2002
Excellence in International Design-built Award – reconstruction an office building at Gicalo street, Minsk, Belarus
Excellence in Design-built Award - reconstruction an office building at Gicalo street, Minsk, Belarus

1998
Excellence in Design Award – reconstruction an office building at Gicalo street, Minsk, Belarus

The building’s architecture is based on a bundle of three conflicting artistic concepts. The first (basic) theme is the architecture of the main volume of the business centre. We preserved the original symmetrical exterior of the factory canteen. Then we added two more storeys and used a bunch of modern architectural details (light domes, parapet pillars, colour saturation) in finishing works in order to create an air of a traditional office building.

Everything would look commonplace and dull if we had not introduced a second theme – a luminous lantern of unusual design that it turned to face the avenue.

The lantern rests on metal pillars, one of which makes two balconies with the façade to resemble a fire escape staircase. The extraordinary artistic element makes the building look new.

The third theme is the screen in front of the façade. Purely decorative, the screen is there to break the rhythm of the apertures of the main building, introduce a different measure of scale and overshadow the plastics of the façade wall. The screen could be on par with the lantern and the metal construction, but even in such a state it would add to the virtual collision of the first two themes and does not loot out of place.

Vorobyev & Partners’ architects have managed to cope with the existing framework, its size and proportions, and shift the main visual accent towards industrial art in its own right.

An architectural work of that kind happens to be out of tune with Minsk’s common standard for office buildings and gives hope for the prevalence of architectural talent in the quest for an optimal combination of functional conditionality and artistic expression.