It cannot be said that the sports infrastructure of St. Petersburg is now experiencing its heyday. The newest large sports complex - the Ice Sports Palace - was opened fifteen years ago, in 2000. Other large-scale stadiums are much older: SKK Petersburg was built in 1980, the Yubileiny sports complex in 1967; in 1994, the Petrovsky Stadium, which has existed since 1925, underwent reconstruction. The new Zenit stadium on Krestovsky Island has been under construction for ten years. On the other hand, the surge of interest in the design of district and quarterly health and recreation centers in the country ended in the nineties. Now, under the Gazprom for Children program, sports complexes are being built in many cities, including in the outskirts of St. Petersburg: technically they are well equipped, but they amaze the imagination with exactly the same facades.
We talked about architecture intended for sports, its specifics and possible prospects with the head of the A. Len bureau, Sergei Oreshkin. The bureau's portfolio includes one of the largest indoor water parks in Russia (despite the fact that it belongs to a hotel) "Waterville", which is also the first park in St. Petersburg with water attractions; sports complex "Reebok"; multifunctional complex with a swimming pool on Veterans Avenue; the sports complex of the Academy of Civil Service; training base of the football club "Zenith"; "Platonov Volleyball Academy", built in 2006, albeit with significant design changes, which the authors still regret; and a number of other sports facilities projects. Now the architects of A. Len are building the SKA hockey stadium, and last year Sergey Oreshkin's bureau for the first time took part in an international competition for a sports complex, multifunctional, but focused on badminton - in South Korea, proposing a building-hieroglyph curved with a light stroke.
Archi.ru:
Tell us about the competition for the project of a sports complex in Korea. Why did you decide to participate, what were the main conditions?
Sergey Oreshkin:
- We were invited to participate by our German colleagues. At that time, we worked a lot on sports facilities, in addition, South Korea is a small country, but dynamically developing. We looked at the site and we liked the place - very beautiful, although so far somewhat depressing, but with good prospects: next to a large block, laid by the state, and a river. In addition, this is a region with history, there are many reserves and museums.
The city hall wanted to get an interesting bright "landmark", an object that would attract attention. However, it seemed to us that the competition program has largely deviated from what was originally conceived. The global crisis began, China, which used to build a lot on the projects of "stars", outlined the opposite position - against difficult-to-use architecture - well, for example, Zaha Hadid and other world celebrities. And Koreans also changed their preferences, wanted functionality, relatively speaking, "cubes". We, "A. Len", are supporters of comfortable and contextual architecture, if an architectural monument is not needed in this place, then it is not needed. But in Korea, I believe, it was in this place that a “monument” was needed - but in the end, the winner of the competition was not a monument, but a utilitarian warehouse for sports.
This competition seemed to me very useful from the point of view of ideology: we don't design like that. The difference is that the building is not made only for sports, it can host any public event. According to the TK, it was required that a large hall - eight to ten badminton fields in size - could be used, for example, for a concert.
The Ukrainian project won the competition: a simple building with translucent walls made of milky glass is a good, decent project. But in my opinion, these walls will not allow to give the interiors a sufficient amount of light, and in sports, especially badminton, light is very important and strictly normalized.
Is your project more successful?
- This is a personal opinion, but the projects of the winners seemed to me too international, unidentifiable. Such buildings can appear anywhere. Why build an interarchitecture? We tried to approach our project “evolutionarily” - to understand how these people look at life, what was in this place before - it was an interesting associative game. In addition, badminton is a sport of trajectories, the shuttlecock never flies in a straight line, it flies along twisted parabolas, along thin parabolic lines. Which is what we tried to implement. I believe that our project has been done at a very high professional level.
By the way, what should a good sports facility look like in the context of, for example, St. Petersburg?
- We live in a city that the whole of Scandinavia "breathes in the side", and with your skin you feel that Finland used to be here, there were many Finns, Karelians, Ingrian people living here, this is the Finno-Ugric territory. I don’t know how anyone, but I feel it for sure, and everything leads to the fact that you make architecture to some extent Scandinavian.
On the other hand, it seems to me a bit ridiculous the combination of an expensive bent structure made of glued wood inside with a cheap facade outside in those children's sports complexes that are now being built in St. Petersburg at the expense of Gazprom. This is somehow irrational. If we talk about a sports school for a family, quarterly, like on Veterans Avenue, then this should be a cozy area where it would be nice to be and where you would like to return. Therefore, we have such a philosophy - a lot of wood or wood-like material, an area with a large visor, an entrance element where people can meet, talk, and where it should not drip, there should be no snow. And then the function begins. The state is writing a program - we want a skating rink, a swimming pool, a universal gym. How was it with the sports
school in Sosnovaya Polyana. In theory, this is a hall where you can do everything, plus opportunities for people with disabilities. A smart idea, and I hope we succeeded.
Before that, we had several visits, we drew a lot for
football club "Zenith", football club "Petrotrest" ordered something. And then the hockey players came and a lot of work started, for the third year we have been working with the SKA hockey club. There we do everything: landscape, general design, exclusive architecture, we work a lot with suppliers, we make interiors ourselves.
The project of the SKA sports complex won the competition, and then was significantly redesigned. Why and how has it changed?
- In the competition project, we wanted to convey the feeling of movement: how a hockey player moves across the field, what a stick looks like, in what position the hockey player is at the moment of an attack. It turned out that there are many twisted lines, so the architecture turned out to be twisted, consisting of intertwining lamellas. There were also vertical slats - light panels, on each of which different motives could be displayed. In the end, the customer said that since everything is crooked and oblique, the building will be difficult to operate.
Then another idea was born: let it be a large block of ice, and there are transverse cuts on the ice. The result is cubic architecture, a very simple, constructivist thing, based on the ideas of the avant-garde of the twenties. But with elements of a certain symbolism: skate traces, puck trajectories. We offered to take the simplest structure of the farm, but draw it all beautifully and use natural expensive ceramics in the facade decoration.
What, in your opinion, is the specificity of designing sports facilities - for example, how much more complicated are they than shopping centers?
- Much more difficult. You need at least four different types of sites, it is very difficult to ventilate, especially on ice. I know only ten people in Russia who are capable of correctly making ice cold supply schemes. It is difficult to maintain the temperature of the ice when the temperature outside changes, plus people who come to the competition give off a huge amount of heat, emit it unevenly, especially when the stands are one-sided.
There are many subtleties here - light, sound. Nowadays the demands of television are very high. There is a tendency to use a super clear image, and in order to show it, you need to shoot it in this form, illuminate it with a certain power, the light sources must be very multidirectional. All this must be taken into account. Post-match interviews are taken in areas where there should be correct lighting, and the interviewer should not get into the dressing room, into the club's utility areas, this is a trifle, but it is important. Acoustics are also very important, there should be no echo in the room.
How would you, as an architect, like to develop within this genre? Do you dream of building a stadium?
- It's not interesting to build a stadium. Now there is a period of standardization, the theme of a ball of threads Hergzog and de Meiron have already used, the theme of the bubble - "Allianz Arena" - has already passed. It is difficult to invent something completely new due to the fact that the stadium is a very large architectural structure, where the shell is attached to the function that determines the configuration of the building. That is, there is still no resource in the stadium genre, it must accumulate until all these buckets and boxes have time to get bored.
Now we need to work on a small scale; I would like to make small sports facilities or even playgrounds for topical street sports - very few people do this. Quarterly, regional option. Maybe make a very stylish, high-quality, with an emphasis on design, a sports hall - a universal one that could be attached to any school. We made a nice project, Baltic, and for a long time tried to push it through the administration. As a result, there was some resonance, and it was after that that we received an order for the project of a sports school in Sosnovaya Polyana.
It would be interesting to make a project for Gazprom or Rosneft - instead of the humpbacked, lifeless architecture that is present now, it would be possible to offer a comfortable, well-thought-out space where it would be pleasant to be. I would like to make an object with an environment that people themselves will later want to take care of.
