http://www.abdcom.ru

Fish is floating around the screen, from the right to the left, towards the habitual line reading eyes follow, that’s why it seems fish are going against the stream. This is normal for salmons: chinook salmon, atlantic salmon, taimen and the other, that migrate upstream for spawn. On large ones it’s easy to make out the specific hooked nose and sadly downward turned mouth. The quality is almost photographic, but orange color and transparence of shapes lessen their realism. Even a sophisticated Internet user may be impressed watching that floating. It feels as if you are reading an underwater editorial, stylized in classic avant-garde. Certainly water diving is an allegory, the symbolic meaning of fish is obvious and doesn’t interfere with reading.

As expected, the meditative title page is followed with rational and informative content. The site unfolds the 15 years work of the ABD architects, starting with ABD news of 90th and concluding with present-day Megapolis complex on Leningradskoe Highway and 674-675 blocks by the Byelorussia Square. It represents a formidable list of designed buildings and interiors, accompanied with huge list of clients and business partners, whose names are modestly hidden behind the alphabetic characters. The section is thoroughly done: there is hardly any other site with a separate section with clients’ references. Each one may be downloaded and read. There is also a complete list of publications, one may unfold each one or download the full version. The book «ABD: Within the Range of Architecture» is also in the list. It has been lately released in two volumes by the prestigious Austrian publishing house ‘SpringerWienNewYork’. We have already written about the book.

Inside the site is a convenient and smoothly running tool. The way a website of any good company should be. It provides easy access to all the needed information. It answers all the questions a client or a business partner or anyone might have. Everything, all the way from A to Z, like in Mendeleev's table: for certain if there is an empty small square, the element is just unknown.

An unknown element, or indescribable one in this case paradoxically lives not inside, but outside. Wonderingly overpassing from fish to the content, we get back to them, to the title page, to think over: what they are for there, in the clearly set information – what meaning do they have? From the interview to the Architectural News Agency we have found out that Boris Levyant is keen on fishing and prefers salmons. Actually the site is the plain introduction not only to the company, its work but also tells about one of the ABD founder’s favorite pastime. The approach is similar to that of the Book of ABD: pictures of constructions alternates with photos of staff and Moscow sights (some of them are shown on the site).

But still fish are so good that one can’t help but keep on conjecturing – what if there are some other interesting messages. Like: all fish swim with the stream, but trout – against, unlike others. In the world of insights and wearing accommodations, well-organized creative process sequentially releasing products of westerly quality is a kind of wonder. This is being unlike others; this is swimming against the stream. Not telling about it straightforwardly would be odd, because that is not an element of Mendeleev's table. Those are only guesses, which emerge on watching orange fish floating over a newspaper page.