In St. Petersburg, reconstruction of the Bolshoi Gostiny Dvor is planned according to the project of Studio 44 by Nikita Yavein. In December last year, the project was approved by the St. Petersburg KGIOP and, according to the media, 88% of the board of directors of the customer company. According to the project, Gostinka will turn from a post-Soviet shopping center into a multifunctional complex with a developed public space, museums, restaurants and a small underground parking, as well as a one-hectare park open to citizens. Inside the Gostiny Dvor, already now - also according to the Studio 44 project - the reconstruction of the letter B building, the so-called Brest Fortress, is being completed for the Elena Obraztsova Academy of Music; in the future, it should become an organic part of the cultural space within the shopping district.
The Bolshoi Gostiny Dvor in St. Petersburg is, admittedly, a landmark building: the first large stone Gostiny Dvor, a metropolitan and European type, which replaced the medieval shopping arcade, differing from them. about greater scope and orderliness. After the appearance of the main St. Petersburg Gostiny Dvor, shopping malls began to be rebuilt in other districts of St. Petersburg, and in Moscow, and in many Russian cities, primarily the Volga regions. In a word, the building on Nevsky Prospect is not just the first time project started in the imperial capital in the style of classicism at the behest of Catherine II, and not only the work of Jean-Baptiste Vallin-Delamot, who partly took advantage of Rastrelli's plan, which was based on Rinaldi's project, - all the architects of the first plan, which in itself is already quite a few, - Gostiny Dvor is a symbol of the city no worse than the avenue itself. The building, however, was quite rebuilt: during the war it burned, a bomb hit it, and after restoration - in the early sixties, according to the project of Oleg Lyalin, the internal structure was changed: the walls of the shops, before that were "through", that is, isolated from each other. friend, but opened in both directions for entry and exit, struck, stringing them on the inner suite - and thus turning the bourgeois shopping arcade into a Soviet department store. In the sharp corner of an irregular quadrangle at the intersection of Nevsky and Sadovaya streets, a subway exit appeared. Then they began to build up the yard with utility rooms, rough passages appeared between the buildings.
It must also be said that the St. Petersburg Gostiny Dvor, neatly encircling its plot with a total area of about five hectares, has a second contour of buildings inside, retreating from the first by ten meters: now the inner buildings are used as warehouses, and most visitors are not at all aware of their existence. The buildings of the inner row, in turn, encircle a triangular courtyard - Rastrelli, designing his own version of the shopping arcade, similar to the Winter Palace in the middle of the 18th century, conceived a park and a pond in the courtyard - but the high cost of the magnificent project was opposed by the merchants themselves, who had to finance the construction. The classicist project of Wallen-Delamot turned out to be more rational, and a pond in the courtyard was dug, but a firefighter: despite the ban on candles in the Gostiny Dvor, something burned all the time. The courtyard has become an economic one: the Gostiny Dvor has always needed more storage space than for trade, and now only 17% of the area is occupied by trade, the remaining 83% is given to auxiliary needs. The Studio 44 project will increase retail space by 10-15% due to optimization.
So, Nikita Yavein proposed, first of all, to cleanse the building from the layers of the Soviet era and restore it around 1917, restoring, among other things, the blotches of Art Nouveau and the orderless classicism of the courtyard buildings. Further, and this is the most important thing in the restoration of the BGB for the pre-revolutionary time: the walls of the shops, punched by the enfilade of the department store, are also being restored - the shops are returned to the former square, the building - the pre-revolutionary structure. But in some cases, adjacent spaces will be merged as modern stores require more space. Store entrances will be open to the street and to the passage between the outer and inner contours of the building.
The architects plan to completely clear this internal passage of late buildings and turn it into a pedestrian city street, which will be easy to get from any store and from the metro - with the correct landscaping, pavement, trees in tubs, benches, and with an open sky, not glazed. “We are now creating pedestrian streets in the city, blocking them from cars, which is why we get more about The biggest problems, but here we have at our disposal a part of the city that has never been open to traffic and, making it a pedestrian, we do not intrude into the existing structure, but only supplement,”- this is how Nikita Yavein comments on this idea.
It turns out something in between a passage and a city street in the spirit of the historical and tourist centers of European cities, so beloved by the Russian people for the rarity of this phenomenon in their homeland. In addition, trade is not planned on this street from all sides: the buildings of the inner contour will be given to culture, there, in particular, there will be a museum of Russian merchants, galleries, fitness, a concert hall, a theater and a cinema, Children's World and other cultural and entertainment places. The western part of the outer contour of the BGD along Perinnaya Street is reserved for restaurants.
Under the pedestrian inner street, the architects placed one tier of underground parking, and under the southeastern line of the inner buildings - four tiers. Together they will provide 700 parking spaces, while the entrance is planned at the far end, opposite Nevsky, from Lomonosovskaya Street.
And finally, the main plot of the renovated Gostiny Dvor, a kind of culmination, should be a park with a pond, which the architects, following Rastrelli's idea, set up in the courtyard. The sharp triangle of his plan expands towards the Nevsky, organizing the space in a perspective, - I recall the enfilade of the Hermitage in the General Staff, but in this case the similarity is accidental, in St. Petersburg there are many such triangular plans due to the irregular shape of the sections of a densely built-up city.
However, inside here it turned out rather a hybrid of an English park with a French one based on the current techniques of modern urban landscaping. Leaving the metro, we see a round amphitheater lawn, rather even a micro-Colosseum, planted with flowers and including a round underground ventilation shaft - intended, among other things, for concerts of the School of Singing Skills located here. It is a small square, public space, convenient for events. Further, the park is cut by oblique lines into five more different parts, connected by a whimsical winding path. The amphitheater is followed by an English park, conditionally landscape, since there is not much space in it, in it is the house of the Gostiny Dvor Management Committee, covered with neoampiric rusticum and cut through with pseudo-baroque windows, but when looking at the design schedule, for some reason, it brings to mind the Summer Garden. The house, I must say, has already been restored and it was in it that the museum of the history of the merchants was opened. Further - a decorative pond, which, according to the authors' intention, is responsible for the "memory of the place", that is, it reminds of the old fire pond and Rastrelli's plan, and maybe also a swamp in the Perinny Ryad area, which at one time unsuccessfully ordered to be drained Empress Elizabeth. In the middle of the park is the apotheosis of memories of the 18th century: "bosquets, trellises and trellises" lined in checkerboard squares - however, they are replaced by modern entertainment, mini golf, and at the sharp end of the triangle - a feast of the belly: open terraces of restaurants here are interspersed with wedges of a vegetable garden …By the way, all the same Elizabeth loved currants to grow in the parks of her residences - while walking, she picked and ate berries from the bushes.
In a word, it turns out to be some kind of "king's walk", not a shop. The image of modern trade with its touch of glamor, music and smiles, the obligatory cinema and restaurants in the set is superimposed here on the equally well-established theme of the center of the historical city: a pedestrian street, museums, theaters, an open amphitheater, open terraces of restaurants … the names of empresses and architects who paid attention to this place. Only now the architects find the "quiet corner of the historic city" where it has never been: actually, now Gostiny Dvor on Nevsky, between two metro stations, is a rather dusty, bustling and noisy place. His yard is also a place for loaders, administrators, warehouses, an unsightly shopping backstage. And now all this is transformed, becoming well-groomed, pedestrian, cool-pleasant, especially in contrast to the Nevsky. Following the laws of the historical center, this version of the BGD combines the laws of trade, which have been repeatedly tested by managers, and the rules of urban improvement, which are so relevant for the townspeople in our time. It turns out that Gostiny Dvor, a monument to, let's say, the period of early capitalism, is now adapting according to the laws of the post-industrial "information age" of hipsters, yuppies, yakki or whatever. It sounds strange, but structurally we are dealing here with a project of redevelopment of an industrial zone, only very old, commercial and therefore specific; the essence of the process is similar, although the columns of Delamoth make it somewhat more sophisticated.
But this is not the only project for the reconstruction of Gostiny Dvor. Studio 44 has been working on this site for over ten years. IN
In 2005, the project looked somewhat different, and now it is quite interesting to observe its transformation. On the one hand, even then he was more delicate in relation to the monument than the reconstruction of the Gostiny Dvor of Quarenghi, which was carried out in Moscow, covered with a glass dome designed by Nodar Kancheli. Already in 2005, a regular park and stairs were planned in the courtyard, in front of which the house of the BGD Management Committee stood purely like a Trianon. A rotunda appeared in front of the metro exit, a two-level parking lot took up the entire space under the courtyard, the inner bypass streets were glazed passages, a glass pavilion appeared in the “sharp” corner of the park, where a vegetable garden was now conceived. Already from the description it is clear that the updated version - the project of 2014 - is much more delicate, especially in terms of underground parking and glazing. However, as Nikita Yavein says, it is possible that the glazing of the inner streets will be returned: in cold and windy St. Petersburg there are reasons for this.
There is another project, which the media describe as proposed by a minority company, the owner of about 10% of the shares of today's Gostiny Dvor, affiliated with a well-known St. Petersburg developer: it is proposed to reconstruct there quickly, in four years, block the courtyard with a glass dome, dig underground floors and to increase the retail space by five times, and the turnover by twenty (this project has been known since at least 2013). This story is reminiscent of Moscow's Gostiny Dvor and Detsky Mir on Lubyanka, but it is still in its beginning. By the way, recently, at the FUF forum in Samara, they finally publicly discussed the fact that it is harmful to build large shopping malls in the city center (in Samara, it is getting worse, they plan to build a suburban type of shopping center right in the historical center). Against this background, it is well felt that the new Studio 44 project, approved by the KGIOP and the Board of Directors, cultivates new trends in attitudes towards the city, treats the past with care and, in this sense, “belongs to the future”. I just want to understand where we have the past and where the future is.
