COMMENT With the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines gaining pace around the world, and with what we hope will be a fair and widespread distribution among all global citizens happening soon, people are cautiously placing optimism on a return to relative normalcy in the future.
Accepting of that, we can all collectively start to refine our plans for life and work in the coming years. As architects, we are at the forefront of helping to enable these plans – and none more so than in the tech sector, where the approach to office design will continue to provide a template that inspires other sectors.
Big tech has driven some of the most ambitious architectural commissions around the world in the past decade. The sector stands tall for creating buildings with goals that are bold, expressive, flexible, and intended to be future-proof. Within this sector, we started the design of an innovative smart campus for global technology leader, Yandex, in Moscow in 2018 with a vision for a titanium-clad, 170,000 sq m building on the Moskva river. Then the pandemic hit, throwing our ways of working and living into question worldwide.
However, we conducted extensive resiliency evaluations over the past year and have readily found that the core values we established with our client in the pre-Covid era are equally applicable to tomorrow’s post-Covid reality. Moreover, the mission embedded in the project to bring people together is even more pertinent.
Wellbeing and convenience
As a building, the plan for the new Yandex headquarters was always dedicated to health, wellbeing and security – marrying safety, comfort and flexibility in an accommodating and interactive atmosphere that will make people feel good, work productively and live well. Though Yandex remains committed to the ideal of an individual workspace for every employee, the building will adopt a wider variety of workplace settings to help allow people to work less formally, supporting a variety of work and lifestyles.
The original plan for amenity-driven programming has proved to still be right post-pandemic. Spread throughout the interior of the new Yandex HQ will be cafes, canteens, a gym, basketball and squash courts, as well as a swimming pool and roof terrace – besides many other amenities. Designed as a campus within a building, at Yandex these facilities are joined by a variety of routes between points and lift-free access to all spaces through dynamic sets of open stairs and ramps to keep people active and moving.
Community and connection
Living through the pandemic has also reaffirmed one of Yandex’s core beliefs: that it is a crucial part of the community and that its new headquarters needs to enable the community to connect with its innovative work and products. Rather than wanting less public interaction, it is more convinced than ever that the public components are a crucial part of the building’s narrative. As a result, the headquarters is conceived as a cultural forum that contributes to and provides for both the needs of the company’s employees and those of its community, with facilities for public meetings, art and culture, education, and dining.
Yandex therefore remains committed to a campus that will serve as an important contribution to the city, fostering human interaction in a future world where these connections are valued as never before. Its headquarters will be a forum for communication and development, for collaboration and knowledge sharing – and thereby a platform for information dissemination, and a launchpad for what it does and offers to its community and the world. The 2018 vision for the new Yandex campus really was future-proof.
Lee Polisano is president of PLP Architecture
