I confess that when I saw the tablets presented by the first issue, I didn’t even consider the “sleeping type” high-rise buildings and was surprised to learn that the project belongs to one of the best St. Petersburg bureaus “Zemtsov, Kondiain and Partners”. Indeed, this time famous architects performed in an unusual role for themselves. This is a new residential complex on the northwestern outskirts of St. Petersburg, not far from the intersection of Parashutnaya Street and Shuvalovsky Prospect (exact address: St. Petersburg, Prigorodny, section 204). The customer of the project is Valery Zhorov.
The contours of Parachute Street are rather vague here, the buildings are large-scale and loose. Most of the houses recede from the roadway, while three new tall buildings are pushed towards the freeway itself. United by a two-storey stylobate with built-in kindergartens, they are solved extremely rationally ("to dryness," as the reviewer Nikita Yavein put it), although the strict taste of the authors distinguishes these houses favorably from their neighbors. The main expressive accent is the turning of the buildings at an angle in relation to Parashutnaya Street, which, indeed, somewhat sharpens the amorphous nature of the buildings, although, it must be admitted, it does not streamline it.
However, the city council considered not so much architecture, which is still conditional, as the technical issue of deviation from the permissible altitude, which, according to the recently adopted PZZ, should not exceed forty meters outside the historic center, while the new 24-storey complex is approaching eighty. However, in the surrounding monotonous-high-altitude environment of 18-24 floors, there is no point in maintaining forty meters, and even along the highway, so the project was easily agreed upon.
The plot once again upset the lack of a meaningful master plan for the entire territory, as well as the scale of the development. Indeed, if among low-rise buildings even ordinary verticals can be expressive, then in this case the efforts of one of the best Russian bureaus ended up with not particularly high efficiency in terms of the overall visual impact on the environment.
In contrast to the first, the second issue was discussed for a long time and rather violently. However, the dispute was not at all raising several buildings to forty-eight meters, but the architectural and planning solution due to the responsible location of the future residential complex in the beautiful bend of the Okhta River. The exact address of the new object is Magnitogorskaya Street, 11, letters A, O, R, Zh, P, Ts, Ya (so far there are remnants of the industrial zone). The customer was the Swedish developer Bonava St. Petersburg LLC.
The residential complex presented by the design bureau of ID LLC will have to occupy about most of the cape washed by Okhta. The western coast of this territory was not included in the design area, but the members of the city council rightly judged that the authors should take into account the future whole.
It cannot be said that the designers are completely isolated on their site: they still made an attempt to link the solution with the context. Thus, they oriented the houses facing the river to the dacha located opposite Utkin - an 18th century estate by Nikolai Lvov. The monument of federal significance is in a deplorable state today, but there are plans to restore it and turn it into a cultural center of the new development. Utkina's dacha became the point at which the axes of houses fanly located along the coast, forming a separate group, converge.
In general, the complex has combined in itself three compositional techniques at once: the above-mentioned quarterly picturesque, with terraced lowering of houses to the river; point, inside the building; and perimeter, along the streets of Magnitogorskaya and Shahumyan avenue.
The main complaints from the speakers of the City Council members were caused by the long buildings along Magnitogorskaya and Shaumyan - the "Chinese wall", along which a person would have to walk for more than five minutes without changing the picture (Nikita Yavein, Mikhail Kondiain, Anatoly Stolyarchuk and others). Also, the overwhelming majority of speakers criticized the setting of the southernmost building from the mentioned "fan", since it is he who, in any scenario of the subsequent development of the cape, will interfere with the addition of the overall picture.
Mikhail Mamoshin suggested that the designers expand their imaginative horizons and think about the architecture of Zanevskaya Square, the work of Armen Barutchev, the development of Malokhtinsky Prospect, in order to take root more firmly in the “memory of the place”.
Based on the results of a secret ballot, the project was approved taking into account the comments.
