Glass Dune — a gigantic dune made of glass, to be erected in the marshy Borskaya Floodplain opposite the The Kremlin. According to a statement by the designers, the building's purpose is a health and recreation hotel-and-business complex. The expressive volume of the hotel, reminiscent of a spacecraft, will "loom over the red-brick building of the former factory like an enormous genie from a fairy tale."
Background
Nizhny Novgorod authorities have been planning to develop the left bank of the Volga for some years now. The so-called Borskaya Floodplain has featured in real-estate news on more than one occasion: in particular, it was here that two years ago the ambitious Globe Town was planned, designed by Italian architects who made a gigantic snow-white sphere (the so-called "Globe of the Nizhny Novgorod Region") the symbol of the new city.
The global economic crisis put paid to those plans, but the area's appeal — it consists of water-meadows and forests, yet is within easy reach of the city center — and the need to develop it keep pushing the city authorities to seek new solutions. One of these involves dividing the land into compact plots, each of which will subsequently be developed by its own investor. It was one such plot, measuring 4.3 hectares, that was allocated to the client of PTAM Vissarionov.
The Developers Speak
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Opposite the The Kremlin, on the left bank of the Volga — which remains almost entirely undeveloped — a modern tourist and business center may soon appear. The design of this multifunctional structure was created by PTAM Vissarionov. The architects interpreted the site facing the Kremlin as a gigantic glass dune. | 
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Project Description
The site earmarked for the recreation complex lies just 800 meters from the Bor district (the former town that has been absorbed into the Nizhny Novgorod Agglomeration), right on the bank of the Volga, facing the Kremlin and the Nizhne-Volzhskaya Embankment on the opposite shore. A further advantage of the chosen site is that it is virtually free of existing development — at present only old factory buildings stand here, and one of these, the best-preserved, the investor has decided to incorporate into the new ensemble. The restored red-brick building is intended to house an administrative complex and a small museum, while a fragment of an adjacent structure will be incorporated into the interior of the complex as a picturesque ruin.
The combination of a favorable ecological setting, proximity to water, excellent views, and good transport access determined the future development's function. The client and the architects were in no doubt from the outset that this should be a resort with its own beach and a sports-and-entertainment complex; a business center was subsequently added to these functions. The waterfront zone itself was assigned by the designers to a landscaped beach area and a yacht pier.
The core of the volumetric-spatial composition is a nine-story hotel, whose two lower levels house the business center. The building is predictably elongated along the river, giving the majority of rooms a superb panoramic view. To avoid long, flat surfaces, the architects transformed the hotel's conventional rectangular block almost beyond recognition. Facing the city it presents a relatively calm and restrained façade, while toward the river it turns a convex, wave-like volume that tapers gradually toward the top. The hotel is connected to the health center building by a covered walkway. The hotel's internal layout is organized around an off-center atrium that runs through the floors and is crowned by a glass dome. A second, larger dome covers almost the entire health center building. Both buildings share a common stylobate whose curvilinear form follows the curve of the bank.
All hotel rooms have panoramic glazing, while the floor slabs are rendered in a deliberately brutalist manner, resembling curved concrete "pancakes." As the upper floors decrease in area, the building appears to "melt," slowly spreading across the site and creating additional functional zones. The residential floors "flow" down onto the greened roof of the business center, which in turn flows into the roof of the side wing; the white mass of the stylobate spreads wider still, merging seamlessly into the beach. This layered "layer-cake" structure allowed Yury Vissarionov, on the one hand, to concentrate all functions in one place and thereby leave the greater part of the waterfront untouched, and on the other, to use this biomorphic composition to integrate the new complex into the virtually wild landscape, undisturbed by the low-rise development of the Bor outskirts. The hotel is to be linked to the residential district by a network of drives and paths that crisscross the green zone behind it. Also set back within the site is parking for 250 cars.
The expressive volume of the hotel — recalling now a glass dune, now a spacecraft — looms over the red-brick building of the former factory like an enormous genie from a fairy tale; some sense of scale is nonetheless introduced by the improvised colonnade of the business center and the small rounded bay windows scattered across the hotel's façade.
PTAM Vissarionov is no stranger to designing for Nizhny Novgorod. Not long ago the architects produced a design for a retail-and-business complex on the Strelka. The left bank of the Volga might seem a far more tranquil and straightforward site than the celebrated Strelka, yet the virgin landscape proved no less of a challenge than the city's historic center. If in the first project the main emphasis was on tact and sensitivity to the surroundings, for the wild green beach of the Volga the architects devised a futuristic volume with a "landscape" plasticity.