From an urban planning point of view, Malokhtinsky Prospect, where the business complex is built, is a winning place in every sense. On the one hand, exceptional transport accessibility - the proximity to one of the main embankments of the Neva River and the Novocherkasskaya metro station provides the complex with convenient access both by car and underground. On the other hand, excellent view characteristics - the complex itself is visible from the Sverdlovsk and Sinop embankments, and from the windows of its offices you can see the view of the Neva, the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, Smolny Cathedral, the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Consequently, the architects were entrusted with an increased responsibility - to create not just a comfortable and spacious class A office center, but to design a new urban dominant that could become a decoration of the embankment and organically fit into the panoramas of the Neva. Proceeding from the scale and significance of this task, the general designers were chosen - the bureau "Evgeny Gerasimov and Partners" and "SPEECH Choban & Kuznetsov", for which the fame of the most successful architectural tandem operating in the city has long been established in St. Petersburg.
The business complex consists of two elongated 9-storey rectangular buildings and a 22-storey tower. Among its closest neighbors today there are both industrial facilities and housing, but in the future, the development of the district will be predominantly of an office nature, so St. Petersburg Plaza can be considered the first stone from which the creation of a large public and business zone began on Malaya Okhta … The main initiator of the creation of the "St. Petersburg Plaza" was the bank "St. Petersburg", so it is not surprising that its headquarters are located in the central tower of the complex. And "St. Petersburg", by the way, became the first financial structure in the city, which carried out the construction of its own office "from scratch" (before that banks preferred to buy or rent mansions in the historical center).
When designing the town-planning dominant, the architects carefully took into account both the dimensions of the existing buildings and the high-rise regulations adopted for Malokhtinsky Prospect. The compositional solution of the complex is entirely dictated by its location and surroundings: the avenue in this place is separated from the embankment and goes at a slight angle to it, so that between the Neva and the Plaza there is a noticeable spatial gap, in which, in particular, there are two historical 4-storey volume. Thus, the architects needed to visually emphasize the location of the complex on the "second line" and at the same time make it quite noticeable from the very embankment and the water area of the river. And if the historical buildings are built along the river, the authors place new office buildings perpendicular to it. The facades facing the river, flanking the tower, are about a third narrower and at the same time twice as high as architectural monuments, which turns them into a kind of backdrop for the latter. In many respects, it was for this purpose that glass was chosen as the main facing material - emphasizing its belonging to modern architecture, it does not visually displace buildings of past eras.
The central tower is also fully glazed, which is a transparent, oval-shaped cylinder of irregular shape. The front facade, facing the Neva, has a concave surface, and the end of the building is cut obliquely. The building expands noticeably upward, overhanging the square in front of it with a massive "nose", due to which in profile it resembles a giant futuristic vase. The press, however, quickly found other prototypes - the new bank has already been dubbed the "electric kettle". However, no matter what this glass volume looks like, its huge advantage is the absence of sharp corners and broken edges intruding into the St. Petersburg sky - on the contrary, it seems to merge with it, absorbing the surrounding spaces and views. It is also interesting that the complex curvilinear shape of the building and the hyperbolic surface of the facade required special calculations, with the help of which the geometric parameters of all glazing elements were set. This is the first time a similar installation of a facade made of linear metal profiles with curved double-glazed windows has been implemented in Russia.
The architectural image of the complex as a whole is based on the contrast between the plastic form of the high-rise, completely solved in glass cladding, and the more “material” volumes of office buildings. The facades of the latter are formed by stained glass elements with stone inserts in the overlapping area. In fact, a large-scale stone grid is superimposed on top of the transparent shell, and each of the buildings has its own layout pattern. In one case, the structural glazing is interrupted by horizontal stone belts, and part of the facade is covered with sun-protection structures made of metal lamellas. The "softness" of this building (located to the left of the tower, if viewed from the embankment) is also emphasized with the help of rounded corners, as well as division into three small volumes connected by glass bridges. In another building, the facades are divided into square "cells" two stories high, and here completely glazed squares and stone ones with two rows of narrow windows alternate in a checkerboard pattern. And if the street facade is completely solved like a chessboard, then the surface facing the tower also has a three-part structure: stone squares are concentrated on the sides of the building, and the center is left transparent. Engineering superstructures on the roofs of the buildings are united by a decorative wall - a screen with finishing with metal panels - and the basement part of the buildings and the facing of the steps of the external stairs are made of natural stone and match in color with the walls of the stylobate part of the complex, which is the same for all three volumes and accommodates a two-level parking lot …
Despite all its dynamism and accentuated modernity, the composition of the St. Petersburg Plaza complex is quite consistent in the spirit of the St. Petersburg urban planning tradition, when the main volume is flanked by buildings of lesser number of storeys and they all crown the esplanade, organized from the Neva embankment to Novocherkassky Prospekt. And this makes us hope that the complex will give an impetus to the development of not only new functions of Malaya Okhta, but also a qualitatively new architectural environment of this area.
