The subject of the design was the site at the intersection of Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt and the embankment of the Karpovka River. Once there was a furniture and carpentry factory of F. A. Meltzer, two buildings of which have survived to this day, having recently acquired the status of newly discovered heritage sites. There are other monuments on the site: for example, "Korlyakov's House" - a miraculously survived example of low-rise buildings on Aptekarsky Island when it was a country suburb, as well as the "Grand Palace" cinema, which survived its last reconstruction in 1912-1913. Both the factory buildings and both of these historic chamber houses were not only to be preserved, but to be made an organic part of the new residential quarter. However, this did not exhaust the challenges facing the architects. “It was equally important to maintain the scale and majestic structure of Kamenoostrovsky Prospekt, one of the most imposing streets in St. Petersburg,” says Nikita Yavein. “On the other hand, we tried to ensure that the new architecture absorbed not only the characteristic features of the development of the Petrograd side, but also the special flavor of the place with its industrial red-brick style”. The answer to such a difficult challenge of the place was the project developed by Studio 44.
Collecting into a single composition several volumes so different in style and scale, the architects quite predictably interpreted the new complex as a large lapidary form that fills the existing gap in the urban fabric and serves as a background for historical volumes. The facades of the "House of Korlyakov" and "Grand Palace" are carefully restored - the first turns into a cafe, the second becomes part of the built-in retail premises of the newly built residential complex. At the same time, architects deliberately leave only these two houses on the red line of Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt - the facade wall of the new complex recedes from it by 3 m deep into the site, which makes it possible to accentuate the volumes of monumental buildings and visually reveal their depth.
As for the buildings of the factory, their front facades are also being restored, and the structures and all structural elements, including load-bearing walls, stairs and even columns, are preserved, making it possible to create large-sized apartments a la loft inside. The restored red-brick buildings also seem to sprout from the “body” of the new volume, but their merger does not seem forced, since the architectural solution of the new buildings is a modern interpretation of the industrial style. The laconic plastic of the facades, faced with brick or natural stone, is diversified only by differently decorated window openings (in the form of French balconies and niches recessed into the plane of the wall), and the sloping walls of the two upper floors, into which terraces-loggias are embedded. Such a trapezoidal silhouette, in spite of its geometric generalization, exactly fits the scale of the development of Kamenoostrovsky Prospekt, making new houses noticeable in the street panoramas, but not discordant with them.
The overall compositional solution of the new residential complex, chosen by Studio 44, also helps to achieve a sense of continuity. “It was in the area of Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt and Karpovka Embankment that architects at the beginning of the 20th century decided to open the continuous front of street development and began to build houses with courdoners. This layout seems to us to be advantageous both from a compositional point of view and from an economic point of view, so we decided to use it in our project,”says Nikita Yavein. In plan, the complex resembles a square root sign with a curved tail or the letters V and I, connected from above by a plank in such a way that between them, in fact, a wide rectangular courtyard appears. And since V, with its sharpening, goes exactly to the intersection of the avenue and the embankment, the front yard turns out to be completely open to Karpovka. On the reverse side, inside the "tick", there is a second courtyard, but its triangular shape and small dimensions predetermined the creation of an atrium here.
Courdoner really has a lot of advantages: in addition to the expressive and very ceremonial composition that a house with such a courtyard acquires, it also allows you to combine high building density with good insolation of housing and provide the maximum number of apartments with excellent species characteristics. It is also important in a megalopolis that such a house acquires its own comfortable and green space, which at the same time actively interacts with the urban environment. “Perhaps the only thing that distinguishes the 21st century courtier from the historical prototype is his communication role,” continues Yavein. - If before it was designed for carriages to approach the front doors, now, with the arrangement of in-depth parking lots, there is no need for this. The yard becomes a place for rest and walks for the residents of the building."
The dimensions of the projected courtyard - 18x80 m with the height of the cornices of the buildings framing the courtyard at the level of 17.5 m - also fully correspond to the historical prototypes, making it possible to create a comfortable space with classical proportions. Architects make its semantic and plastic dominant a red-brick chimney - another element inherited from the factory by Studio 44, and the courtyard is separated from the embankment by a massive portico, also made of bricks.
But the second courtyard, as already mentioned, is planned to be blocked at the level of the second floor and divided into front gardens for apartments of this level. Under the same private gardens there will be retail space, for which the architects have invented a spectacular skylight to illuminate.
