Petmol, one of the largest producers of dairy products in St. Petersburg, moved to the Parnas industrial zone a few years ago, and in its place the new owner of the territory intends to build housing. The decision is more than logical: residential quarters predominate around the plant, even from Moskovsky Prospect, Petmol has been separated all these years by a line of apartment buildings. A closed international architectural competition was announced for the project of the residential complex, one of the participants of which was TPO "Reserve".
The building plot has an elongated shape, oriented from north to south. On its long sides, this rectangle is bounded by Moskovsky Prospekt and Varshavskaya Street parallel to it (so far only projected), along the short sides - by the Obvodny Canal Embankment and Krasutsky Street. However, the factory buildings do not occupy it entirely: due to various restrictions, production developed in a cascade, from the southwestern border of the site to the northeastern one. Their closest neighbor is the lobby of the Frunzenskaya metro station with its inevitable exclusion zone, which cuts into the site with a huge undeveloped wedge of land. Another limitation is associated with an architectural monument: on the territory of the plant, closest to the Obvodny Canal, there is a cattle yard, built in 1823-1826 by the architect Joseph Charlemagne, which should not only be preserved, but also surrounded by relatively low buildings.
Having analyzed all the circumstances, Vladimir Plotkin decided to split the projected residential area into two independent parts. In addition to purely urban planning considerations, the architect also took economic considerations into account. A house with a lower number of storeys, located next to the architectural monument and overlooking the arc of the Obvodny Canal, has every reason to become an object of a higher class and can be brought to the market by a developer as an independent product.
“Of course, when you think about building St. Petersburg, the first thing that comes to mind is the classic regular structure with closed quarters, which is so typical for the city,” says Vladimir Plotkin. “And this is exactly the model we proposed to implement in the case of a more expensive house located closer to the metro.” The architect closes the eight-storey volume into the perimeter and places it in another "box" - already existing historical one-storey buildings. Monuments, thus, turn into a kind of outposts of a new house, which is the best fit with their brutal industrial appearance. The architects propose to raise the inner courtyard of the house above the ground - it is located on the roof of a one-storey car park (floor elevation is -2.5 m), is completely landscaped and turns into a garden for residents. By the way, the apartments on the first level have two floors - they are a kind of townhouses, from which the center of St. Petersburg can be reached by metro in about fifteen minutes.
The main part of the residential complex could not become a quarter. In this case, all conceivable and inconceivable norms of insolation of apartments would be violated, and the courtyard spaces would turn into shaded cold wells. And then the architects limited themselves to an allusion to the classic quarter building, having developed a planning scheme based on the layout of several courdoners.
The complex has a pronounced longitudinal axis parallel to Moskovsky Prospekt, on which open residential quarters with greened courtyards, designed on two levels, are "strung". The dimensions of this ridge (the internal dimensions of each block are 60-70 m) are large-scale buildings in a slightly more central part of the city, located on the other side of the Obvodny Canal, namely Krasnoarmeiskiye Streets, which, together with Egorova Street, form just such a grid on the map. The situational plan clearly shows that the architects reproduce this drawing almost thoroughly, only in the area of the former barracks the role of the ridge and transverse ribs is played by the streets, and in the master plan of the residential complex, on the contrary, houses.
In order to fill the courtyards with the maximum amount of sunlight, the central axis is not fully built up: in the plate of the main longitudinal building, the architects propose to make gaps almost the entire height of the building - only the last three floors are connected by crossbeams that emphasize the unity of the volume. The number of storeys of the side "wings" decreases perpendicular to the avenue and Varshavskaya street, gradually approaching the scale of the historical buildings on the Obvodny embankment, and the border of each courtyard is marked with the help of low and compact single-entry houses - their appearance helps to "get" the number of square meters specified by the customer, as well as separate the space reserved for residents only from the street. As you might guess, in this part of the residential complex all courtyards are raised to a higher level, landscaped and made completely pedestrian - they "flow" into each other, thanks to the bridges designed by TPO "Reserve". Parking and infrastructure facilities are located in the stylobate part.
The project, developed as part of the competition for the best concept of a residential complex, did not imply a detailed study of its architecture. But the minimum proposals for the external appearance of the buildings were still made. The authors have developed 8 types of facades that can be combined in different sequences, thereby creating a rich visual environment. The alternation of dynamic vertical and horizontal divisions and the use of materials of different textures and colors relieve the residential complex from the feeling of massiveness and make it recognizable.
