Kronstadt is a specific place. The island, now strung on the ring road dam, is a military town and at the same time a monument of architecture and history. A fragment of St. Petersburg, austere and slender, albeit a little shabby; but - its low version, as if reduced, mainly three-story. At the same time, closer to the outskirts of the city-fortress, the blotches of Soviet houses made of silicate bricks, fences and checkpoints of a garrison type spoil it. It was in such a place, between the long building of one of the so-called defensive barracks of the early 19th century and the cozy Posadskaya street - but also next to sloppy fences and five-story buildings, that a residential complex appeared with the name Amazonka, characteristic of our time, which, however, did not exist. free imagination of developers, but inherited from one of the nearest channels.
We talked about the project of a residential complex in 2013, when its construction was coming to an end. Now it is completed, and judging by the comparison of the pictures, for the most part according to the project.
The architecture of the complex reacts to the peculiarities of the outskirts of historic Kronstadt. First of all, the complex is a low, three-storey one with one tier of parking, which, due to complex hydrology, protrudes one and a half meters up from the ground, which is why it has earned the name "semi-underground". Three floors, first of all, of course, are determined by the high-rise regulations of the security zones: they echo the height of the old barracks and buildings of Posadskaya Street. But I would dare to suggest that it would not be difficult to "stretch" the height, if desired, here - both the mentioned five-story buildings and the Stalinist, but similar to late classicism, four-story house of officer families are nearby. There are four-storey houses in the neighboring yard. But Nikita Yavein returned to the scale of the Nikolaev front of Posadskaya, "stretched" the scale and type of development set there to the west, where the sea is nearby, albeit behind a military fence. And next to the sea, such low, extended brick houses resemble Holland, where there are many similar two-three-storey townhouses on the outskirts of cities. In a word, as if following the dream of Peter the Great, an admirer of everything Dutch from boots to ships, one more contextual shade emerged here, a historical and geographical one. God knows whether this fragment of the sea fortress will turn into a "piece of Holland", but the beginning, first of all in terms of scale, we will assume that it should be.
The plan of the complex is inherited from the closed courtyards of St. Petersburg and echoes the modern "tendencies of quarters". But the courtyards are unusually long, and two are almost completely enclosed, apart from the back passage on the steps and the passage for the fire engines opposite; and the middle one is open to Zosimova Street and resembles the courdoner square of large apartment buildings in St. Petersburg at the beginning of the 20th century. The axial courtyard-square echoes, however, also with Posadskaya street, which closes the quarter at a distance, from the east side: if you leave the residential complex, turn right twice and look at Posadskaya from its intersection with Surgin street - we will see a similar structure of houses, long lawns and the pediment in perspective. It is quite far away, so the roll calls are not visual, but speculative-contextual; a kind of inner charade for those who are ready to guess that the architect seemed to have "grown" in the core of his complex a semblance of "provincial Petersburg" Posadskaya.
But let's look at the complex not from the outside, but from the inside. In our time, when experiments with typology, it would seem, are a thing of the past, crushed by the typification of residential layouts, this house is almost entirely an experiment. Not that something else is invented here, yet unknown. But the range of apartments is quite wide, as if sustained in the spirit of the modern European ideal, which seeks to bring different social strata closer together.
The most spacious dwellings, from 70 to 100 m2, located in the quietest transverse volumes between the courtyard and courtyards. Here, on three floors, there are two tiers of apartments, each of them has three semi-levels, connected by stairs. Their tenants enter the apartments of the first floor from the courtyard-square, from the level of the city pavement; doors in deep niches. Entering, they enter from the hallway into the room of the first tier, or they go forward along the stairs, one and a half meters up, into a larger room, from where there is an exit to the courtyard on the roof of the underground parking, which, as we remember, is raised above ground level. In the courtyard, these apartments are equipped with their own front gardens, the exit to which is designed as a deep loggia, from where, presumably, it will be convenient to watch the Kronstadt summer rain. The room with access to the courtyard is a living room, next to a kitchen. Again we climb one and a half meters along the stairs, and we find ourselves in the master bedroom, already on the second floor. There are only three rooms.
The entrance to the apartments on the second floor is decorated from the side of the courtyard-square with a protruding vestibule, from where a two-flight staircase leads to the site for two apartments, to the right and to the left. There are four rooms and more spacious. First we find ourselves in the living room, it looks out into the courtyards, as on the first floor, then along the stairs to two rooms facing the square, probably these are bedrooms; a little higher - a spacious room, also, presumably, a living room or a large bright office with a balcony to the courtyard. The apartments on the ground floor are perceived as Italian piano terreno, while the upper ones are piano nobile, they look like the best offer of this residential complex, although there you have to climb the stairs. The structure of internal, "elite" buildings is sectional.
The structure of the outer buildings is planned more fractionally, here alternate one-room apartments with a separate kitchen and very small studio-pencil cases, combined with a kitchen. But there is an elevator and the apartments on the first floor are raised above the ground to the height of the courtyard pavement; very small balconies-loggias overlook the street. The narrow house-fence separating the residential complex from the slovenly neighboring territory also has its own planning features. There is an elevator and three-room two-storey apartments, connected inside by a staircase with a turn, almost spiral. The northeastern end of this building, facing Surgin Street and adjoining the uneven border of the site, is cut off in the St. Petersburg style, here a pencil-box apartment is formed, however, two-room and enriched with a relatively spacious loggia at the very end. In the longitudinal buildings, especially in the wall-house, elements of the corridor-gallery layout appear.
A certain variety of plans, combined with their predominant modesty, sometimes even crowded, correlates with the historical city, moreover, both with St. Petersburg, where you can find anything, and with the Dutch and, perhaps, English examples, with their abundance of internal staircases. But also, somewhere on the periphery of consciousness, experiments of the avant-garde emerge with their love for corridors and miniature studios, a variety of combinations and options. Needless to say that in the modern Russian situation, which is not prone to experiments, the house seems lonely, moreover, even generated by some specific combination of the conditions of the Kronstadt (military?) Order, some kind of its literal borderline, because it stands right "On the windowsill" window to Europe ". Of course, the convictions of Nikita Yavein, an architect keen on experiments and avant-garde, should have played a role here.
Outwardly, the uniqueness of the house is not immediately apparent. Moreover, the combination of red brick with gables and angular, in places brutal plastic, will scare away the snob. The snob will catch the resemblance to the under-castles near Moscow and will get scared and run away. But in vain. The red color of the brick scares most of all, well, we are allergic to it. However, looking closely, you can see that even the brick is of two colors: at the top, in the attic level, it is lighter. The fences are painted with gray paint, but I want a matte sheen of pure metal; downpipes in plain sight. In addition, when comparing with the project, it is obvious that some of the details were omitted in the process of reducing the cost. It is a pity for the wooden inserts and striped shutters, which alone could multiply the feeling of quality finishes and European associations. And who has not come across this? The framework of the plan, meanwhile, is certainly alive.
In my opinion, this is just the case when a not too glamorous house is rich in architecture. In addition to the already described variety of apartments, the facades are interesting for the multiple rhythm of niches, ledges, cutouts and recesses. The proportions of the windows change from narrow vertical ones, at the bottom, assembled into a square panel, and on the third floor they are devoid of sandrik and covered with a flat cornice of the roof like serf battlements; they are echoed by the attics in the courtyards - all together, definitely, plays out the serf theme of Kronstadt.
However, the best in the local facades, in my opinion, is the white stone inserts. Not all of them have survived either; small decorative inserts have gone. The restrained brutal idea swung a little more towards simplification. But there is a cornice that separates the third, attic floor, and large white-stone "slabs" that visually support both the arches of the entrances (fire entrances) to the courtyards, and bay windows. But it is important that the authors managed to preserve the white stone cladding of the entrance vestibules, covered by Nikita Yavein's beloved “antirust”, where smooth polished stone alternates with thin strips of “torn” stone with a “rock” texture. In combination with round windows illuminating the stairs (which were not in the project, they appeared in the process), the main courtyard-courdoner acquired an unexpected, even Roman flavor. These rough stripes stretch out everything, accentuating the entrances and decorating both the courtyard-square and the front of the house on Zosimov Street.
To say that the house is not so simple will probably not be enough. He's addicting. It reminds the buildings of the post-war period, which the legend attributes to the "captured Germans": such houses are found in many Russian cities, for example, in Tver; they are two or three stories high, and somewhere with gables. It also brings to mind the suburbs of European cities, not only Dutch ones, and even not only built-up townhouses - for example, the Vaksali district of Tartu, where Alvar Aalto's house stands, is in tune with him by combinations of glass verticals with miniature square windows, a scatter of shapes, a combination of hints of classic elements and avant-garde "from the inside out". Interesting, in a word, the house. It opposes the Russian tendency of internal simplification of housing with external variegation; which is probably valuable.
