The history of this project goes back almost ten years. The construction investor, United Finance and Construction Corporation (UFC), acquired the land plot on Tverskaya Street in the late 1990s, and at the very beginning of 2000, Evgeny Gerasimov had already begun work on the architectural and planning solution of the future elite complex. No one doubted that this should have been exactly elite housing - the house is located five minutes from the Tauride Palace, its garden and a little further from the Smolny Cathedral, that is, in the most historic part of St. Petersburg. True, in Soviet times there was no housing here - the house was built on the territory of the former Avtoarmatura plant, the buildings of which KGIOP allowed to demolish. It is also noteworthy that directly opposite - at 6 Tverskaya Street - the same investor owns another plot, on which a residential building was also built according to Gerasimov's design. For various reasons, including the crisis and the whims of the construction market, house number 6 was later designed, but built earlier than its counterpart.
The fundamental difference between the plots located opposite each other was that the house 1A in question is located between two existing historical buildings, and house 6 is actually located on the corner, next to the Old Believer Church of the Sign, white, and pyramidal-massive, like sugar head. The church was built at the beginning of the 20th century by the architect Dmitry Kryzhanovsky in the Art Nouveau style. The buildings of Evgeny Gerasimov now surround it on two sides: the earlier house number 6 reflects it with its curved glass bay window, and house number 1A does not plastically interact with the monument of a century ago, it just stands, almost opposite, and does not particularly react to the church. But he has another neighbor - the nearest to the left, the apartment house of I. I. Dernova, better known as the "House with a Tower", the same one where Vyacheslav Ivanov lived and spent the so-called Ivanov Wednesday. Architecturally, this house is interesting as an example of a successful combination of restrained eclecticism and modernity. According to Evgeny Gerasimov, this neighborhood turned out to be decisive for him. The "House with a Tower" set the height of the building under construction nearby, and the theme of bay windows, and the general style of the house, which neatly, almost like a hundred years ago, builds its main facade into the red line of the street.
And what a facade! It is covered with a brutal, very embossed gray rustic coat. Its rocky relief surface is interspersed with ironed folds of polished stone and shiny glass, while large angular bay windows hang over the sidewalk. All this is especially impressive at night, when the rough rustic background is accentuated by the backlighting.
The prototype of the facade is quite obvious: these are apartment buildings of the Art Nouveau style, or rather "Northern Art Nouveau", or more precisely one very romantic (perhaps the most romantic) house of St. Petersburg Art Nouveau in its "northern" variety - "House with Owls" on the Petrogradskaya Side, the same apartment house of Tatiana Putilova, built by the architect Ippolit Pretro in 1907. The similarities are obvious: the harsh gray color and rough surfaces of the walls, large windows with high trapezoidal ends, plus one more detail - brown bindings of a funny pattern, in the lower part of the frame are wide, and in the upper part of the glass are broken into a grid of small squares. The three named elements are enough to understand that the new facade of Yevgeny Gerasimov refers to a certain (possibly the best in the city) monument of the "Northern Art Nouveau". The architect explains his preference for this particular, the most severe, coldish, but Wagnerian-inspired variety of Art Nouveau: "… I wanted to make architecture in tune with our time, but it seems to me rather harsh and in some ways even ruthless."
There are, however, more differences than similarities - speaking about his new building, the architect also emphasizes that he did not want to “make Art Nouveau in its purest form”, striving for a more “free and modern stylistic expression”. And we must admit that the modernity of this house is as obvious as the fact that it appeals to the image of Pretro. The fact that the house is larger and the facade is just the tip of the iceberg (the rest is hidden in St. Petersburg-style courtyards and underground in a modern way) is not even that important. Another thing is more interesting: taking the language of Northern Art Nouveau as a basis, the architect not only adapts it to a larger scale (the five-storey house of Putilova next to him would seem chamber), but metaphorically, of course, turns the logic of the chosen style inside out. Or he puts it upside down.
First of all, Art Nouveau, and especially the northern one, preferring to dress their houses in rough "fur coats", observed and emphasized the tectonic logic: the rust is larger at the bottom, softer at the top, the higher - the lighter and flatter. It is not so here - the lower tier is faced with a flat, brilliantly polished stone, the ephemeral surface of which competes with the glass surfaces of showcases. Above, from the third to the seventh floor, is rustic, while the eighth floor is smooth and recedes from the red line.
It is easy to see here, firstly, the favorite principle of the architecture of modernism, which, unlike classical architecture, does not emphasize the tectonic "growth" of the facade from the ground, but, on the contrary, seeks to show its facade "hung" on the house, or even "levitating", soaring above the ground. Modernism expresses this theme either through the open supports of the ground floor, or, more often, with stripes of solid glass, which are so similar to air cushions. Secondly, the solution of the upper part is also similar to the reception of a glass penthouse, accepted in modern architecture, only here it is more stone and lined with (also gray) metal, which, however, does not change the very essence of the matter - it is facilitated and hides from passers-by behind the cornice. the house pretends that it is not eight, but seven stories; well, now nowhere without it. The simple and energetic lines of bay windows, by the way, also evoke associations not so much with the refined prototypes of modernity, as with the honest directness of the avant-garde balconies. Thus, despite the quite obvious use of the vocabulary of northern modernism, the architect builds it into the syntax of modern modernism.
The resulting fusion is no stranger to theatricality and even a certain pose, metaphorical exaggeration in the game with the forms of a century ago. The giant windows at the top, the bindings of which are so well in tune with Pretro's house, are crowned with "kokoshniks" platbands made of flat gray striped stone, with gigantic (exactly one floor high) castle stones painted on them, with a metal rib growing in the center of each of them - providing a logical transition to metal cornices. Which are supported (this is one of Gerasimov's favorite tricks) by simple and rarely spaced rectangular consoles, one per wall.
Platbands, sandriks and kokoshniks - everything that frames windows in classical architecture and historicism (Art Nouveau did not favor platbands, so their elements here are also “leaked” pieces of classics) usually protrude from the plane of the wall. As well as rustic blocks, if they form a window or corner. Here, on the contrary: the rusticity of the walls forms a kind of material of stone, from which the frames of the windows are removed by means of not elevation, but flattening; a kind of anti-rust is obtained, which is taken out of the real rust in order to indicate the contours of the window (a technique that is not very common in Russian architecture,but well known in English). This technique is similar to a photographic negative (rapidly disappearing from our lives into the past). The entire facade as a whole, and the townspeople will see exactly the facade, is similar to such a negative of northern Art Nouveau: it seems that the contours coincide, but it feels like the opposite is true.
This is a strong feeling, and the house attracts the eye - at the recent "Zodchestvo" stands with it were very noticeable. The romance of a stone fur coat and the recognition of historical details are here side by side with a rather meaningful stylistic game, and, what is especially remarkable, the architect somehow manages to keep this game within the framework, to make it not too intrusive, to avoid both direct stylization and outright irony. This is a house-improvisation, a successful set not for a movie, but for a play about the city of St. Petersburg, which was exactly one hundred years ago.
