Tochka na Karte LP

The new hotel of the Tochka na Karte chain is located on the high bank of the navigable river Svir’, which connects the Ladoga and Onega lakes.The context of this project is formed both by its natural environment and by its placement in relation to important transport arteries: the navigable river Svir’, on the high bank of which the hotel stands, and the federal highway Cola which is adjacent to the project site.

The site of the hotel, large and devoid of trees,  remains mostly untouched, preserving the potential for additional filling of  this territory, while the two buildings of the hotel are set on its boundary, almost at the edge of the high and impressive bank of the river Svir’. All the 50 rooms of the hotel look out to the river bend and the other bank, which is overgrown with mixed wood.

Tochka na Karte Lodeynoye Pole is an hotel built using the modular construction method. The base for this method is a spatial module with the dimensions 3.5x3.5x7 m, which corresponds to a standard hotel room. Therefore, these room modules, united into a residential building, following their innate spatial logic, strive towards a kind of a concise prismatic form. Our key goal in working on this project was to find an expressive and constructive solution that would dispense with the orthogonal logic of stacked boxes, complicating and enriching the interaction of the observer and the user with the object.

The material that offered us such a solution was glulam – we used it for all the roundabout galleries of residential buildings, the stairs and the recessed balconies of the rooms.

Combining these two technologies, the use of large modules and the glulam, we managed to create a highly prefabricated object without becoming hostages to any particular structural and economic logic.

The glulam framework envelops the residential module units, which are distributed to get the best scenic views, creating between them irregular freeform spaces for staircase lobbies and passages.

The free-rhythm placement of decorative screens along the south-facing roundabout galleries creates an additional layer, fills the galleries with shadows falling in a complex way, and forms a space between the nature and the interior.This way the cold and quintessentially functional structure for transit and evacuation, the staircases and passages become an extended sculpture that opens up for a hotel visitor who is moving along it.

By arranging the amount of rooms required by the economics and logic of the project into two 2-storey buildings, we managed to keep the balance between the characteristics of the views from all the rooms, the rational development footprint and the length of pedestrian connections. The low-rise buildings also help preserving the feeling that the guest is getting to his or her room straight from outdoors, following the format of countryside life deeply immersed in nature, and not according to the logic of a large hotel contrasting with its environment.