Office Concept. Moscow.
Architects: A. Goryainov
Client: ОАО SАC ENERGOGARANT
Total Area: 295 sq m
Project Development: 2007

Our proposal considers a principled spatial solution for the fifth floor facilities. This floor is larger than the sixth floor area and allows creating an image-enhancing public area with conference rooms. The design of this area will dictate the overall approach to the style of other interiors.

In the central part, at the floor entrance from the side of the elevator lobby, an open “penetrable” space is created, which forms a public area and comprises reception, waiting area, 2 conference rooms. This space also includes a hallway leading to the exterior glass, which is required by the fire department since the hallway serves as an evacuation walkway. The glass provides natural lighting for the public area. For the same purpose, the wall of the room behind the reception counter is made entirely of glass. The reception counter is located in front of the floor entrance from the side of the elevator lobby.  

The conference room block is set apart as an independent object of the design and has no common partition with other rooms. The conference rooms are located along the same axis as the reception counter, and together with the counter they form the main image-making core of the entire floor. Other partitions are made of office partitions filled primarily with mat and transparent glass. All personnel are located in one open space, which allows the most efficient use of the existing area. The supervisors’ offices are built as small stand-alone glass boxes dispersed along the exterior wall. Thus, the general concept is to create a large open space with separate offices and conference rooms dispersed inside.

The style and space of the central core provide various options while maintaining the general floor design concept.

We propose two options:

1.  Option 1

«Crystal-like». Each conference room is treated as a separate glass cube approximately 3x3x3 m built of mat glass, which is important since the conference rooms have no external walls. It is possible to use light-sensitive glass, which can instantly change from transparent to mat. This will allow making the glass conference room transparent most of the time thus visually expanding the public area. If necessary, a conference room glass cube cаn become opaque.  
The reception counter is built of steel and has internal lighting. Other room partitions are also made of glass but have solid inserts and doors, which visually separate them from the public area group.

2.   Option 2

«Techno-object». The conference rooms are joined into one block, which has an oval layout.  Straight portions of the oval wall are built of glass in order to provide insulation. Two semi-cylindric portions of the wall are solid, thus giving the object materiality and integrity and adding expression. The reception counter layout is also oval, with solid surface.  Its finish is different from the conference room finish, which makes it an independent object related with, but subordinated to the conference room space.  Other partitions are transparent so that the two main objects, conference rooms and reception, stand out against their background and differ from the general penetrable, shining, ethereal background with its palpable materiality.   Conference rooms are separated by the Dorma mobile partition, which consists of segments suspended from the ceiling rails. If necessary, the partition can be removed, and the two conference rooms can be joined into one. The partition system is designed in a way that allows storing the segments in a variety of ways (e.g., along the walls), thus keeping the utilized space to the maximum.  It also provides the necessary sound-proof capacity.