The judo school, the project of which Studio 44 finished a few months ago, is planned to be built on the Vyborgskaya side in Polyustrovo - an area once occupied by large county dachas, then factories, and now mostly typical Soviet buildings, diluted with fragments of dachas and impressive spots of tenacious industrial zones … In a word, not the most obliging environment, from the interesting in the district the Benois business center by Sergei Tchoban at the beginning of Piskarevsky Prospect and the Kushelev-Bezborodko Quarenghi dacha next door. But this is far, both of them are two kilometers to the south. And meanwhile, the place where the school is being built is interesting: it will occupy a large rectangle on the border between the Academician Sakharov Park and the residential neighborhood at 27-31 Zamshina Street, which consists mainly of panel nine-story buildings of the seventies interspersed with new buildings and other things. The background is grayish-checkered, familiar: a former Soviet person recognizes this type of urban environment a mile away. The park is not simple, it inherits the Abamelek-Lazarevs' dacha, that is, it is also a piece of pre-industrial outskirts, mixed with the factory St. Petersburg. Later, the park was called Pionersky, the northern part retained this name, while the southern part was renamed Sakharov Park, and a monument to the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings was erected there - a copy brought from Japan. And somehow it so happened that the Japanese theme continued: right in front of the monument, across the park, it is now planned to build a school of Japanese martial arts judo. With halls for training and performances - not only judo, but also gymnastics; with large halls and a developed infrastructure, which even includes a dozen hotel rooms for athletes. A large, good school with a height of a nine-storey building (28.8 m) - the heights of the building, thus, are inscribed in the prevailing environment.
The school building consists of a three-dimensional lattice frame with a large pitch of 7.2x7.2 m. The frame is planned to be revetted with wood, imitating a wooden structure both externally and internally, repeating the logic of its construction. From the outside it will seem, and even now, looking at the project schedule, it already seems that the building's grating is wooden. It, like tags, is covered with glass in places, filled with panels in places, but often - transparent, open for viewing and brought out. The walls recede deep inside, forming an intermediate space on the facade, comparable to deep loggias, but uninhabited. Forward, to the plane of the facade, the "legs" of the glazed stairwells go out. They, like all other supports, support the bowl of the main competition hall - an inverted stepped pyramid, whose volume is partly readable from the outside. The entire building turns into a support for the bowl of the main hall, raised above the ground to a height of 12 m, and its edges "stand" on the outer lattice, and the base - on the volumes of the small halls of the lower floors, also, however, pierced with point supports, as it should be for architecture The newest time. The narrow verticals of the stairwells are evenly spaced, like the buttresses of a Gothic cathedral, and together with a wide ribbon of panoramic glass crowning them, form on the facade a composition that resembles, on the one hand, a horizontal skyscraper on graceful supports, and on the other - especially from a distance, when viewed from the park - the temple portal of the Far Eastern architectural tradition: a row of columns supporting the beam with the "tails" of the consoles far out along the edges. The similarity is supported by the steps of the stands, adding characteristic extensions to the silhouette of the consoles. The entire facade has been turned into a portal - a gateway to sports, which is more than symbolic. The portal, however, is classic, with a support in the middle. What made the architects move the entrance with its wide visor to the left: the geometry of the main facade acquired from this a movable optionality, and the resemblance to a hyper-gate became non-literal. Behind the horizontal glass top, there are cafes that surround the stands along the perimeter, from there there will be an excellent panoramic view, as well as from the stairs - to the park and the city.
A mixture of avant-garde / modernism with a bias towards Japanese post-war metabolic architecture - with references to a traditional Japanese house and, importantly, traditional judo halls - is ubiquitous here. One grows into the other, it seems more or less obvious depending on the level of abstraction of the form. As in a Picasso painting, where there seems to be a nose, and at the same time - a triangle, we can see here, depending on the mood and look, either a Japanese temple with a wide roof, or a wooden pavilion of those that are now loved at architectural festivals. that huge building, built according to the rules of modern architecture (which it, in fact, is). What - which is quite amazing - we see before us a wooden structure verified by squares, that is, an almost unrecognizable version of the Pompidou Piano & Rogers Center, a masterpiece and manifesto of deconstruction architecture. Why not? The stairs are brought forward, behind them there is a bustle of "scaffolding" crossed out by diagonal metal screeds - a resemblance to the famous escalator and metal gratings on the main facade of the Parisian museum, although here, in St. Petersburg, everything is much quieter, far from high-tech, and vice versa, immersed in the tradition of timber construction. I recall Polissky's Hadron Collider, an allusion to the mechanism of the most complex technologies built of rough wood - however, in this case, the gap with the prototype is not so great. If we talk about deconstruction, then it is kept inside - the building does not throw out "prominences" outside and remains compact; the main facade looks more like a cut, a section of some part of the structure. No irony is visible - on the contrary, we have, apparently, a rather serious conversation on the topic of the foundations of the culture of modernism and its origin from traditional oriental cultures.
And that is true - the stairs brought out to the outside are not only Pompidou, but also many masterpieces of modernism, take at least the house of aviators Andrei Meerson with its oval stair towers. The intersections of plane-cut verticals and horizontals, on the other hand, are reminiscent of the Fuji Television Kenzo Tange building. And also - and the projects of "Studio 44" itself, where a centipede beam, raised high on many "legs", is one of the favorite themes; it is found, for example, in a competition project
MFC in the reclaimed areas of Vasilievsky Island; or in the building of the Ministry of Defense of Kazakhstan.
Everything is steeped, however, in Japanese tradition. The most obvious prototype, of course, is the Japanese house and judo halls with their wooden frame, grilles, partitions, covered with rice paper. Light, transparent, mobile, air-filled judo schools. In a sense, the building of the St. Petersburg school is such a hall, but enlarged many times: 72x29 m, height 12.6 m to the beams, 16 m together with them - a couple of five-story buildings would fit inside, strictly speaking. Three tiers of ceiling beams - its main decoration, serve to "reveal the theme", directly referring to the prototype of Japanese frame ceilings, which in old houses sometimes capture, dividing into cubes, a significant part of the top space. Daylight coming from all sides, including from the ceiling, turns out to be muffled, but voluminous, and emphasizes the "Japanese" frame of the space - in which, as it might seem, masses completely give way to structures.
But as already mentioned, the modernist basis and Japanese prototypes are closely related here. The architecture of the newest time is a frame, which accounts for 90% of its success and beauty, as well as one of the principles of Le Corbusier. The point supports are derived from the features of the reinforced concrete technology and allow you to save material and space, as well as make the walls transparent and lightweight. But at the same time, this technology goes back to all known frame houses in history, moreover, for modernism - to a lesser extent to European half-timbered houses and more to the frame of a Japanese house, which many classics of the movement were fascinated with. In other words, the new and modern frame construction technology that has come into practice for a hundred years has its roots in tradition. In this case, the theme successfully coincided with the theme of the judo school, producing a closure of meanings, or a return to the origins at a new stage of development.
It's hard not to remember that Studio 44 has another project built on a wooden frame -
Museum of Science and Technology in Tomsk. Then it seemed that the architect revived the plasticity of the wooden avant-garde of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition and intended to use this language, balancing on the verge of recognizability of literalism and generalization. Now it is clear that Studio 44 is examining the topic - in this case, a wooden frame - from different angles, studying different prototypes suggested by the semantic context of the project. The look at the base of the building as a three-dimensional lattice, whose filling is prompted by a function, and as a result, is quite flexible, is interesting in itself, moreover, much has been said on this topic over the course of the 20th century, there is something to start from and on what to rely on.
