We have already talked about the project of reconstruction of the summer residence of the Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich for the Graduate School of Management of St. Petersburg State University and about the implementation of its main educational building in the reconstructed Konyushenny courtyard of the estate. The main historical buildings of the grand-ducal dacha are located in the eastern part of the territory allocated for the school, closer to Strelna. In the western part, from the side of Peterhof, historically there was only a small church of St. Olga, built by the architect David Grim in the early 1860s in a pseudo-Russian style with columns-boxes, and several villages. It will house a group of modern buildings, including several hostels, a gym and a cafe-club. Their volumes, subordinate to different stereometric figures and freely scattered over the designated area, Nikita Yavein compares with park pavilions. First of all, the pyramids-glaciers in the Tver estates of Nikolai Lvov come to mind, but the conical earthen slide in the park of the eastern half of Mikhailovskaya dacha also perfectly resonates. On the other hand, however, campus buildings are inevitably larger than any park pavilion, and their shapes are closer to abstract geometry - hence another association inevitably arises, with a group of spaceships on a lawn cosmodrome. Futurism and archaism are mixed with each other, as well as with the memories of the Enlightenment of the 18th century - and not only Lvov, but also Ledoux - and the vanguard, and the strength of each association depends on the personal priorities of the observer.
The building of the club-cafe is so far the only one fully built in the modern part of the campus. It is not surprising, because it is the informal social center of its residential part, a place of meetings and parties, everything that after graduation is remembered better than any exams.
The center of public life, a kind of "key" or even the "navel of the earth" of the student part of the campus, Nikita Yavein decided in the form of a pentagonal - like a Soviet quality mark - and, therefore, a five-façade stepped ziggurat. It looks like both the Mausoleum and the Tower of Babel - especially the one in the painting by Bruegel the Elder, and the mountain tomb of Queen Hatshepsut. It also resembles the latent classics of David Chipperfield, only in an even more refined, almost weightless version of the wooden nets of thin porticoes, and besides, it perceptibly remains in some kind of mobile state, as if in the process of transformation. A promising game - and each straight line here interprets spatial contraction in a very different way, confusing as well as the theory of relativity - is supported by the pentagonal shape, it also violates the statics, and how - from any side you cannot immediately understand what is happening. And what happens is this: a tectonic transformation of the contradictory mobile Mausoleum, opposite to the Kremlin's static ziggurat Shchusev. Tatlin's Tower begs for a thick compote of the above comparisons already by itself, as a final chord.
The resemblance to the Mausoleum is in fact purely typological, such as exists between all the stepped towers. But the paradox is this: a stepped tower, a symbol of meaningful stability, a rational, solid staircase to the sky, one from which the sky cannot dodge in any way, which cannot be dropped - here it has been turned into something whirling, not entirely reliable. And yes, such is the share of the manager, especially the top echelon, that even the ziggurat underneath him figuratively sways that way, makes you keep balance. It is necessary to be able to swing such a static form as a stepped tower, while the form, by definition, is doubly stable. It's hard to say what could shake the mausoleum at all, but Tatlin's tower is not so simple either - the spiral dynamics demonstrates the reliability of the drill's movement, drilling upward, leaving the observer in no doubt about the linearity of progress, even if it is spiral. Who would have thought that if you crossed two stability, you get such mobility.
There is another contrast with the ziggurat: all the real towers (Tatlin's - not very real) were for the elite, priests, kings, the Politburo, finally. And here is a café building, that is, not very serious, at least not pompous and for almost everyone, well, for future top managers, of course, but they are not yet a Politburo, as long as they are students. Therefore, I would like to understand the dynamics as the democratization of the form, the transformation from a temple into a club - and this is a serious, essential transformation.
So, the building is pentagonal in plan - a wide pyramid spread out on the ground, spacious terraces of the exploited roof of which rise along a very smooth spiral to the upper platform. Therefore, the roofs, they are also the floors of the terraces, are slightly inclined, and the central symmetry of the “quality mark” gets lost, and the pentagon of the inner hall is no longer symmetrical. Therefore, the extended straight lines of the roofs from the outside do not fold into a straight line, easily amenable to rational comprehension, but into some kind of reverse, almost iconic perspective, causing the observer to see the image of a pyramid not simple, but either growing, or shivering from the cold wind from the bay. This kind of hidden dynamics is a favorite technique of modern architecture, but not always and not everyone succeeds in making it so obvious, working with a simple, basic and seemingly well-known form.
The spiral theme is supported by the entrances - not at all centered portals, but by the lobbies brought forward, they again resemble the entrance to the pyramid-glacier in some manor designed by Nikolai Lvov. The tambours are not just asymmetrically located, always to the right of the center, their axes are also turned like propeller blades, and their volumes are varied: one black glass, another white, another wooden, and the fourth white stone with rare stripes of rough rustication.
The facades maintain the same optical effect of disturbed balance: glass planes and protrusions of wooden lattice-pilonades alternate in a checkerboard pattern. The strict shading of the verticals emphasizes the dance of the cornice lines, but at the same time keeps the emerging dynamics in check and subdues it a little.
In the spacious and well-lit halls of the lower bypass, there is not one cafe, but several: a restaurant for teachers, a buffet, a buffet and a cheap dining room. They are separated by paths leading from the entrances to the stairs to the second floor, and together we get a kind of "multiplex". The kitchen - the hearth - is located in the very middle, but it also occupies one of the sectors of the pentagram.
The upper floor is occupied by a multifunctional hall, illuminated and ventilated through wide openings, which can, however, be covered with metal curtains. You can go upstairs both from the street and, following the main spiral-spiral movement here, set by the vestibules of the entrances, along open two-flight staircases pressed against the walls of the inner volume. The diagram drawn by the architects clearly shows how the movement from each entrance rushes to the nearest staircase, and then, already at the level of the second floor, short ladders continue to rise, crushing the inexorable logic of the spiral ramp inside, until finally one of them leads through the lattice volume to the roof … The staircases pressed against the wall with a visible profile of steps look like a clear, accentuated element of the modern archaic, the conditional "Tower of Babel" - here you can speculate about the eternal climbing of a person, the topic is quite obvious and comprehensive. The blades of the stairs, which are classic in the broadest, essential sense, are symbolically opposed by an elevator in a silvery pipe covered with a triangular pattern of butt joints. Ladders are an ancient invention, they both help to climb the mountain, and make you make an effort for this, an elevator is a technique that lifts up; they are almost antonyms. The triangular pattern of the elevator echoes the pattern of the dome of the congress center, just as it does, representing the technogenic part of the building.
It is light inside: the outer walls are transparent, the inner ones are white, the beige floor, wide strips of light wood and thin strips of dark metal on the ceilings, greenish glass of the fences. The supporting columns are round and white, placed quite rarely, they are echoed by the rows of round lamps of reflected light.
Meanwhile, the predominance of white was not at all planned by the architects, and here we find another associative parallel, however, almost lost during construction due to resource savings. “This is the Temple of the Rock! - says Nikita Yavein. “We planned to decorate the interior with colored ceramics in contrast to the rather calm facades, so that the person entering would fall into a kind of precious box … White should not dominate the interior.” Indeed, now the elevator column is the only textured accent, and the walls of the inner volume of the tower were supposed to be covered with a thin carpet of multi-colored stripes, making them warm, attractive, but also pixelated, fragmented into bits-bytes of graphic information or - on the plane of multidirectional shading, and not at all as sculpturally unambiguous as it is now.
Outside, a broken line of terraces is folded into three tiers and ends at the upper platform; all of this is exploitable. It is interesting to see what the pyramid of a cafe-club looks like when students sit on the roof terraces, it should be a populated hill, not a cold mausoleum.
The volume is maximally involved, spacious, open in all directions and is designed for the efficient use of every corner. It is stable, but mobile, wide, but thin and transparent, its shape - which is inevitable for a stepped pyramid - is, on the one hand, loaded with associations, and on the other, it behaves at ease in the company of rare northern birches near the Gulf of Finland. The sums of contradictions, gracefully reconciled in the architecture of the cafe-club, are supposed to serve as an example of skill for future managers. In any case, the sloping floor of the terraces will teach them to be alert and act in not the most predictable situations - a useful skill for senior managers, times are not easy.
