folded, turning into a flat floor. The orchestra pit has three positions: it can rise to the parterre plane and to the stage plane, and behind the stage there are blitchers - roll-out stands that can fold, expanding its space.
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zooming 1/3 Great Hall of the Zaryadye Concert Hall Photo: © A. Naroditsky
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zooming 2/3 Great Hall of the Zaryadye Concert Hall Photo: © A. Naroditsky
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zooming 3/3 Great Hall of the Zaryadye Concert Hall, view of the hall with full use of seats in the stalls Photo: © A. Naroditsky
All these transformations were visualized by means of ARCHICAD in the hall model.
“To show the different phases of transformation, we used layer combinations. A big plus of ARCHICAD is its flexibility,”notes Alexander Ponomarev.
He also draws attention to the fact that Rhino software was actively used in the design of the hall: “Sketches and detailed design were carried out in ARCHICAD. And curved surfaces - the hall is built on flowing biomorphic fluid forms - were modeled in Rhino and then imported. That is, the shell of the hall, which we now see, was modeled in Rhino. Monolith, walls, trusses are designed in ARCHICAD. Test simulation of acoustics took place in Rhino - it was a requirement of Yasuhisa Toyota and Nagata Acoustics."
Interestingly, in the original version of the project, the back wall of the Great Hall was completely glass: this way spectators could see Moscow, and park visitors could watch what was happening inside. But then it was decided to abandon the avant-garde solution - the glass violated the acoustics of the hall.
So behind the stage, instead of a transparent window, a media screen appeared, and instead of a glass wall, a giant - the largest in Europe - organ was installed, designed by the French organ firm Muhleisen specifically for the Great Hall, taking into account all the necessary parameters: volume, acoustics and architecture.
The production and assembly of the organ took two years, and it will take another six months to tune it - this is just a year less than the concert hall itself was designed and built!
Teamwork
According to Vladimir Plotkin, 20 people worked on the project in ARCHICAD Teamwork. The architectural team was divided into four groups: one was engaged in the shell of the complex, the "bark"; the other is a facade; the third is the design of the building, its interiors and technologies; the fourth - by the hall and the accompanying mechanization.
The carrier systems were executed in their own software in Novosibirsk: from there they sent a model that was integrated into ARCHICAD.
Algorithmic design
At the stage of decorating the hall, the team used the Grasshopper program. In this environment, the most random, non-repeating microrelief of the walls of the hall, which was required by acoustics specialists, was modeled. It was made of mahogany-shaped triangles of different widths, protruding forward triangles. All dies are different shapes, and their sequence is not repeated in the finish: “Making changes to the nest manually is incredibly difficult. We have algorithmized all this and managed to deliver the changes introduced by the acoustics on time, - says Alexander Ponomarev. "Then they passed on to Rhino and sent to production the blueprints from which the robot cut the dies."
With the help of Grasshopper, the designers analyzed the visibility from the hall: all the seats were imported into Grasshopper from ARCHICAD, a point of view was set above each and the lines of sight were projected onto the stage. “This way we got an excess over the one in front and knew where to change the incline to improve visibility. If something changed in ARCHICAD, they imported it into Grasshopper again and checked everything again."
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zooming 1/4 Wall decoration of the large hall Photo: © I. Ivanov
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zooming 2/4 Zaryadye Concert Hall. Acoustic finishing of the Great Hall, made in Rhino-Grasshopper and imported into ARCHICAD © TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 3/4 Zaryadye Concert Hall. Acoustic finishing of the Great Hall, made in Rhino-Grasshopper and imported into ARCHICAD © TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 4/4 Zaryadye Concert Hall. Acoustic finishing of the Great Hall, made in Rhino-Grasshopper and imported into ARCHICAD © TPO "Reserve"
Complexity and urgency
All the work - both design and construction - took only three and a half years. For comparison: the Sydney Opera House took 14 years to build, the Elbe Philharmonic in Hamburg - ten.
“When we started to build, not a single sketch line was drawn. In January 2015, they started digging without even knowing exactly where to dig, '' says Vladimir Plotkin. - Facades with "bark" were made by September 2017. A year later, the hall was rented out at the same frantic pace."
Despite the colossal amount of work and tight deadlines, a calculation error happened only once. To maintain the microclimate, it was necessary to place glass opening screens in the "crust". A week and a half before the facades were handed over to acceptance, it turned out that the screens did not fit in size. Nevertheless, “the contractor reacted quickly - the metal was cut and the glass was re-ordered. We managed to meet the deadline."
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