Bold Move

ARCHITECTS
Design by Erick van Egeraat
www.erickvanegeraat.com

PROJECT
Chess and Billiard Club
6 Lopareva Street

Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia

The oldest continuously operating chess club in the United States is a soot-stained spine of a building, shelved between the banks and offices of downtown San Francisco. It has tall, arched windows, a bust of the founder by the front door, and a private library on the second floor. It looks, in other words, exactly like a chess club. And then there’s Erick van Egeraat’s take on the genre in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia: a stainless-steel-clad magic bean, which sits, glimmering and voluptuous, on the Siberian plain. “I like to compare it to a chess player,” Van Egeraat says. “There’s a huge discrepancy between what you see on the outside and what happens within.”

What you see from the outside is a bulbous sheath of lozenge-shaped panels, sliced open like RoboCop’s visor and curved to suck precious sunlight into the interior chess hall during the day. Through the long Russian night, the exterior shimmers with a colored light show. The building might seem out of place some 2,300 miles from St. Petersburg, but empty spaces breed big thoughts. Van Egeraat defends its grandiosity, saying that the small oil town will grow into it: “The fascinating shapes and intriguing geometry are silent witness to historical growth and change.” Sure, but the steel? “It’s cold there,” he says. He needed something tough. That facade, for all its weighty meaning, is “practically maintenance-free.”

Inside, the 50,000-square-foot structure is, well, normal: a two-story auditorium—“a box within a box”—is ringed by a stone and pale-wood gallery that has classrooms and a bar for spectators of chess competitions, like the 2010 World Chess Olympiad. Irina Krush was there, on the U.S. Women’s Olympiad team. They came in fifth; things other than architecture were on Krush’s mind. “We just look for an acceptable venue,” she said. “We’re not admiring the architecture too much.” Indeed, Van Egeraat intended for the auditorium to host a variety of events—bleachers swing in and out to accommodate various crowd sizes, like in a high school gym. But while the building is designed, inside at least, to fade away, its setting steals the show. Asked what she remembers most about Khanty-Mansiysk, Krush passes over the shining blob at the center of town. “The cold,” she says. “And the beautiful autumn leaves.”