On July 1, the first stone was solemnly laid in the foundation of the temple complex on Kronstadt Square in St. Petersburg. Metropolitan Varsonofy of St. Petersburg and Ladoga said at the laying ceremony that there are not enough churches in the sleeping areas, since they were not built there in Soviet times, and expressed the hope that now, when a new church appears in the district, everything will be better there with God's help. The complex has been designed by the architectural bureau of Evgeny Gerasimov since 2006 (and on a charitable basis - without a fee), which does not specialize in temple architecture at all, although it is known for its works in both modern and historical styles. The architects treat the project of the temple complex with love: for them, first of all, it is a public building against the background of many successful commercial orders, the authors are happy to do something for the city, they not only carefully approached the specifics of the religious building, but also, among other things, carefully thought out the improvement of the square for the parishioners. In architecture, the architects combined several historical allusions, placing them in the laconic framework of modern style to the extent that it is available to modern churches in Russia. ***
Kronstadt Square is, in fact, not quite a square, but rather graceful in St. Petersburg - not a round, but an oval road junction at the intersection of Leninsky Prospekt with Stachek Avenue on the way to Peterhof, beyond the Kirovsky district. Inside the oval there is a large flat lawn, around - the modernism of the seventies interspersed with the sealing buildings of the two thousandth, in a word, nothing elegant, except for the rocaille shape of the lawn and the tempting "road to Peterhof" (well, to Strelna) there is no here - the terribly familiar building of the post-Soviet outskirts, however, is relatively clean, green and spacious, not too built up. A tram still runs here.
Before meeting the junction, the avenues form a sharp arrow - somewhere in the center of St. Petersburg there would be “five corners”, and here there was a square, on the western “nose” of which the architect Ivan Knyazev in 2003 built the chapel of John of Kronstadt, later, an altar was consecrated in the chapel, making it a church, since the construction of the planned temple complex was delayed. But to the east, by 2009, a large residential complex appeared with the obligatory name "Monplaisir", which became a rather ordinary background for the future temple complex, the construction of which was delayed after the construction of the chapel for ten years.
Yevgeny Gerasimov's studio has been working on the project since 2006, and, as stated in its author's description, the architects made an attempt here "to harmoniously link new architectural forms with the features of the national spiritual tradition."
The building of the existing chapel stretches along Leninsky Prospekt; the new buildings of the complex - the Cathedral of the All-Merciful Savior and the parish house behind it - are symmetrical, strung on the axis of the bisector of the triangular section. In the lower tier of the cathedral, a baptismal church is planned, another small chapel is built into the clergy building, above the roofs of which only its head is visible.
The features of the new, as well as conservative allusions, are read well enough in the project.
In addition to general church requirements, Evgeny Gerasimov's project focuses on various layers of context, both in the broad sense of northwestern Russia, and in the narrow one, starting with the nearest church of Ivan Knyazev. However, this purely romantic temple in the spirit of the neo-Russian branch of Art Nouveau (see.
here and here) the new buildings are rather opposite, they are stricter and more serious: straight lines, simple stereometry, a granite base and even a helmet-shaped head - all together add up to a different message characteristic of the new time (let's say, more serious; this temple is not a fairy tale and not decoration).
The eight-pitched roof with three windows built with a "slide" under the gable and a number of decorative inserts certainly belongs to the Novgorod and Pskov traditions, recalling that St. Petersburg adjoins the lands of the Russian north-west, although it did not exist during the construction of the Church of the Savior on Ilyin. It was not there even during the times of Novgorod Sofia, the contours of the central head of which and the frequency of the windows probably influenced the drawing of the chapter in the project of Yevgeny Gerasimov. Three high vestibules originate from the Church of Paraskeva Pyatnitsa on Torgu - in the architecture of the temple on Kronstadt Square, as we see, at least two or three Novgorod sources are found: a kind of bow to the former working-class suburb of secular St. Petersburg to the old bishopric of these lands, Veliky Novgorod. The belfry of two pillars with large beams can also be understood as "Novgorod".
Although we must pay tribute to the other part, less tangible, but still present in the project of the context: frequent drum windows, roof slopes, a helmet-shaped head, two towers at the entrance, - an attentive observer can recall the Naval Cathedral in Kronstadt (here we recall that the square is then Kronstadt). The rest of the 1913 cathedral is unlikely - too lavish. In addition, the contours of the plan of the cathedral under construction: thin walls, a square naos, criss-crossing pillars - St. Petersburg, almost Empire, - as well as a granite basement, and flat walls - although the reliefs conceived on the walls (under the cornices, more precisely, under the sloping roof offsets) send us back to Novgorod, as well as the pseudo- and neo-Russian architecture of St. Petersburg.
Meanwhile, in the architectural sense of the project, the main thing is probably not a set of sufficiently clear allusions, but whether they managed to be tied into one knot, generalized, take (let's say) the differential from the conservative tradition, bringing it (to some extent) to modernity. In this case, geometry became the basis for generalization, which is noticeable even in the author's description, where the exedra of the apse is called “a quarter of the sphere”. The degree of geometrized generalization is quite high here, it is this that prevents architects from drowning in context and stylization, and it also allows us to mention the Savior on Ilyin and Kronstadt St. Nicholas Cathedral.
Moreover, the generalization grows, and the degree of recognition of prototypes falls from the central core, the quadrangle of the temple, to the periphery. Literally: the chapter with a row of high windows led directly under the cornice, which traditional church architecture has never done, looks fresh, and the western vestibule cut through with a vertical stained-glass window, by the standards of modern Russian church architecture, is almost a challenge to the foundations. The bell tower is related not only to the Novgorod belfries, but also to the memorial stelae of modernism, so simple are its supports under a heavy tong on brutal consoles. In a word, the architects seem to have really succeeded in fulfilling their task - to find a balance between a strictly interpreted tradition, context and a modern interpretation of the form, which allows, on the one hand, to fit the temple into the surrounding modernist city, and, on the other hand, to adapt the inevitable for the church building "literature".
