In the 1920s, this territory, a former workers' outskirts, entered the city limits and began to actively transform. The tone for the development here is set by the representative pre- and post-war houses of famous Leningrad architects: Grigory Simonov, Boris Rubanenko, Oleg Guryev, Viktor Fromzel and others. However, started in a monumental and solemn manner, Tallinskaya Street has not acquired a regular shape over time. From the south, the growing industrial zone of the Severny Press plant adjoined it, and the later buildings were significantly inferior in quality to their "Stalinist" predecessors. In place of two of them - a bath and recreation complex and a warehouse - a new apart-hotel was supposed to be located.
The project won a closed concept competition announced by the Hua Ren group of Chinese companies. Later, the work received the Golden Diploma of the St. Petersburg Review-Competition "Architecton-2014" and the Silver Diploma of the XXII International Festival "Zodchestvo-2014". However, it never came to implementation: the customer's plans changed.
The apart-hotel is a ten-storey square with an inner courtyard, the dimensions of which are 41 x 20-24 m. In plan, the rectangle is proportionally close to the golden ratio and faces Tallinskaya Street with its short side. The first floor is intended for trade, from the second to the ninth there are apartments, on the tenth floor there are offices. Another, underground floor, is given to the parking lot.
The building consists of four residential sections, the area of the apartments ranges from 35 to 55 m2… On the second and sixth floors, each section also has rooms for maids and linen. In the corners of the courtyard there are four staircase and elevator nodes. Each of them is adjoined by an additional autonomous staircase and elevator block, closed on residential floors and intended only for entering the office premises on the tenth floor.
Starting from the fifth floor, loggias appear in the apartments, which can be used as additional emergency exits. Loggias play an important accent role on the facades: two symmetrical zones are allocated for them on either side of the central axis. These square inserts are decorated with red opaque glass (or aluminum) plates, while the main planes of the facades are faced with light gray stone. In addition to the loggia zones, the façade divisions also include a lower glazed tier, a pronounced horizontal attic and corners accented with balconies, together creating a compact and balanced composition, not devoid of monumentality. The main facade overlooking Tallinskaya Street is highlighted by a high, six-storey central arch. At the bottom of the arch there is an entrance to the courtyard, sufficient for a fire engine to pass, and its upper part is decorative, marked with stepped glass inserts into the stone plane of the facade.
The restrained and austere appearance of the building, however, is devoid of severity, which is facilitated by the successful "compact" proportions, as well as the aforementioned color accents. The latter are inspired by the theme of the Chinese box, which has become one of the prototypes of the project. The theme of the box continues in the courtyard: here the red color of the external facade "inlays", beloved by the Chinese, becomes the main one.
The exotic toy motif removes excessive functionalist austerity, but does not become dominant. The entire look of the building is full of classic solidity. Modern in language, it enters into an unobtrusive dialogue with its historical neighbors due to the general balance of volume, strict symmetry, the motif of the monumental arch, as well as the rhythmic step of the “pilasters” of the lower tier. There is also a "hello" to the avant-garde - two jagged rows of balconies at the corners of the building, reminiscent of the Kirov District Council of Noah Trotsky and the Moscow works of his teacher Ivan Fomin.
The project of the apart-hotel on Tallinskaya showed the most important quality for the architect: the ability to respond to the context without compromising his own vision of the topic. Nowadays, at the junction of two "super styles", it is only gaining its relevance.
