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Architects: Za Bor Architects
- Area: 290 m²
- Year: 2011
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Photographs: Peter Zaytsev
Text description provided by the architects. The Yandex company, for which this office is designed for, is the most popular Russian Internet segment search engine with lots of useful services, one the world top 25 sites. The company is constantly developing, so in late July, the Kiev Yandex branch moves to new office. As a dozen other Yandex offices it is designed by the Moscow bureau za bor architects.
Arseniy Borisenko and Peter Zaytsev — the architects are making comments on their new design: “Every project we strive to make the most eсofriendly. It appears in the use of mostly natural materials and creation of user-friendly spaces: comfortable, quirky, even cheerful ones, the spaces which don’t resemble dull gray offices in their standard plastic version. While developing the concept of the Yandex Kiev office we wanted to create a modern and welcoming space — that is, to put in it qualities of IT-company, which is famous for the careful attitude to their staff.”
There were no special problems with designing and agreeing since this was not the first office developed for Yandex. For office volume has been allocated a tiny 290 sq m, (the smallest office designed by the bureau for today), the location was very interesting. Future office had to take the sixth and seventh floors of A-class business center «Leonardo», which is a single two-level space with a void. The room is well lit with natural daylight through a huge arched window which offers a wonderful view of the Kiev opera house and the area in front of it. That is the unusual window that pushed the architects to use large round XAL lamps.
While in contrast to other Yandex offices, there is no gym and other recreational zones except for a rather big coffee-point, it is very convenient and not overloaded with workspace. There are about fifteen workplaces equipped with ergonomic Herman Miller furniture on each of the two levels. Visitors are met at the original reception area where they can comfortably wait for a meeting in contemporary Fritz Hansen armchairs. The reception area is designed in corporate colors and symbols.
On each of the two levels there is a meeting room. At the bottom one clients are mainly accepted, in the upper one staff meetings are usually held. The top level, which is fully glazed and tied up to the bottom with the staircase. The project was planned to have an extremely complex geometry of the gallery and staircase, which should behave as an entity. To explicate the contractors its layout, the architects produced a model of the staircase block. In late winter, the model was brought from Moscow to Kiev. Thanks to builders in Kiev — they are managed well with an exact fit of planes and glass gallery, so that the design looks exactly as it was planned. After completion, when the architects took the object builders reported that this was the most difficult job that they had to perform for their practice.
