The new residential area is planned to be built on a land plot with a total area of 39 hectares. Having the shape of a square and a trapezoid attached to each other, it is bounded by Matrosskaya Street, Levashovsky and Primorsky Highways and, on the one hand, is adjacent to the newly built area of five-story residential buildings, and on the other, with gardening and forestry. Thus, the main advantages of the future area are obvious at the first cursory glance at the map: excellent transport accessibility and proximity to the natural complex, proximity to the developed infrastructure of Sestroretsk and the Gulf of Finland nearby. All this suggested to the architects the idea of a comfortable and cozy settlement, in which the advantages of city life would be organically combined with the specifics of suburban housing, and the authors of the project willingly listened to the “voice of the context”. “Our feelings about the place happily coincided with the wishes of the customer, who was not going to build high-rise buildings here, but, on the contrary, asked to design a comfortable urban-type area with low-rise housing and developed infrastructure,” recalls Vladimir Bindeman. - Somehow the motto of this project - “Cozy suburb of the megalopolis” - came up by itself, and we focused on it in our work. At the same time, it was very important for us that the megalopolis in this case is St. Petersburg - a city with a very special town-planning history and recognizable regular planning."
As already mentioned, in the plan, the site is a combination of a trapezoid and a square - in fact, it is such a boot with a very wide square boot, although according to the cadastre these are two different land tenures, and the architects emphasized their legal independence by running a roadway along the joint border. The architects did not soften the geometry originally laid down in the plan, but, on the contrary, used it as the main compositional and planning technique, emphasizing the continuity of the new district with the planning of the center of St. Petersburg. In the trapezium, the authors inscribed exactly the same square as the neighboring plot, but placed it at an angle to the first, and, drawn into rectangular cells of the quarters, they became the two main residential areas of the future district. The “sock” is set aside for green spaces, in which engineering infrastructure objects are hidden, and in the alignment between two squares the architects divide the central square with a park - the main landscaped area of the district, surrounded by public buildings. By the way, the shape of one of them is also completely dictated by the general plan - it is a triangular volume, opened to the square, which is "embraced" by green spaces from the back side. On the opposite side, the theme of a green area is supported by a park, and a central green boulevard is launched perpendicular to the already mentioned street.
The authors of the project preferred the orthogonal grid not only to pay tribute to the historical planning of St. Petersburg. In the opinion of the architects, it is precisely this that allows creating a full-fledged urban fabric with its indispensable attributes - a street, a courtyard and a square. The undoubted advantages of such a layout are simplicity and clarity to any of the residents, as well as the guaranteed absence of traffic jams. And to make this grid visually boring and pleasant for life is the immediate task of the architects, and Vladimir Bindeman's team invested the most in its solution.
In particular, the authors propose to pave each block with tiles of different colors (the shades are selected close to each other, but still clearly signaling the pedestrian in which part of the district he is located), the streets should be traced with trees, each intersection should be solved as a small cozy square with so called "corners" - trade and catering establishments located on the ground floors of corner houses. Numerous options for the layout of townhouses will also help to visually diversify the environment - "Architecturium", which ate a dog in this genre so popular today, was able to come up with several fundamentally new types of block housing for Sestroretsk. The main know-how here is the rejection of the "apartment + plot" scheme. “We have returned to the original typology, when a townhouse is an apartment on the ground, that is, with a separate entrance, and not with a vegetable garden under the windows,” explains Vladimir Bindeman. - This allowed us, firstly, to abandon the hateful fences, and, secondly, to offer the customer the maximum range of sizes. In particular, our smallest townhouse has an area of only 65 square meters - a standard two-story apartment, but with a separate porch, and a two-story one. " And the development of the outskirts of the neighborhoods, which have a triangular or polygonal shape, are organized by architects with the help of sections arranged not linearly, but crosswise - this made it possible to avoid sharp corners and more picturesquely form the boundaries of the residential area.
“Since the future area borders on gardening, that is, summer cottages, our first thought was to organize the development in such a way that a belt of cottages would adjoin the country houses, and a ring of townhouses would close to the center,” recalls Bindeman, “but we quickly recognized that this is the most predictable and therefore uninteresting scheme. And we decided: since we are breaking the stereotypical Russian idea of a townhouse, then why not change the image of the cottage as well”. In the Architecturium concept, a cottage is not a fortress behind an impregnable fence, but a friendly city house, which has a small plot of land, but no fence, thanks to which it is a full-fledged participant in urban development, forming its “face”. And since a cottage is in every way more prestigious than a townhouse, the architects placed detached houses in the center of the district, around its main square.
Special mention should be made of the transport scheme of the future settlement and the solution found by Architecturium to the perennial issue of parking. Since it is economically impractical to make underground parking here, the architects proposed two types of ground parking - mini-lots for 5-6 cars at the ends of residential sections and parallel parking along the streets. And so that the latter do not interfere with either drivers or pedestrians, all streets, except for the central boulevard, are widened here and at the same time made one-way.
It is interesting that all the workshop employees worked on the actual architectural design of townhouses and cottages - the final project included more than 15 types of facade solutions and layouts of residential volumes, which made it possible to diversify the appearance of the future district as much as possible. Note that here the architects do not discover America - rather, we are talking about a high-quality exercise on a long-studied topic: in numerous combinations of cubes with consoles and enlarged window frames, in variations on the theme of flat and pitched roofs and alternations of blind and fully glazed planes, it is easy to recognize the signature style of Architecturium, which has always relied on the discreet style of the architectural solution. By the way, according to Vladimir Bindeman, even at the diversity achieved at this stage of design, the authors of the project are not going to stop - ideally, in their opinion, each quarter, with similar layouts and the same set of functions (playground, playground for quiet recreation and waste collection area, delicately solved in the form of an inconspicuous house) you need to give an individual appearance.
As already mentioned, the central square of the settlement is decorated with public buildings - a shopping and sports complex and an educational center, which will house a kindergarten and an elementary school under one roof. And if the residential areas are supposed to be decorated with light multi-colored panels (another point in favor of the visual diversity of the environment), then public buildings, in contrast to them, are designed in more solid brick. The only exception is the triangular "nose" of the shopping and sports space - the pointed facade facing the green square is completely covered with glass by the architects, decorating the transparent surface with multi-colored triangular bay windows. And in the composition of the same complex, which promises to become the main magnet of the public life of the area, the architects have included such an integral attribute of the city square as the clock tower. True, both the tower is modern and the clock is electronic - the upper part of the vertical dominant is designed as a glass cube rotating 360 degrees, which will be illuminated in the dark and serve as a recognizable landmark.
