Kudrovo is located in the Vsevolozhsk district of the Leningrad region between the eastern border of St. Petersburg and the ring road (KAD). The total area of the site intended for the construction of a new residential area is 150 hectares. From the south it is bounded by the Murmansk Highway and the territory of the Mega-Ikea shopping and entertainment complex, from the north - by the Okkervil River (if not by the scenic beauty of the channel, then at least by name, undoubtedly the most romantic reservoir of the region) and the water protection zone of the Northern Waterworks … Kudrovo itself is a small village (less than 50 houses), located at the confluence of a river with an unnamed stream, around which there are endless picturesque fields and forests that have never really been explored. The city first came up with the idea to build housing here in the late 1980s, but then the economic and political situation prevented its implementation. Let's face it, in the end it only played into the hands of St. Petersburg - instead of another typical residential area, the city has a huge ecologically safe and free plot of land, which it can use as rationally as possible. And it is these attempts (at least at the stage of the initial development of the site) that are being made.
In 2007, the territory of the future city was divided among several investor-developers. The largest plot, located between the extension of Dybenko Street and the IKEA-Mega shopping complex, went to the Setl City development company, which organized an international closed architectural competition for the best master plan of the future residential area. It was attended by NBBG, Sweco, Arup and the creative tandem Gerasimov - Choban. The project of the latter was recognized as the most detailed and promising.
Evgeny Gerasimov and Sergei Tchoban began work on the master plan with the functional zoning of the territory. The architects reasoned sensibly: since there is a large shopping and entertainment center on the southern border of the site, which is also located near the road itself, it is most logical to form non-residential zones along it, which, on the one hand, can be accessible not only to residents of the area, but also to all citizens, and on the other hand, they will serve as a kind of noise protection buffer for residential areas. In the north, the future housing is separated from the less noisy highway by the Okkervil River, and in its floodplain the architects decided to set up a large landscape park with all kinds of cultural and sports facilities and active recreation areas. These two islands of social activity are connected by two parallel transport arteries, and between them the architects are laying a pedestrian zone, interpreted as the main planning axis of the entire district.
It runs from north to south, starting behind Dybenko Street and connecting another area of new buildings and the projected area located there with an overhead passage. Further, the axis crosses the landscape park, dives into an underground passage and again comes out to the surface, not a modest path, sprinkled with gravel, but a spacious comfortable boulevard, which ends on the southern border of the site with an area open to the office and entertainment center. Due to the numerous built-in parking lots, the pedestrian zone has a rather active vertical relief, which is played up with numerous staircases of various configurations and ramps, including green ones. This simple technique greatly diversifies the landscape of the boulevard, relieving the main street of the district from the feeling of monotony and hiding its true length. The development on both sides of the building is also dynamically solved - along the entire promenade there are shopping and entertainment facilities, and architects, designing volumes of the same number of storeys and areas (stylobates for high-rise residential buildings), tried to diversify in every possible way the plastic and decor of their facades.
On both sides of the pedestrian zone, there are residential neighborhoods, and between them there are green recreations with schools, kindergartens and household services. The microdistricts, of which there are only seven, and one office block are strung on the main axis in pairs, and are connected to the recreational zones by underground passages. And although at the stage of developing the general plan and concept, the issues of architecture itself are considered only in a first approximation, Gerasimov and Choban perfectly understood that such a large-scale construction of housing inevitably threatens to turn into, if not monotony, but repeatability of the visual environment, and the question of how to prevent this, worried them from the very beginning. It was immediately decided to design each microdistrict separately and in fact create seven different general plans, guaranteeing even in the case of typical development (of course, it is not planned here, but what does not happen in a crisis) a variety of panoramas and perspectives. And after this decision, the idea almost immediately arose to turn the neighborhoods into replicas of Western European urban planning. So, for Kudrovo, first “Barcelona” with characteristic perpendicular streets, beveled corners of houses and courtyards, then “Paris” with a central square in the form of a star and “Rome”, reminiscent of a forum in plan, were drawn for Kudrovo. The structure of other "named" microdistricts is predictable: "Amsterdam" is certainly a system of internal canals, "Berlin" - detached houses, "London" - linear development in the form of separate trapezoidal wedges, and "Madrid" - an enlarged Plaza Mayor with dense quarters around the perimeter.
It must be said that this very idea - to reproduce European cities in miniature - is not new and has long proved its economic viability in the segment of suburban settlements. However, using well-known place names as win-win brands, developers tend to limit themselves to a few superficial architectural quotes. In Kudrovo, the situation is exactly the opposite - thoroughly reproducing the structure of the historical centers of European capitals, which has been tested for centuries, the authors of the project deliberately refuse any stylizations in architecture. Evgeny Gerasimov is convinced that with such minimal means as the layout and proportions of individual volumes, it is possible to create an interesting associative array, referring to the traditions of a particular city, and, as a result, to obtain a space with a bright individual character.
