Let us recall in a nutshell that the subject of this competition, which was widely covered in the press, was the territory of the Scientific Center "Applied Chemistry" with a total area of about 9 hectares, located in the very historical center of St. Petersburg, between Tuchkov and Birzhevoy bridges, right opposite arrows of Vasilievsky Island. By 2016, according to the plan of the developer - VTB Bank, a quarter with a five-star hotel, elite housing, a shopping and office complex, Boris Eifman's Dance Palace and the first pedestrian embankment in the city - the Embankment of Europe, which gave the project such a sonorous name … The competition was held for the best architectural and urban planning concept for the development of the territory, but in practice, the review of general plans resulted in a competition of space-planning concepts, in which both the TEPs and the plastic of each building were worked out in detail. The Studio 44 project was no exception, and the luxurious layout of the European embankment, made by Nikita Yavein's workshop, became the undisputed leader of the audience voting at the exhibition of works by the participants of the competition.
In their arguments about the future of the quarter, the architects proceeded from the fact that the site was located at the junction of the "three Petersburgs" - the sea (the water area of the Neva), the city of classical ensembles (the Palace Embankment is in line of sight) and the area of tenement houses (the development of the Petrogradskaya side). Give preference to one of the three cities or make a selection? The authors came to the conclusion that not only the location of the site, but also its rather impressive area and the multifunctionality of the proposed development are in favor of combining various architectural techniques and styles. To build up 9 hectares with palaces alone or, on the contrary, with buildings copying the style of apartment buildings of the early 20th century, would knowingly deprive the quarter of its own face. Therefore, the territory bounded by the Malaya Neva on the one hand and Dobrolyubov Avenue on the other, Studio 44 puts together like a puzzle of three, at first glance, completely different sectors.
With its southern border, the new quarter opens onto the embankment of the Neva and faces Vasilievsky Island and the Admiralty, and a little to the east is the Peter and Paul Fortress. This is Petersburg in the first half of the 18th century, a city that made Peter's dream of the sea come true. The architecture of this time is, first of all, the architecture of canals, embankments, shipyards, berths. And therefore, on the embankment itself, Studio 44 designed four residential buildings, facing the river with ceremonial courtyards and having their own harbors, which cut into the adjoining territories with narrow tongues. The public "Lower Park" is broken on the embankment, and the Courdoners rise one floor above its level and turn into "Hanging Gardens", where you can climb the main stairs. Thus, the embankment becomes three-tiered: the lower level, near the water, is intended for ships, the middle one is for the strolling public, the upper one is for residents of houses, and, as a result, it acquires a very picturesque relief, where straight sections alternate with those thrown over the harbors. bridges and descents to the water and piers. However, not only the visual appeal was supposed to ensure the love of the townspeople for the new embankment: in the role of numerous additional "magnets" there were supposed to be shops and restaurants located in the first floors of buildings and under the platforms of the "hanging gardens". Such a compositional solution, on the one hand, is read as a tribute to the Peter the Great era, inseparable from the river and the sea, and on the other hand, it is perceived as a fantasy on the theme of modern Dutch residential complexes, for which mini-canals and greenery are essential conditions for comfort and coziness. The placement of buildings with their ends to the water, so uncharacteristic for St. Petersburg, is striking. The architects explain this by the desire to fulfill the technical task as accurately as possible, which prescribed to provide a view of the river for the maximum number of apartments.
On the cape overlooking the Neva, towards the Winter Palace, there is a hotel complex, whose majestic volume and plasticity are given, in the words of Nikita Yavein, "a powerful tuning fork of classical Petersburg." The complex consists of three buildings, two of which are parallel to Dobrolyubov Avenue, and the third is oriented towards the embankment and therefore, together with its nearest neighbor, forms a "tick" open towards the river; the space on the promontory between the buildings is occupied by a fully glazed atrium with a winter garden inside. The idea of making this corner completely glass is, of course, unclassical; but very successful - in this project the hotel lobby has been turned into a giant convex window for contemplating the most classic views of St. Petersburg, which literally flood the hotel lobby. The architecture of the 19th century is reminiscent of long vistas, open axial compositions, a clear structure and "monotonous beauty" of the facades.
Two other buildings overlooking Dobrolyubova Avenue - the shopping and office center and the Dance Palace - are designed in an emphatically modern style, and this fully corresponds to the architectural liberties of the Petrograd side - the most, perhaps, chaotic in terms of development and at the same time the most European district of St. Petersburg. The shopping and office complex is a little more restrained, since its inner street faces the Prince-Vladimir Cathedral of Antonio Rinaldi, and in the plan it is a square, cut in half by an arcade. Each of the triangles, in turn, has several transparent inset-atriums that fill the impressive buildings with a sufficient amount of daylight. Yavein himself calls the Palace of Dance "an architectural transcription of the plastics of modern ballet", and, perhaps, anyone who has ever seen the works of leading choreographers of our days, this definition will tell that this is a very, very radical building. It is formed by many planes that clung to each other at different angles and from a distance really resemble dancers frozen in complex steps. Strictly speaking, according to the terms of the competition, it was not required to design the Dance Palace (just a couple of weeks later, an architectural competition was announced in St. Petersburg for the project of Boris Eifman's theater itself), but, on the other hand, to develop a general plan without imagining what its culmination looks like. point is hardly possible. Nikita Yavein tried to indicate that the Dance Palace should be a modern and dynamic structure, because it is here that it acts as a center of attraction at both the district and city level.
Three building blocks of such different nature converge in the center of the quarter, forming a miniature square of complex outlines with arcades, a fountain and a clock. It, like its prototypes - the squares of the old cities of Europe - becomes a place of concentration of public life at the walls of the theater. A kind of urban planning paraphrase of that time can also be considered the three-ray, incorporated by "Studio 44" into the master plan of "Embankment of Europe". From Academician Likhachev Square to the theater, a new street is being laid - Teatralnaya - a kind of visual corridor, at one end of which is the Palace of Dance, on the other, on the other side of the Neva, - the Hermitage Theater and the Savior on Spilled Blood. The second visual corridor leads from the Dance Theater to the cradle of the city - the Peter and Paul Cathedral. And, finally, the third ray is the Exchange line, passing between the hotel and residential complexes and closed by the Rostral columns and the Exchange.
It is well known that Nikita Yavein and his team have vast experience in design and construction in the historical center of St. Petersburg. However, even a thorough knowledge of the structure of the hometown, according to the architects, does not exempt from the need to start work on a project with an analysis of all the town planning features inherent in a particular site. Rather, on the contrary, it obliges: the more you know the city, the more delicate you treat it and the more attentively you listen to the “voices of the past”. And we must admit that attention to the "genius of the place", for which the workshop of Nikita Yavein is famous, over time gives more and more diverse and interesting results. The appearance of the business center "Linkor" was influenced by the neighborhood with the famous cruiser "Aurora", the reconstruction project of "Apraksin Dvor" was based on a thorough study of the history of the development of this quarter and the return of its original linearity, and the "Embankment of Europe" was interpreted by architects as a complex system of mirrors reflecting the city in front of her. To be more precise, there are as many as three cities - sea Petersburg, classical Petersburg and modern Petersburg.
This project by Studio 44 is not just an attempt to create a city within a city, but the quintessence of the urban development of St. Petersburg, a kind of visual aid demonstrating what lessons modern architects can learn from the legacy of bygone eras. And as such it will undoubtedly “work” successfully as an unrealized project.
