The site in question is bounded by two main transport arteries of the Vyborg district of the city - Prosveshcheniya Avenue and Ho Chi Minh Street. On the square in front of the metro, they converge at an acute angle, and the section, taking into account the necessary distance from the roads and the subway, takes the shape of a trapezoid. For a long time there was a market here, and in the neighborhood they tried more than once to build some kind of multifunctional complex, but somehow it didn’t work out. As a result, the market has become so dilapidated that it is subject to demolition, and it is high time to liquidate the abandoned foundation pit with a pile field. Since 2007, this territory has been owned by the Pioneer Group of Companies.
At first, it was planned to build a business center in the alignment of two transport arteries. His project was commissioned by the workshop "Sergei Kiselev & Partners" and in February 2009 received all the necessary approvals, but the implementation of this high-rise complex was prevented by the crisis. The project was frozen for a whole year, and then the management of the Pioneer Group of Companies decided to revise the concept of the complex: in particular, after a year of economic upheavals, it became quite obvious that a business center in this area of the city was not needed. The project of a new multifunctional complex, now completely focused on inexpensive housing and an equally inexpensive hotel, was commissioned by the Evgeny Gerasimov & Partners workshop. And if "SKiP" turned their complex into a high-rise and town-planning dominant, radically changing the system of visual landmarks of the area, then their St. Petersburg colleagues took a fundamentally different path.
The complex consists of two buildings - residential and hotel. The height of the first is twenty floors (this is the maximum allowed by the PZZ), the second is sixteen. The apartment building in the plan resembles the letter P, the "legs" of which are slightly dispersed in different directions, repeating the trapezoidal shape of the site, and the hotel block is a wide tick, opened towards the house so that together they form a large courtyard. At the same time, the architects smooth and round the corners with which the complex faces the metro, thereby softening and leveling the pointed promontory formed by the intersection of two highways.
The residential building and the lower building of the hotel are not connected to each other, and the passages between them form a connection between the outer city life and the inner courtyard. Its vast area allowed the architects to place green areas, recreation areas, and the walking area of the kindergarten here. The entrances to residential buildings are also oriented to the courtyard, but the hotel and built-in office premises (there are very few of them) can only be accessed from the street.
The recent economic crisis directly affected the functional program of the complex designed by Evgeny Gerasimov: one-room apartments prevail in a residential building here, and the main room stock of a two-star hotel is made up of small studios. Interestingly, the latter provide for the so-called kitchen niches - places for cooking - which will allow the hotel to be used for long-term accommodation, for example, employees of companies or students attracted from other cities.
The facades of both buildings are designed in the same way. Both are faced with slabs of light yellow, beige and brown shades with white horizontal inserts. The only thing that differs the residential building from the hotel is its larger divisions, concealing its true height, as well as rare glazed bay windows, built on a plane in six-story "columns". From a distance, pale chocolate facades are perceived as wooden, which, on the one hand, makes the complex "natural" and resembles a nearby park, and on the other hand, promises to enrich the palette of the area with warm tones, which so far are dominated by gray colors.