Kovensky Lane is located in a not entirely touristy, although historical and pleasant for walking part of St. Petersburg, between Liteiny and Ligovsky Prospekt, in an area built up with apartment buildings of the 19th - early 20th centuries with rare Stalinist patches. The undoubted gem of the lane is the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes, a building of the early 20th century with a concrete vault and a brutally romantic granite facade.
The church was built in 1903-1909 according to the project of Leonty Benois and Marian Peretyatkovich for the Catholic community at the French embassy. It is known, among other things, for the fact that in Soviet times it was the only active Catholic church in the city.
It was here, in the "united security zone", that in 2004 it was allowed, and in 2008 construction began. Six years ago, the project was completely different: a 9-storey building with an underground parking, designed by Pyramida LLC, caused indignation among city defenders and letters addressed to the city authorities (see “Living City”). Then the project was radically reworked (more precisely, made anew) in the workshop of Yevgeny Gerasimov. Recently the construction was completed and even among the people who are strict with the innovations of the Pereburzh residents, the resulting house evoked a restrained acceptance: "the new house … tactfully treated the environment and partly even supplemented it" - writes Konstantin Budarin in Art1, approvingly noting that … the architect abandoned "neoclassical exercises" …
If we talk about an example of a modern building embedded in the fabric of a historic city, this house is an undeniable stroke of luck. Evgeny Gerasimov managed not only to reduce the number of storeys and move the underground parking to the level of the first floor, avoiding digging a pit among the historical buildings, but also subtly play on the antithesis of the modern - historical, building the architecture of his house on an almost classic for the 20th century juxtaposition of modernity and historicism - the theme, which, in principle, cannot be more relevant for a new building erected in the historical center.
A residential building looks out onto the red line of the lane, which at first glance is completely stone. The light roughness of the Jurassic stone restrainedly reacts to the rough chipped rustic granite of the Benois-Peretyatkovich Church; the French theme is picked up by embossed inserts rhythmically scattered along the facade of the new house - royal lilies and patterned crosses. They are responsible for the “literary” component of interaction with the context, that is, they almost literally point to the neighborhood with the French church and the image of medieval Romanesque assigned to this place by romantic architects of the early 20th century.
However, the authors look at the southern French theme through the prism of the 20th century, which is especially felt when looking at the stone volume of a residential building from the most advantageous northeastern point, from the side of the church and school building of the 1930s (architect David Buryshkin). Due to the fact that, stepping back from the walls of the church, the architects arranged a miniature city square in front of the house - not a square, but a paved stone square, as in Venice or in the same southern France - and so, thanks to the indentation of the square, we see two facades at once stone volume. The facades are exactly the same, covered with a regular grid of windows with equal walls, which is why the volume acquires some completely crystalline, metaphysical qualities. There is no firewall, facades of the main and secondary, but there is strictly organized matter, the embodied geometric rule. The topic, I must say, is not new, but on the contrary, very popular in the restrained-classicizing direction of architecture of the 20th century from the cubic EUR-a of Mussolini to the fine grids of David Chipperfield (and, in particular, Sergei Tchoban, in partnership with whom Evgeny Gerasimov recently built several buildings).
In a word, the residential part of the complex from the advantageous northeastern point seems to be a perfect stone cube, cut through by equal rows of windows, an ideal form that resides in a space that seems to be a little more ideal from this. Despite the abundance of walls and "stone", from the point of view of classical architecture, the building still looks too cut, looks more like a dense stone lattice than a traditional array with windows. If the metaphysical Art Deco of the 1930s had decided to build something Romanesque, it would have been a similar house; stylistically, this partly connects him with the already mentioned school building. It would seem that the Benois Church and the Buryshkin school are terribly far away, above all ideologically, but nevertheless stylization, seasoned with Art Deco techniques, allowed the new building to find a common language with two so different neighbors. If we look at the new house from the opposite, western side of the street, then here it is built into the line of apartment buildings in St. Petersburg - this is the third theme of architectural discourse, another homage to the context.
We can say that the living space facing the red line of the lane has absorbed the entire conservative part of the score: textured stone, meaningful crosses and lilies, geometric rigor - everything serves the context, the structure of the streets, responds to neighboring buildings, carefully introducing its own. The house-diplomat speaks no less than three languages, is moderately conservative, moderately tucked up, is not alien to reflections on the vicissitudes of history … It is not surprising that such a respectable gentleman came forward.
The second volume, which is part of the complex, is completely opposite to the first, strictly educated conservator. About the architecture hidden in the backyard of the office part, I would like to say that this second house is a hidden oppositionist, a modern glass body inside the historic quarter. The office part, of course, is not entirely glass, it would be too simple and straightforward. But her atrium courtyard is completely glass, and the passage to it also consists entirely of glass. It is located behind a miniature square between the church and a residential building (which we have already mentioned) and strung with this mini-square on one common axis, perpendicular to the line of the street. The perpendicular - the symbol of the opposite - is more than appropriate. The courtyard is opposed to the street, glass is opposed to the stone of the city facade.
But the high-tech material of the future not only opposes itself to traditional stone and hides, nursing its futuristic highlights in the calm silence of a business courtyard. She also observes, frames and demonstrates the city, admires it. The glass corridor builds a promising interaction between the two courtyards and the city - leaving the sterile office brilliance, we plunge into the city layer by layer, gradually passing to it through the theatrical and architectural performance. The theme played out here is completely classical and, if you think about it, it is dictated by the circumstances. It could not be otherwise: offices are a modern thing, they are supposed to be built of glass (at least for the sake of lighting workplaces), but glass is not welcome in the city center. A stone residential building represents and conducts a dialogue, while the office hides inside, which is why the energy of its glass image only intensifies, acquires unexpected spectacularity and tension instead of routine office boredom.
However, there is a transition between classics and modernity: in contrast to the glass atrium, the outer wall of the office part is designed in the spirit of holland wall - walls of smooth Jurassic stone with a free rhythm of windows. The technique, which was extremely popular in the 2000s and is now rather boring here, is quite appropriate, since it forms an intermediate step between the rigid, classicized mesh of a cubic volume and the completely transparent glass of the atrium. The transitional motive "splices" the halves of the complex - it is difficult to say, perhaps, without this reconciling layer, the architectural statement would have sounded sharper; but, on the other hand, the transitional facade adds not only complexity to the solution, but also emotional harmony.
In addition to the theatrical theme "classic-modern", the complex has its own secret. To the left of the new office part, that is, right behind the church, is the building of the former Krümmel garage, which has been renovated and incorporated into the office building.
Around the 1909-1910 garage building, known as the first building in St. Petersburg with reinforced concrete floors and flat roofs and endowed with the status of an identified heritage monument, controversy also unfolded during the construction of the Kovensky 5 complex. The builders demolished the adjacent four-storey building of workshops, which did not have a conservation status, although, according to historian Boris Kirikov, it was a single complex with the garage. The demolition of the workshops caused indignation among St. Petersburg city rights activists: many decided that they had demolished the garage itself, and although the project developers denied this information, not everyone believed them. Meanwhile, it should be admitted that the garage is intact, the workshops have been demolished.
Having absorbed the building of the garage, the new complex thus literally "rooted" into the historic city, became a part of it, just as the buildings of the early XX century became, when the difference between modernity and history was already realized, but not as sharp as now, when any intrusion into the context of old buildings is perceived as hostile. Meanwhile, the interaction between the old, the new and the stylized began in Kovensky Lane not ten, but a hundred years ago. The church with its technologically advanced concrete vaults and Romanesque façade; a garage with the first flat ceiling and thin supports in the city - at one time they were on the wave of progress (I wonder what we would say now if they started building a parking lot behind the altars of the church?). The building of Evgeny Gerasimov picks up and develops the theme, sharpens the contradiction, continues the dialogue, which allows it, with all its delicacy, to remain noticeable, not suppressed by the context, but to be a full-fledged, and therefore alive, part of the city.
