The pavilion of the center for youth culture, designed by the collaboration between KOSMOS and Legato Sports Architecture, will appear in Kazan's Uram Park, the largest extreme park in Russia with areas for skateboarders, BMX riders and parkourists, two pump tracks and a streetball court.
"Uram" became part of a large-scale project for the improvement of the Kazanka embankment, which is being carried out by the architectural studio Orchestra, thanks to the initiative of Kazan activists who have been advocating for the creation of a park on a vacant lot near the Millennium Bridge for more than ten years. Assistant to the President of the Republic of Tatarstan Natalia Fishman-Bekmambetova, who is largely responsible for the phenomenal transformation of public spaces in the region, invited the Legato Sports Architecture team to work on the park, which has implemented several projects in Tatarstan, including the first pump track in Russia, and also opened the production of MAFs and blanks of sports facilities. Among the new solutions at Uram are a concrete loop and mosaic decoration of sports facilities.
Architectural bureau KOSMOS is another co-author of this large-scale project, responsible for the appearance of the pavilion of the center of youth culture, which endows the park with an all-season character. Inside, it will be possible to train at any time of the year, hold lectures, film screenings and street art exhibitions. "Uram", by the way, is translated from the Tatar language as "street".
The red concrete hills on which the bulk of the building rests turn it into an element of park infrastructure and are firmly connected with the surroundings, blurring the boundaries between the park and the covered areas. Concrete "influxes" are functional: you can also enter them on a bicycle or skateboard, just run in or sit, observing life inside or outside - the facade at human eye level is made of glass.
The upper part of the building meets a different, urban planning scale, task. The laconic rectangular volume becomes dominant, echoing the huge "M" of the Millennium pontoon bridge and the stele of the National Cultural Center at the other end of the park. The cube is lined with profiled sheet, from which hangars and fences are usually made, but polished to a mirror shine. The impressive size - the building will be about 100 meters long - and some industrial dryness of the "box" is balanced by the same concrete hills crawling onto the walls. In much the same way, street artists "appropriate" warehouses and fences along the railways, covering them with drawings and inscriptions.
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zooming 1/3 Center of youth culture "URAM" © Kosmos Architects, Legato
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zooming 2/3 Center of youth culture "URAM" © Kosmos Architects, Legato
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zooming 3/3 Center of youth culture "URAM" © Kosmos Architects, Legato
The interior of the pavilion repeats the technique of a combination of gray industrial materials - slate, chain-link, glass blocks, concrete panels and reinforced glass - with a bright accent, only this time not in red, but in bright yellow color with the name "Volt", familiar from road markings and overalls workers. Architects use color to mark key areas and objects and create a pattern for each space. “The interior solution reveals the beauty of practical, functional, radical and painfully familiar“street”materials and presents them in a new modern light,” the architects explain.
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zooming 1/3 Center of youth culture "URAM" © Kosmos Architects, Legato
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zooming 2/3 Center of youth culture "URAM" © Kosmos Architects, Legato
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zooming 3/3 Center of youth culture "URAM" © Kosmos Architects, Legato
Extreme park is a potential place for social conflicts, so the creators had to take into account the interests of different groups of the population. The open part is clearly divided into children's, amateur and professional zones, which also meets safety requirements, and beautiful panoramas open from the promenade embankment: it is interesting to come to Uram just like that, even without doing extreme sports. The pavilion, according to the authors, "is based on three fundamental functions: sports, culture and family", which allows turning the place into a center of street culture, which is wider and more stable than a sports ground.
