Open Structure

2024 Author: David Durham | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 02:26

RCC is one of the most successful and high-tech copper producers in Russia and the world. It was originally based in Yekaterinburg, and at some point the question of the need to build a separate headquarters arose, as they say, in full growth. An ambitious business sets ambitious goals, and RCC is no exception - even among the very first wishes for the future complex, the company's management voiced innovation, entertainment and uniqueness. And almost immediately, to embody these qualities in volume, they began to look for a foreign architect, and certainly of the first magnitude. For Foster + Partners, it was a direct order: in 2012, the project began to be developed, in 2015 it was accepted by the City Council of Yekaterinburg, and five years later the construction was successfully completed.

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RMK acquired a land plot for the construction of its new headquarters in the very center of Yekaterinburg, on Maxim Gorky Street. This is one of the oldest streets in the city, which stretches along the left bank of the Iset River for about 1.8 km. For its proximity to the river, merchants and industrialists were very fond of it at one time - the mansions of many of them, albeit by no means always in a stately state, and today form the basis of the town-planning fabric of the street itself, and all the blocks adjacent to it.

Штаб-квартира «Русской медной компании» Фотография © Олег Ковалюк / Предоставлено РМК

That is why, by the way, strict high-rise regulations were in force in this area of the city for a very long time - investors were strongly discouraged to build above 5-6 floors. But for RCC and the invited company of the architectural star, they made an exception - with the proviso that the 87.5-meter building will remain the highest dominant in this part of the Yekaterinburg center. And this, by the way, is an important clarification, since the site on which the headquarters is built is closely adjoined by another one, overlooking the parallel Gogol Street and also belonging to the RMK: so, on it the company, with all the desire, is no longer able to build anything high-rise will be able.

План благоустройства. Штаб-квартира «Русской медной» компании © Foster + Partners / предоставлено РМК

The first thing that attracts attention to the constructed building is, of course, the facade. A very textured facade of a distinctly copper color, designed in the form of a crystal lattice. On the one hand, such a shell, of course, very unambiguously and straightforwardly refers to the main activity of the company, but its role is not limited to metaphor. At the same time, it is also an important part of the building's climate concept. The "crystal" pyramids that form the façade consist of four triangular faces, two of which are made of metal and two of which are glass. Transparent and opaque segments are combined in a different order depending on which side of the world a particular module is facing: its glass edges catch sunlight, focusing on the sun, which is mostly low in these latitudes, while the upper metal "hoods" protect the interior from overheating in those short weeks of the year when it rises high above the horizon and really gets hot. In addition, the complex three-dimensional shape of the facade elements allows, even with their repeated repetition, to form a very diverse surface that constantly changes its appearance depending on the intensity of light, time of day, cloudiness and generously compensates for the extreme rationality of the plan of this building. After all, if we mentally remove the 3D shell from the headquarters complex, we will see a laconic parallelepiped - what, strictly speaking, any office building should be, sharpened primarily for ergonomics and high labor productivity.

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1/7 Headquarters of the Russian Copper Company Photo © Oleg Kovalyuk / Courtesy of RCC
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2/7 Headquarters of the Russian Copper Company Photo © Oleg Kovalyuk / Courtesy of RCC
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3/7 Headquarters of the Russian Copper Company Photo © Oleg Kovalyuk / Courtesy of RCC
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4/7 Headquarters of the Russian Copper Company Photo © Oleg Kovalyuk / Courtesy of RCC
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5/7 Headquarters of the Russian Copper Company Photo © Oleg Kovalyuk / Courtesy of RMK
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6/7 Headquarters of the Russian Copper Company Photo © Oleg Kovalyuk / Courtesy of RMK
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7/7 Headquarters of the Russian Copper Company Photo © Oleg Kovalyuk / Courtesy of RCC

It is also interesting that the rectangular building on Gorky Street is oriented with its narrow side. That is, formally, this is the butt, but at the same time it is the main facade. And the architects add additional spatial intrigue to its appearance, composing the central modular elements with glazed triangles to each other. As a result, a completely transparent lattice, framed by copper folds, appears in the center of the end face. The first and two last floors of the building are assembled from "pyramids" of increased height (12 meters versus the standard 10), so that at the pedestrian level, the "copper" cladding is perceived as a solemn drapery. The main entrance to the building is especially impressive in this sense - triangular "folds" fall from both sides over a large-scale flat stained-glass window, like a solemnly parted curtain.

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1/4 Headquarters of the Russian Copper Company Photo © Anna Martovitskaya
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2/4 Headquarters of the Russian Copper Company Photo © Anna Martovitskaya
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3/4 Headquarters of the Russian Copper Company Photo © Anna Martovitskaya
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4/4 Headquarters of the Russian Copper Company Photo © Anna Martovitskaya

And exactly the same flat stained-glass window fixes the end of the tower - there it was used to place the volumetric RCC logo, also made of glass.

At night, the building is illuminated with warm yellow light, which very logically continues and develops the theme of copper cladding. The emblem is decorated with LED backlighting in the colors of the RMK logo, which is very colorful in its palette. However, the programmable LEDs installed inside this structure make it possible to implement a variety of lighting scenarios: the residents of Yekaterinburg are promised the Russian tricolor, the colors of the St. George ribbon, and other special effects. The presentation of all the illumination possibilities will take place a little later, probably closer to the new year, but it is already clear that the building has become a very noticeable landmark in the panorama of the entire center of Yekaterinburg, and the new landscaped embankment of the Iset River, which both literally and figuratively illuminates all around.

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1/4 Headquarters of the Russian Copper Company Photo © Oleg Kovalyuk / Courtesy of RCC
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2/4 Headquarters of the Russian Copper Company Photo © Oleg Kovalyuk / Courtesy of RCC
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3/4 Headquarters of the Russian Copper Company Photo © Oleg Kovalyuk / Courtesy of RMK
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4/4 Headquarters of the Russian Copper Company Photo © Oleg Kovalyuk / Courtesy of RMK

The structure of the building in the retelling is simple and predictable in a good way. The first floor is a public lobby with a ceiling height of 12 meters. From the second to the 13th - office blocks, solved within the framework of this project as standard. And finally, the two upper floors are individually finished levels, where the offices of the company's management are located. The roof is interpreted as a "fifth facade" - it is lined with the same structural modules as the facades. There are a total of 196 modules, if you count ten "stacked" on the roof. Each such element weighs from 9 to 12 tons and consists of 1100 parts. A colossal figure, and each module includes a complex glazing and elements of a steel frame that forms the basis of its structure, as well as steel plates facing this frame, filling aluminum panels, and already on top of these panels, sheets of micro-ribbed stainless steel are fixed. The eyes perceive this entire complex multi-layer structure as a kind of monolith - not least due to a special PVD coating, which, on the one hand, gives the same copper shade and tactilely smooth, but not mirror-like, but like a velvety surface, and on the other ensures the resistance of the facade in relation to a rather harsh climate.

The installation of the facade structure has been carried out for almost two years, since mid-2017, and one cannot but pay tribute to the local contractors who withstood such a test: the modules were manufactured and partially assembled in advance, and all the final installation work was carried out directly on the site, in a special hangar, which, by the way, and today has not yet been fully disassembled.

And - a few words about why the facades, designed to symbolize belonging to the copper mining industry, are not made of copper. Probably only the lazy one was no longer joking about this, but both for Foster + Partners and for RCC in this matter, considerations of expediency and manufacturability were in the first place - copper facades are not only an order of magnitude more complicated and more expensive to manufacture, but also unpredictably capricious in operation and especially in interaction with the environment. Alexey Baida, deputy general director of the A1 Group, which acted as the general contractor for the construction of the complex, commented on this moment most wittily in a conversation with me: “We didn’t want to get another Statue of Liberty”. It is also important that the facade, for all its technological complexity, in theory is perceived by the customer as a replaceable shell: the structural frame of the headquarters building is made of white architectural concrete and is designed for decades of trouble-free operation, while the facade, according to Alexei Baida, after 20 -30 years can easily be replaced with “other customized solutions”.

In Russia, by the way, this is the first time when absolutely the entire structure is made of white architectural concrete. The use of this material - honest and, due to this honesty, self-sufficient, that is, it does not require finishing - was one of the main conditions of Foster + Partners. We can only guess at what cost (and I'm not even talking about the budget now, but first of all about the skill of the builders) it was possible to achieve perfectly smooth walls and columns (hexagonal!), Defining the appearance of the interiors and all working areas of the headquarters, and its solemn main entrance lobby 12 meters high.

The modular system formed the basis for the internal layout of the building. All office floors are nothing more than two-story standardized blocks with offices on the long sides. The staircase and elevator nodes are facing the rear facade, and a public communication zone is organized in the center, which, thanks to a ten-meter stained glass window on the side of the main facade, does not lack daylight. In other words, the height of each working floor is 5 meters (of course, part of this space has been “eaten up” by utilities, which are completely hidden in the ceilings here), but the public area is left with two levels. In fact, the center of each module has become its own atrium, and its sculptural and communication dominant is a three-flight Y-shaped staircase that connects the levels of the module.

The very idea of such a planning solution was born to the architects as a result of studying how the internal structure of the RMK is arranged. The company consists of separate divisions, within which teams of mainly 4-6 people work. In the new headquarters, a separate office has been created for each of these teams, and within one module there is either one division of the company, or those that, by the nature of their activities, constantly interact with each other. Internal transparent partitions provide maximum daylight and permeability to the working rooms - not only the walls of the offices, which face the atrium, but also the railings of the upper (in fact, mezzanine) level rails are made of glass. By the way, not only these interior elements (partitions, stairs, reception desks, etc.) were made according to the sketches of Foster + Partners, but also all the furniture. The tables, "crystal" in their form, installed in the offices of heads of divisions, now, for example, are even present in the catalogs of furniture manufacturers under the name "RMK".

In Yekaterinburg, they already got used to the building of the RMK. It took quite a long time to build and even longer overgrown with "pyramids" from which the facades were assembled (it is thanks to them, by the way, that this object is called "pineapple" in the capital of the Urals), and for local residents it managed to become an integral part of the urban landscape. But in the humble opinion of a visitor, RMK has turned out to be a dominant, from which it is difficult to break away. Along Gorky Street (by the way, well-equipped and on a large scale by the end of the construction of the building) one just wants to walk back and forth, looking at how triangular glass-copper folds have grown into its fabric and panorama.

In my opinion, this building refutes two stereotypes that are almost the most painful for the Russian architectural and construction culture: the first is that the beautiful ideas of foreign stars are inevitably broken by the despondency of our standards and the qualifications of our developers, and the second is that the sophisticated headquarters corporate apartments inevitably hide behind tall fences. They do not break or hide. And if for the first it is worth to thank the large-scale Russian team responsible for the project, the second is the merit of the customer company. The latter is especially clearly understood when walking along Gorky Street, where the building stands completely free in the city space. Although from time to time figures of guards appear in the field of view, unobtrusively present in different parts of the area - but this, one must think, is a necessary and rather delicate precaution. It would be, perhaps, much easier and more reliable to put up a traditional fence, but RCC deliberately relied on openness - for the sake of the building, conceived by British architects as the embodiment of transparency, and, on the other hand, following current trends in the development of the urban center space, since in our time interspersed with a modern "star" building in a series of mansions should look vivid and natural - so,so that everyone can touch the shiny "copper" facade. I wonder if other large companies that are still planning to build large-scale headquarters, including in Moscow, will follow this path.