Published on Archi.ru (https://archi.ru)

04.08.2011

High-speed designing

Anna Martovitskaya
Studio:
Sergey Estrin Architects

In record short time "Architectural studio of Sergei Estrin" designed a project of new offices of Russian Railways two sub-companies - Federal Passenger Company and the Second Freight Company. It took month from the date they got the contract to the day when the construction was started.

"First order schedules seemed impossible, - says Sergey Estrin. - We decided to undertake this project also because we wanted to test if we could do that or not. We managed to provide high speed of work because, firstly, we involved almost all of the staff of the studio, second, we made up an extremely thoughtful schedule of design stages and its coordination with the client”. In particular, the work over the project was as following. First, the architects done a draft design and rendering of open work spaces, parallely the client approved the standard specification of materials, which excluded all the wet-mix processes: nothing that required long drying. It helped us to significantly reduce time of project execution. Immediately after the specification was approved, the studio started making the budget estimates – calculated of all future costs of materials and engineering, because the client put us not only in tough time constraints, but also heavy limited in cost per sq m of an office. The architects did their best to ensure that the limited budget had no impact on the image of corporate interior. Since there were two offices to work on, the solutions are similar in terms of typology, but they are designed in different colors. They both are black and white, but one of them has red as additional color, the other – dark blue. Colors of carpet tiles used as floor coverings are also various in both buildings: here and there light and dark "squares" alternate chequerwise, but somewhere there is more gray, graphite palette, but somewhere it’s gray-blue. As the main decoration element there are used graphic panels - images of trains, from ancient locomotives to modern "Sapsan". Names of their point of destination are as decoration of the walls, they separate opens spaces and office rooms, meeting rooms and kitchens. Each storey is unique also due to different colors of doors - black, white or red.

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