The building of the Alcon II business center, the construction of which was completed this fall by the Alcon Group, is stretched along Leningradsky Prospekt, a hundred meters from the exit from the Sokol metro station. If you go from the center to the region, its facade will be visible on the right, shortly before the fork of Leningradsky Prospekt and Volokolamskoye Highway: it is elongated longitudinally and its facade consists of three large volumetric waves of a terracotta shade.
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zooming Business center Alcon II on Leningradsky prospect / ADM architects Photo © Yaroslav Lukyanchenko / provided by ADM architects
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zooming Business center Alcon II on Leningradsky prospect / ADM architects Photo © Yaroslav Lukyanchenko / provided by ADM architects
Alcon II is inscribed in the front of the red line of Leningradsky Prospekt, and thus represents the entire business center to the city. Another part of the BC, built earlier - Alcon I, is located behind the new building in the back of the site and consists of four square buildings; ADM architects also worked on the final stage of his project. Therefore, when the Alcon II project was considered in 2013 at one of the first architectural councils of Sergey Kuznetsov, Hans Stimann, the former chief architect of Berlin, who was then a member of the council, said that he personally went to the already built Alcon I business center to study the situation, and that The resulting urban space, designed by ADM, including the facades and landscaping, he liked.
I must say that the work of ADM architects with Alcon II began even earlier than their redesign of Alcon I, namely, in 2007 - then the customer, the Alcon Group company, invited the architects to think about the fate of the building that existed on the site - a rather heavy eight-story building - beams of late Soviet times. In 2007-2008, the architects proposed several options (one of them -
here), but the work did not progress further. It was possible to return to Alcon II in 2012, in 2013 the project was successfully passed by the arch council and by 2014 it was finalized. Construction resumed in 2018 and is completed now in 2020.
Andrey Romanov, ADM
The project was carried out exactly as it was conceived and as adopted by the Arch Council in 2013. It seems to me and my co-author Yekaterina Kuznetsova that the building fits well into the development front of Leningradsky Prospekt.
I know that already now the demand for rent in the Alcon-II building is very high, one large company is moving from the earlier buildings of the business center to this new one.
So, the new office center stretches along the avenue, occupies the spot of a Soviet building and now hides the stepped silhouettes of Alcon I buildings from the side of the avenue. Under the new building there are 3 underground parking floors for 374 cars, and its first floor combines areas for cafes and shops with a lobby of two office blocks. Layout - flexible, communication cores, as befits an efficient office building, in the center of each block. It is planned to lease the area both in whole floors and in small lots. The architects proposed an atypical solution for the central air conditioning system: the ventilation outlets face the rear facade and are hidden by glass; only dry cooling towers are installed on the roof (a similar solution was used in Alcon I).
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zooming 1/4 Plan of the 1st floor. BC Alcon II on Leningradsky Prospekt © ADM
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zooming 2/4 Plan of the 3rd floor. BC Alcon II on Leningradsky Prospekt © ADM
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zooming 3/4 Plan of the 5th floor. BC Alcon II on Leningradsky Prospekt © ADM
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zooming 4/4 Plan of the 7th floor. BC Alcon II on Leningradsky Prospekt © ADM
The upper floor is completely glass with a very thin and rare cut and with a large indent from the edge. The indentation forms spacious terraces - from the offices you can get out into the fresh air (there are also terraces on the upper floors of Alcon I, as the client, the Alcon Group, considers the upper floor terraces to be an important advantage of modern office buildings). The top floor - in the figurative expression of Andrey Romanov, is a kind of "office penthouse", the "clean" height from floor to ceiling here is 5 m. Although in the six main office floors it is also quite large - 4.5 m, which, in combination with floor-to-ceiling windows, allows you to well illuminate office spaces with natural light.
The height of the first floor is even higher - 7 m, which is more than the average in Moscow residential buildings being designed now (where the norm for the height of the first public floor is 5-6 m).
The tier of the public space - the lobby and the space of the rental infrastructure - were decided by the architects in an emphatically expressive way. Only a small leveling tape of the basement, ten centimeters high, rises above the sidewalk, but further, for all 7 meters from floor to ceiling, there is curved glass, large, with sparse seams, like a large "melted" showcase. The volume of the building visually "levitates" on the luminous "air cushion", and the curves of the glass add a "glamorous" shine.
In the volume, the first tier of the building is divided not into two, but into three parts, and from the avenue there are two passages to the courtyard of Alcon I. In the side blocks, in addition to commercial areas, there is a lobby, and the central block is smaller, its contours are flexible and smooth. the space inside is free and transparent, here only the supports of the main frame are placed. The spacing of the supports, white and round in cross-section, is a classic 8 meters for offices. On the ground floor, these white columns are mainly visible through glass, supporting the theme of "house on legs", but sometimes the authors leave the support open, as in the alignment of the western archway, thus once again emphasizing the ephemerality of the glass border.
Side blocks echo the central one in terms of flexibility and streamlining, but in some places - in the areas of the building entrances and in the arches, glass is replaced by perforated metal with a pattern of tree shadows.
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zooming Business center Alcon II on Leningradsky prospect / ADM architects Photo © Yaroslav Lukyanchenko / provided by ADM architects
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zooming Business center Alcon II on Leningradsky prospect / ADM architects Photo © Yaroslav Lukyanchenko / provided by ADM architects
The first floor with its precious glass "boutique" facade, of course, forms the first vivid impression that the building - yes, let's face it, the entire complex - makes a pedestrian. This space is warm, habitable and bright. Already now, according to the owners of the complex, in the building a total of 80% of the area is rented.
But the authors of the project paid the main attention to the plastic of the main six floors, the most noticeable from the point of view of the city as a whole - and the motorists of Leningradsky Prospect. Upsups at the ends "arrange" the silhouette. And the main facade facing the avenue is assembled in three ribbons, two stories high each. The ribbons of the front third of the volume are bent in large smooth waves, working for a sculptural effect. In this form, you can see the techniques of the Late Renaissance, if not to say the baroque: the facade as a volume, while having a "thickness" that can be "bent". The new building itself becomes such a “baroque facade” - a sculptural calling card, continuation, completion and representative representative of the business center located behind it.
“Our idea was to figuratively reflect the dynamics of movement along the avenue,” says Andrei Romanov, “cars rush past, raise air currents, and with our facade we seem to let you feel this“aerodynamics”through the architecture of the building.”
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zooming 1/4 BC Alcon II on Leningradsky prospect / ADM architects Photo © Yaroslav Lukyanchenko / courtesy of ADM architects
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zooming 2/4 BC Alcon II on Leningradsky prospect / ADM architects Photo © Yaroslav Lukyanchenko / courtesy of ADM architects
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zooming 3/4 BC Alcon II on Leningradsky prospect / ADM architects Photo © Yaroslav Lukyanchenko / provided by ADM architects
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zooming 4/4 BC Alcon II on Leningradsky Prospekt Photo © Yaroslav Lukyanchenko / courtesy of ADM architects
The architect also says that it was quite difficult to implement the intersecting ribbons. The fact is that the cantilever exits of the tapes had to be insulated at the top and bottom, while maintaining the integrity of the horizontal lines - that is, without turning the tapes into a "braid", retaining the feeling of matter, cut horizontally and swaying in air streams. The authors solved the problem by insulating the top and bottom from the inside, drawing diagonal bevels of the insulation. The node turned out to be complex and time consuming.
As in the previous Alcon I buildings, the ventilation facades of the new building are faced with rich terracotta ceramics, which ensures the integrity of the complex and is to some extent consonant with the colors of Leningradsky Prospekt, but most of all with the color of the towers built in the early 2000s by the Ostozhenka AB nearby. One way or another, the terracotta color for Alcon is a corporate one. But in the new building, firstly, the proportions are slimmer from the beginning and, moreover, are emphasized by the doubled, vertical rhythm of the walls. The verticals alternate with thin stripes and smoothly change width on the ribs of the ribbons, emphasizing the shape - as if the matter stretches, becomes thinner and becomes "more glassy" on the ribs.
In addition, the relief of the façade terracotta panels differs from Alcon I - it is slightly wavy, as if composed of jibs and heels and resembles a variant of a thin order profile, "multiplied" in height. And at the same time, of course, the relief of the panels echoes the “idea of a wave” on the facade and with the mobility, “waviness” of the plastic of the building as a whole.
So the business center Alcon II turned out to be noticeable both in architectural and urban planning terms. One cannot but recognize it as an excellent and very modern, in the words of Andrei Romanov, a futuristic replacement for an old Soviet building, which had absolutely no place on the main highway of the capital. Moreover, it must be admitted that now, in our time, the dominance of multi-storey housing on the Moscow market project, a new office building in a significant place, low in the general context of the frontal development of the avenue, and at the same time, distinguished by its plastic, eye-catching architecture is definitely an event that brings the city to life and is worth seeing.
