The ten-story residential building is currently under construction on the odd side of Chapaeva Street, in the eastern part of Petrogradsky Island (better known as the Petrogradskaya Side). From the Peter and Paul Fortress here - twenty minutes on foot, from the fashionable at the beginning of the last XX century Kamennoostrovsky Avenue - ten. But to the east, closer to Bolshaya Nevka, fashionableness was already replaced a hundred years ago by brick buildings of industrial buildings, although very romantic in today's opinion - right in front of the house, which is now being built according to the project of Sergei Oreshkin, there are buildings of the former paper-spinning manufactory, and there was another and the piano factory. The factories were grouped, probably for technical reasons, closer to the river, and the odd side of Chapaeva Street still remains not “loose” in St. Petersburg, - as Sergei Oreshkin accurately described it: built up intermittently, but with trees. Nearby: lyceum, bomb shelter, apartment building, sports ground. However, the neighboring houses still needed to provide insolation according to the standards, as well as to make the appearance of the new house organic to the historical environment.
What Sergei Oreshkin did, "stretching" the romantic image of the northern Art Nouveau castle house from Kamennoostrovsky Prospect here, to the once semi-industrial, and now residential and office, east of the Petrograd side.
The two sections of the house are connected like the letter "T", the asymmetrical crossbar of which is stretched along the red line of the street, and the "leg" goes into the courtyard, deep into the trapezoidal section. The house is being built according to modern standards: reinforced concrete frame, ventilation facades, one tier of underground parking and public functions on the ground floor. Its external appearance becomes a kind of theatrical decoration, where stone, plaster of light shades, thin tinted bindings of large windows, cast-iron railings of balconies and even grilles for installing air conditioners - everything is inscribed in one general plot, very romantic, according to the author's own admission. Indeed, the resulting image of a house, on the one hand, evokes stable associations with the "northern modernist style", on the other hand, the modernist style of autochthonous apartment buildings in St. Petersburg is more severe and restrained, and the scale of the large dachas on Kamenny Island is much smaller, so it seems that in this case, the architect crossed the echoes of St. Petersburg Art Nouveau with light fabulous undertakings of the earlier, 19th century - on the periphery of consciousness, no, no, and some kind of Neuschwanstein castle by Ludwig of Bavaria looms.
The volumes and decorativeness of the main facade grow from bottom to top. Thus, the first floor of the main facade recedes into the depths, freeing the sidewalk for passers-by and forming an open street gallery, without columns, on consoles. The volume of the second floor is almost devoid of plastic, and only on the third do bay windows appear, uniting the next three (from the third to the sixth) floors and casting curved shadows downward. The walls between the bay windows are cut through by three wide windows, of which the middle one is accented with a striped relief, a bit like the open doors of Parisian blinds, but softened by a characteristic wavy line.
Above the fifth floor, a dance of wide balconies with openwork gratings begins, - a balcony is an important thing in architecture and in the history of St. Petersburg, no bad weather interferes, - to the Kshesinskaya mansion, for example, with its important balcony for history, it is also fifteen minutes walk from here; both at the beginning of Chapaeva Street and at Malaya Posadskaya there are such balconies on bay windows. The motive was widespread at the beginning of the 20th century, however, then it was usually interpreted more restrainedly, here balconies grow not only on bay windows: going down to the floor below, they then climb to the very top and decorate four penthouses, placed under sharp Dutch tongs.
Openwork lattices, supported by the fractional rhythm of the window frames, successfully dematerialize the mass of the house, captivate the viewer with a game supported by larger forms that also behave mobilely: the tongs grow into the plane of the facade, and it is already difficult to understand where exactly their lines intersect; at the top, they alternate with high attic windows. The details of a complex, in places fractionally decorative, in places wavy composition seem to come into motion, not forgetting, however, in their smooth shift about the laws of balance and general harmony.
The balconies grow into stepped terraces in the southern part of the house - which certainly could not have been in northern Art Nouveau houses, and is often found in modern architecture - the steps of the terraces are caused by the requirements of insolation, but they are perfectly grouped, growing to the tower above the crosshairs of the house sections. Thus, the tower is found not at the corner, which one might expect from stylization, but in the middle, it is carved out of the mass of the building as its core, almost a donjon, or almost a town hall - perhaps this is why the theatricality and associativity - it is quite difficult to combine all the requirements of modernity with the historical image, and plastic play, mobility, lightness, transparency not only add "positive", but also make the rules of the accepted style framework more flexible. As if we had found a modern apartment building at that moment of growth or even hesitation: whether to turn into a town hall, a castle, or an Italian villa is a kind of moment of meaningful growing up, thinking about our own image, a frozen plastic search (why not a tribute to deconstruction?) …
Sergei Oreshkin has repeatedly used the stepped composition, which allows to obscure the significant height of the building and its volume, in his other buildings. In this case, it is interesting to note that the terraced facade faces a building with a three-stage facade, built more than a century ago, located a little further across the road, entering into an active dialogue with it. In connection with the topic of the dialogue, we also note that the ends of the main facade resemble the firewalls of neighboring buildings: they have no windows, and the only decoration is the unaccented cells of strict rectangular niches, delicately structuring monotonous planes.
The architecture of the house is complex, as is the task set before the author. To begin with, the thin part of our society, which is generally interested in architecture, was divided into two halves: those who deny stylization by definition and those who consider it the only possible one in historical cities, especially in St. Petersburg; positions are mutually exclusive. One way or another, it is known that Sergei Oreshkin boldly works both with an acutely modern form and with historical stylizations - for example, in the same 2013 he designed a large
a residential complex on the embankment of the Karpovka River, also designed in the spirit of the architecture of the beginning of the century, but a little later and austere: neoclassical or even Art Deco. Both here and there, we observe a fairly confident mastery of the style and proportions of the source - always adjusted for modernity, making us understand that the house has arisen now. However, modernist projects are relatively predictable, and for buildings associated with historical styles, embodiment is especially important, in which the quality of implementation of every detail requires attention. However, there is not long to wait, the house, apparently, will soon be built.
The house was recently awarded the Urban Awards 2014 as "The best business class residential complex under construction in St. Petersburg."
