Archi.ru:
– Anatoly Arkadievich, "Tapes" occupy a large place in your creative biography. When you started working with them, almost no one heard about such stores. Meanwhile, this genre is very specific: in fact, a hypermarket is a machine, only not for housing, but for trade.
Anatoly Stolyarchuk:
- Yes, it was new for us. Someone saw hypermarkets abroad, but for most of our fellow citizens, the concept of "grocery store" was limited to a deli or a bakery. In 2001, when a customer approached us with a proposal to design Lenta, there was only one shopping center of this kind in St. Petersburg - on Energetikov Avenue, in a former production building adapted for this purpose in the late 1990s.
Lenta is a warehouse store where logistics determines everything, where all parameters are calculated to the centimeter, where the joint efforts of the customer, marketers, psychologists and designers are aimed at making the buyer lose the sense of reality and leave all his money here.
Unlike GUMs, TSUMs and other fashionable shopping centers, hypermarkets strive for ultimate utilitarianism. At the same time, their appearance should be catchy, inviting, "fair". Is there room in these scissors for a complete architecture? How did you solve these problems?
– As I said, the entire technological filling of the hypermarket has been calculated to the nearest centimeter. This is the warehousing of goods, their unloading, placement on shelves, preparation of our own semi-finished products, etc. The distances between the shelves are tied to the dimensions of the electric forklift, which travels between them for twenty-four hours. We worked with St. Petersburg, Moscow and German technologists. We learned everything on the go.
These technologies had to be dressed in some kind of construction shirt. At the same time, no one was going to throw money on architecture. But fortunately, that time was not yet alien to some kind of romance. Based on this feeling, we managed to convince the customer of the need for additional expenses. We tried to play on the expressiveness of the entrance groups, which should attract buyers. We also tried to make the paths of people more interesting. They are also technologically calculated, but using lighting, decoration elements, advertising, we achieved some additional effects. All our "Tapes" have different entrances. Today, I think this is no longer possible.
Can structures of this kind take into account the context?
- Hypermarkets are gigantic volumes of 12,000 - 14,000 m2, which require large plots of 3-4 hectares of land. Here you need a parking lot for 400 - 500 cars and more, a place for the entrance of trucks. There are few such sites in the city, it is easier to find them outside the city. Therefore, as a rule, there is no talk about context.
The first address of our "Lenta" is on Savushkina Street. Sixteen years ago, it was completely empty territory. Then there was Pulkovskoe highway, which at that time surrounded a clay field with croaking frogs. Now, as you know, there is no living place there. On Kim Avenue on Vasilievsky Island, this is the territory of a river cargo port. On the Obvodny Canal - the territory of the lifting and handling equipment plant.
However, on Obvodny your "Lenta" has porticoes
- On Obvodny, the decision of the porticoes is not connected with the desire to imitate the historical Petersburg. A building with such a function is contraindicated in "decoration". And this is not our way of working, even in the city center.
But we are looking at what is happening in the world. At one time, Michael Graves made a big impression on me: I liked his famous postmodern works, in which he tried to connect the incompatible. I tried to go this way too.
I must say that the customer did not like this decision, he considered it too heavy. However, the project was nevertheless implemented, and after the opening, the same customer called and thanked me, because he saw how these trousers are actively working and how beautifully they call people (he specially observed from the opposite side of the Obvodny Canal). For me, the most important thing was “to make architecture”. We impose our ideas on the customer, and that's okay. If we succeed, then we get something worthwhile.
Hypermarkets - on the one hand, it is convenient, but this turns into a complete unification, including architecture. Why are we so attracted (especially abroad) by small shops where you can talk with the seller, get advice, try something - in a word, where there is a human factor, comfort and individuality. Bakeries, fruit and butcher shops, grocery stores - today it is increasingly difficult for them to survive in the competition with hypermarkets
- One does not exclude or replace the other. As you know, Lenta is not just a grocery and department store: there is a cafe, a pharmacy, and various terminals and so on. When you can fill a full basket on wheels with goods relatively inexpensively, take it to the car and leave it there - this is convenient. Why these kinds of shops are thriving. And even such objects can be made interesting. It all depends on desire and goodwill. However, this goodwill is dwindling.
We have designed eleven Tapes, as well as two Metrics and two Castoramas. Two "Tapes" were rented a year: from an empty area to the opening of a store, and each time we got an individual object. However, the last project was extremely simplified, and then the customers simply stopped needing our services. An architect is not needed for today's hypermarkets.
And this is not from a bad life. This year Lenta is going to open forty new stores across the country.
It would seem that you can allocate money for an architect?
- What for?
