The 22-storey building is unique for St. Petersburg not only for its architectural and constructive solution, but also for its function - it is the first headquarters of a financial structure built from scratch in the city, since until now banks have been solving the “housing issue” by buying out or renting mansions in the historic center. The architectural solution of this object is emphasized modern, but in the interior design two approaches are implemented at once. In the office part of the complex (from the 4th to the 21st floor), which was managed by the Moscow bureau SPEECH Choban / Kuznetsov, the emphasis was placed on comfort, energy and respectability of the interior, and in the solution of public areas, the authors of the project, using the same modern materials, reflected the historical experience of St. banking architecture.
The interior of the entrance lobby and the elevator halls of the bank was designed by the Berlin bureau nps tchoban voss. According to the chief architect of the project, Valery Kashirin, the architectural and planning solution was based on the idea of the connection of times - with the help of modern expressive means, the authors wanted to emphasize the continuity of generations and inscribe the first bank of the 21st century among the best similar buildings of the previous centuries. To do this, the architects paneled the walls of the entrance lobby with glass panels depicting the historic banking buildings of St. Petersburg.
The drawing is applied to glass using the digital printing method, which is so familiar to the Langensiepen and Benois business center projects bureau. True, if in these two buildings the main facades are solved in this way (in the first case, the drawing "tells" about the lost beauty of the architectural decor of past eras, in the second it demonstrates enlarged sketches of theatrical costumes by Alexander Benois), then in the case of the bank, the favorite technique stepped inside the volume and from the side of the city it is not readable in any way. From the outside, the building of Bank Saint Petersburg looks like a completely transparent hyperboloid cylinder, mesmerizing with its futuristic shape and plastic, but inside the glass appears before the visitor in a completely different hypostasis - the photographs applied to the transparent panels give it an emphasized materiality and carry it away not into the future, but on the contrary, into the past.
There are bank facades of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries - only 13 “portraits” of monuments. Let's name, for example, at least such buildings: the State Loan Bank (1790-1793, architects L. Ruska and A. Adamini), which is at the corner of Demidov Lane and Kazanskaya Street, Russian Bank for Foreign Trade (1887-1888 V. A.) on Bolshaya Morskaya, the famous Art Nouveau banks designed by Fyodor Lidval, and the Main Treasury on the Fontanka embankment arch. D. M. Iofan and S. S. Serafimov. “After the idea was born to organize a certain abstract street in the entrance hall of the bank, consisting of historical bank buildings of St. Petersburg, we compiled a graphic collage of fragments of buildings, taking into account the complex configuration of the plan of this room with its rounded corners, height difference and narrowing towards the elevator hall, - recalls Valeria Kashirina. - St. Petersburg photographer Yuri Molodkovets took a large number of photographs of the facades of buildings and their details. All these photos were carefully retouched by us from the signs of modernity - ventilation grilles, air conditioners, plastic blinds, and adjusted to the perspective of a pedestrian."
Freed from the signs of our time and slightly enlarged fragments of historical facades, they build a historical street, creating the illusion of a very dense, visually rich urban environment in the space of the entrance zone. And this illusion is extremely true - thanks not only to the retouched details, but also to the absence of visible fastening elements of the glass panels. This technology of the so-called "concealed installation" is carried out by hanging panels with fasteners installed in the rear surface of the glass on a steel post-transom substructure. Fragments of buildings are also used in the design of columns, elevators and floor elevator groups, and the control and indication elements of the latter are built into the panels with delicate luminous "windows".
In order to emphasize both the well-deserved age of the buildings removed, and the fact that we are still looking at photographs, and not fragments of the buildings themselves, the architects chose sepia as the main color scheme. The columns and the central part of the lobby with a height of 8.2 meters are illuminated, which gives this space a special "amber" glow, and the "native" properties of glass - its ability to reflect light and everything that is around - allow you to impose a multitude of glare, thanks to which the image of the entire zone is in constant dynamics. The main theme is supported by natural stone flooring and a large-sized granite plinth running along the walls and columns, and, incidentally, this emphasizes the continuity of materials - glass and stone are present on the facade of the building.
All other premises of the bank, including the areas for working with clients from the 1st to the 3rd floor, dining rooms and an office part, are decorated in an emphatically modern style. Moreover, it is important to emphasize that these two parts of the building - public and office - are by no means opposed to each other, on the contrary, the upper floors pick up and develop the declared theme of natural materials and the palette of the main lobby, sustained in cream-beige and umber colors. And if the first floor of the complex can be considered an ode to the once flourishing financial business of St. Petersburg, then the stake is placed on the comfort and rationality of the working zones, which, without a doubt, is the key to the present and future prosperity of a single bank.
