Krestovsky Island, gradually building up, turns into a reserve of elite housing in St. Petersburg, and it is not the first time that Evgeny Gerasimov has worked here. Suffice it to say, the House by the Sea was recently completed here, built by Gerasimov in collaboration with Sergei Tchoban, which immediately received several professional awards. Here, a few years earlier, Yevgeny Gerasimov built a hotel complex "The Fifth Element" and designed several more residential buildings, including on Deputatskaya Street.
Deputatskaya is one of the most picturesque and quiet streets of Krestovsky Island. It runs along that end of it that faces the Elagin Island and is cut off from Kamenny Island only by the mercy of the Krestovka River. The street echoes the smooth outlines of the coast and still remains quiet, almost idyllic: there is only one cottage village nearby (it belongs to the Constitutional Court), and two low-rise residential complexes are under construction. So the place is park-like, almost deserted, and even near the water.
As for the address "Deputatskaya, 34", until very recently the hotel "Sportivnaya" was located here, built for the Olympics-80 and later reborn into the hotel "Krestovsky Island". It was a remarkable building in its own way, the decoration of the main facade of which was a reconstructed five-story Art Nouveau building inserted into it. Lavishly decorated with colored granite and facing bricks of various shades, figured sandrids and tiles, it was enclosed in a brutal frame of two tall stairwells made of faded Soviet brick, and was an interesting example of how capable (or not capable, because opinions always diverged) coexist and get used to each other architecture of different eras. The city authorities, however, did not find such essays in the material with a total area of about 10 thousand square meters interesting, and the building was sentenced to demolition.
The main reference point in the work on the future residential complex for Yevgeny Gerasimov was the river. A building that can be seen from the water at a glance, in St. Petersburg, by definition, can be neither modest nor faded. So, succumbing to the charm of the place, Evgeny Gerasimov designed a palace-house or, even more precisely, a castle-house.
However, considering the resulting architecture, you can find many different allusions in it at once. First of all, this is, of course, Venice. Where else can you find a brick palazzo with white stone details, proudly standing by the water? Now, of course, in many cities there are similar things, but the Venetian palaces are definitely the primary source of the image. Inspired, which is quite obvious, by the well-known phrase "Venice of the North" … But in Venice, as well as in other cities, such palaces usually stand among their own kind, and not in the middle of nature. Therefore, the house looks like the embryo of a stone city, established on the coast in anticipation of future neighbors.
But while the house is alone, among the birches it looks, frankly, unexpectedly - its rectangular volume is very strict, very closed and closed. Hence another prototype - the castle. More precisely, you can see here a hint of the palaces of Paul I, the Mikhailovsky Castle and Gatchina. It was Pavel who began to transform the palaces of St. Petersburg, previously frivolously magnificent or refined classicism, into romantic castles. He built the Mikhailovsky Castle, and thanks to him, in the middle of the Gatchina fields, columns and galleries were replaced by towers, simple windows and walls.
If we return from Pavlovsk prototypes to the house on Deputatskaya, then the romantic image of the castle is hidden here inside the courtyard. The courtyard (by the way, a courtyard-well typical for St. Petersburg, but glazed from above in a modern way) has rusticated square towers in each of the four corners with small rectangles of windows arranged spirally-diagonally. Typical stair towers - especially since there are really stairs inside. An interesting solution, and the coincidence of image and function seems to be especially important in it.
These two themes, the palace - the Venetian palazzo and the palace-castle, are important in meaning, and the form demonstrates other, closer and more recognizable analogies. Thus, rusticating the plinth would be appropriate in an Italian palazzo of the 16th century, but equally in the architecture of St. Petersburg in the 19th century. The triumphal arch of the entrance to the courtyard, with dense low columns and sculpted deciduous capitals, points to (again) Italian palazzo and, at the same time, to the St. Petersburg Art Nouveau of the early 20th century (for example, you can recall the Nobel house of Lidval). It is possible that this "fragment of modern architecture" in this case became a tribute to the memory of the unfortunate monument of the early 20th century, which was initially enclosed in a crude modernist framework, and then completely demolished.
But acroteria in the form of griffins, installed on the corners of the roof - they directly point to the famous St. Petersburg Bank Bridge, this direct quote is clearly designed to be recognized even by a tourist. On the other hand, the silhouette of the open wings above the cornice indicates Art Deco, as does the diagonal pattern of brick ornamentation on the walls and the light rhythm of the upper tier. Large, three-story-high windows, completed with semicircular tympanes, simultaneously resemble loggias of Venetian palaces, windows of English castles and decorative inserts of "Stalinist" architecture, which, as you know, is a variant of Art Deco. And I must say that the architecture of the house, in principle, balances on the brink of Renaissance - Historicism - Art Deco (and the latter is also on the verge between "Stalinist" and "international" options).
In any case, architectural historicism, about which so much can be said just by looking at it, neatly drawn and quite confidently operating with a variety of analogies (both from a number of masterpieces of world architecture and native Petersburg ones), is now rare. For the once suburban, and now elite-modernist, Krestovsky Island, this house is likely to become an inoculation of urban, and even "palace" architecture, which, Evgeny Gerasimov is sure of this, is quite appropriate for modern elite housing.
