In St. Petersburg, on the Petrogradskaya side, Europe-City is being built - a new panel business-class apartment complex from the bureau Evgeny Gerasimov and Partners, ‘nps tchoban voss’ and SPEECH. It consists of seven multi-sectional nine-storey buildings, lined up along the red line of the street, and ten fourteen-storey towers, lined up in two rows of five in the courtyard. And the key word here is "panel", since those houses that are being built on the site of the former Electric plant in the triangle between Lopukhinsky Garden, the greenery of the Zenit Sports Complex and the Botanical Garden are nothing more than an example of modern industrial housing construction. However, it is not at all typical, at least for Russia.
The basis is taken from the series 137 of the St. Petersburg DSK "Blok", the range of which was expanded taking into account the requirements of this project. The base is monolithic, panel supporting structures rest on it. The facades will be executed according to a combined technology, combining a panel and a hinged structure with facing with ceramic tiles of several types: glazed, matte and natural uncoated. As a result, from the outside, nothing resembles typical panel houses. For each building, the architects have developed an original drawing of the facades, however, the variety is balanced - all options are subject to a common proportional grid.
Having dressed the houses with unequal ceramic facades, the authors not only hid the panel cut and seams, but also achieved the impression that not a series of multi-entrance plates stretched along the avenue, but several different buildings resembling old tenement houses, lined up under a single edge of the cornice. It turned out to be a St. Petersburg quarter in a new way - and it is pleasant to pass by along the street, and it is not difficult to identify oneself in space: “you know, I have already passed the blue house and walk past the white one with bright yellow inserts”. And the 45 ° beveled building at the intersection of Medikov and Pavlova, although it does not correspond to tradition, allows, when crossing the Bolshaya Nevka, to see the entire perspective of the complex from the Kantemirovsky bridge.
I must say that the project has changed a lot since
2007, when it was first announced by the same authors: then the site was divided into several strict square block-blocks. Now the facades of houses built along the perimeter of the site along the red line are recognizable and develop the principles already familiar to us from the works of both Sergei Tchoban and Yevgeny Gerasimov: first of all, in the emphasized variety of facades of each section, in fact, of each entrance, “Microcity“V forest”, the first stage of which was completed in early autumn. In this case, however, the solar brightness of the town near Moscow is somewhat humbled by the St. Petersburg environment: there is more relief than colors, and the geometry is more predictable, as the authors justly remarked, “rusty, rods, cornices, bas-reliefs” that make up the facade grid are quite classic motives, make houses more Petersburg-like, latently classicized. Evgeny Gerasimov's portfolio also contains a project suitable for comparison - an offer he made a year ago for the competition for Tsarev Sad, an elite residential complex opposite the Kremlin - however, both Microgorod is brighter, and Tsarev Sad in Gerasimov's version is more classic and more associative. On the facades of Europa City we get the sum, the result of the development of the plastic language and the approach declared by both architects five or seven years ago.
In addition to a new approach to the use of panel technologies and a harmonized variety of facades, the Europa-City project has another very important feature. Behind the front of seven nine-storey plate houses built along the street, designed by famous architects Yevgeny Gerasimov and Sergei Tchoban, ten fourteen-storey “point” towers with five different facades are hidden in the courtyard. young architects. The competition was supported by both the project customer - LSR Group, and the Committee for Urban Planning and Architecture of St. Petersburg and the St. Petersburg Union of Architects.
The creative competition was attended by Russian professionals under the age of thirty-five, the design period was set aside from October 14 to November 10, 2010 - the participants were required to develop the concept of the facade, as well as to show how a separate building and a whole group of ten houses would look like. Having considered the submitted projects, the jury of the competition chose one winner and four more prize-winners, among whom two hundred thousand rubles of the prize fund were distributed. Meanwhile, the main reward for the laureates was their inclusion in the project team and the use of their proposed concepts in further work. Five award-winning projects were finalized by the designers to the stage of working drawings and distributed among ten towers: each project will be repeated twice. At the moment, the construction of five towers in the courtyard of the complex has advanced the furthest in the implementation of the Europa-City residential complex: their facades have already been tiled and you can already see how the projects of the five winners of the competition for young architects were implemented.
In 2010, Roman Pak was named the winner of the competition for young architects with a project in which the facades were turned into an equilateral lattice of wide inter-window and inter-storey walls. In some places the white lattice is interrupted by colored indentations - as if behind the white "skin" there is a more interesting multi-colored matter. Implemented using colored ceramic tiles: the color turned out to be more restrained than in the project, but, on the other hand, from a distance it looks like majolica of the early 20th century.
Evgeny Kitselev in his Celling project proposed a somewhat more brutal solution, however, vaguely resembling the forms loved in the SPEECH bureau: houses are covered with a large lattice, where enlarged horizontal openings, combining two windows each, are built in strict diagonal logic, forming a brutal meander on the facades …
The abstractly beautiful idea of Yana Tsebruk and Oleg Tkachuk: to divide the houses vertically into light and dark halves, gave very simple towers (the glass vertical was an element of the task and is present in everyone, but the authors supplemented it with an orange niche at the bottom, somewhat defusing the laconicism of the solution). However, the authors of the idea had the upper half of the house in nine out of ten towers, and the project was called “games in zero gravity,” the light was supposed to keep the dark; in the tower built now, the bottom is black.
Ilya and Irina Fillimonov, on the contrary, made their facades especially colorful by placing gratings of a restrained purple hue in front of the windows - similar to an attempt to imitate lamellas moving parallel to the plane of the facade along the guides. Whether this decision was imitation or not, in reality it became a series of decorative terracotta inserts and black horizontal stripes, however, subordinate to the rhythm suggested by the authors.
Vladimir Peshkov and Konstantin Podvyazkin suggested making about a third of the tower light (almost white), and the rest terracotta.
The winner of the competition received 100,000 rubles, four other marked participants - 30,000 each, after which the towers were "mixed" with each other, having received, like outside, different facades, only from young architects.
*** We asked the heads of two large bureaus involved in this project, Evgeny Gerasimov and Sergei Tchoban, about what is important for them in this project.
Evgeny Gerasimov: “The most interesting thing in the whole project is, of course, the competition. It was carried out with the participation of the customer (SK Vozrozhdenie St. Petersburg), KGIOP, the chief architect at that time - Yuri Mityurev, the Union of Architects, whose chairman was Vladimir Popov, as well as with the participation of Sergei Tchoban and myself, as general designers of the entire complex. The aim was to select the five best projects of young architects for the interior “points”. About thirty projects were submitted, of which the jury selected five, and I think they were brilliantly executed. Five young architects were given the opportunity to implement the first large-scale projects in their lives. We will definitely carry out this practice in the future”.
Sergey Choban: “The urban planning concept was developed jointly with Evgeny Gerasimov. As we often do, one house was designed by Evgeny's bureau, the other house - by our office, which resulted in a parcelled structure of extended buildings that form the outer facade, inside which ten more separate towers stood. Due to this combination, we were able to increase the number of storeys of buildings in the depths of the block, and also achieved more varied buildings and improved apartment layouts.
The main reason for holding the competition and involving the winners in the work on the project was our desire with Evgeny Gerasimov to give young architects a chance to prove themselves. It seems to me that in St. Petersburg there is a big gap between the older, actively practicing, and the younger generations. This is one of the differences between the St. Petersburg architectural environment and Moscow, where major changes have taken place in recent years and an effective professional "lift" has been created, which has brought fame and orders to many young bureaus. In St. Petersburg, this process is not so active, so there was a desire to help young architects."
