Telezhnaya Street runs parallel to Nevsky Prospekt and in itself is no different from many other similar intra-district highways of the St. Petersburg center, drawn into regular rectangles. It originates in the outskirts of Vosstaniya Square and, having retreated from Nevsky a quarter, accompanies the main highway of the city along the entire exclusion zone of the railway line. As you move away from the station, its buildings become more rarefied and impersonal, and Telezhnaya breaks off quite suddenly, making a sharp turn to Alexander Nevsky Square and merging at its mouth with the main avenue of the city. The section connecting Telezhnaya with the square has its own name - Chernoretsky lane, and the plot found by the investor for the construction of a business center is located right at the junction of the street and the lane.
Not every St. Petersburg resident is familiar with Chernoretsky Lane by its name, but outwardly many people know it, since it is in it that the ground lobby of the Ploschad Aleksandr Nevsky-2 metro station is located. And the building into which this lobby is built - the production and service building of the Leningrad Metro - occupies almost the entire odd side of the lane. It was built in 1991 according to the project of the Lenmetrogiprotrans Institute, but with its impressive dimensions, massive concrete supports and faceless gray cladding, it may well pass for a work of brutalism of the mid-1970s. The part of the building where the entrance to the metro is located is somehow revived due to the semicircular end and large stained-glass windows, but an elongated volume with a standard lattice of windows is directed to the opposite side of the square, behind which the office-corridor structure is easily guessed. Despite its impressive length, the building does not reach the intersection of the lane with Telezhnaya Street, so for a very long time the intersection itself was "decorated" with a vacant lot. Sometimes the city and the developers had plans to build it up, but the modest area of this site initially doomed construction to absolute non-profitability. Until, finally, the idea appeared to attach a new building close to the existing one, fortunately there was a technical opportunity for this - the production building of the metro was turned towards the intersection with a blind end. All that in this situation was required from the architects was to comply with the normative indent of 5 centimeters. And, of course, to design a building that would be equally organically perceived both as an independent object and as a continuation of the existing complex.
In their search for an artistic image, the architects started simultaneously from two ideas: a building as a continuation of a very bulky volume and a building as a symbol of a crossroads, or more precisely, an acute angle formed in this place by a street and a lane. With the first, everything was more or less clear from the very beginning: the blind end had to be filled with architectural material as quickly as possible, draped, if you like, so that the numerous folds finally hide the dull concrete firewall five stories high. And the need to fix the angle in the urban space directed the authors' thoughts in a more constructive direction, and the image of a drapery building was reborn into the image of a hinge or gear building. The architects designed their office complex as a bunch of glass prisms fanning out from the center of the building, and in terms of this unusual composition really resembles a gear most of all.
To keep such an unusual "bouquet" and somehow stylistically combine it with the neighboring building, at the level of the 3rd-6th floors, a bundle of prisms is pulled together by a round stone belt, which, both in color and the rhythm of the window openings, picks up the tectonic structure of the house, created sixteen years earlier. … With its spherical shape, this element brings the long-awaited completeness to the composition of the neighbor: now it seems that the building belonging to the metro has a very long main facade and two rounded side ones. At the same time, the architects of "Studio 44", although they reproduce exactly the proportions of the square windows of the neighboring building, they deliberately knock down their rows at their facility. So wallpaper, glued side by side, creates a sense of predictability and order in the room, but it is worth slightly shifting the sheets relative to each other, and the same room is filled with scraps of unsaid phrases and nuances of additional meanings. Plus, the stone mesh encircling the glass cogs of the cogwheel does not always fit closely to them, and this also gives the building a visual lightness and dynamism.
The incompleteness of its composition also introduces a certain intrigue into the perception of the object. From the side of the intersection, it is perceived as a full-fledged cylinder with strange stalactites inside, but in fact a good third is cut off from the cylinder, otherwise it would not have been able to lean against the neighboring building. The same is true with the inflorescence of the office blocks themselves: it seems that the architects have depicted an eight-flower in the plan, but in fact there are only five petals. And this deception of the building only plays into the hands - it attracts glances, makes you think, and those who do not remember anything at all from the course of school geometry - to fantasize uncontrollably.
Since the building completely occupied the allotted building site, in order to organize the entrance zone, the architects had to somewhat cut the two lower floors and thereby force them to retreat from the facade line. Glass prisms make a similar indentation again after they emerge from the stone embrace - and this is not only a tribute to the laws of symmetry, but also a completely practical desire to organize viewpoints.
Despite the external pretentiousness of the composition of the business center, its internal layouts are very rational. The whole volume is based on a radial structure with a composite rod in the form of a small round atrium. This core contains elevators and bypass galleries leading to offices, and a trapezoidal block of utilities is located close to the neighboring building. The atrium is crowned with a conical skylight, and in order for daylight to penetrate all eight floors of the formed well, the floor of the bypass galleries is made of frosted glass.
Formally, this object is just an extension, but Studio 44, even in the conditions of an extremely small area and the neighborhood with a monstrous volume, managed to design a building with its own character and voice. With the help of its dynamic composition, it captures a sharp change in the direction of the street, and the stone "wrapping" not only made its appearance complete, but also helped to compensate for the weight of the building next to it.
