Multifunctional leisure centers have been known, strictly speaking, since antiquity: for example, the baths, which combined the functions of a bath, fitness center, library, club, were the focus of social life in Greece and Rome. The idea of leisure centers was reborn at the end of the 19th century, on a general democratic wave, when People's Houses, educational clubs and other similar institutions began to be created almost simultaneously in Russia and in a number of other European countries. After the revolution, they migrated to the new system of Soviet Russia, but with no less stubbornness they continued to exist in the capitalist countries. In the USSR, the construction of youth leisure centers proper began in the 1950s – 1960s. Today, the reasons for building an ICC remain the same: to distract adolescents from harmful influences and direct their energy “into a peaceful channel”.
One of these centers, built as part of a public-private partnership, is preparing to open in the Primorsky District of St. Petersburg. The place where the new IDC is located is a typical variant of a sleeping building, where everything is measured by the scale of the highway and the speed of a speeding car. Against the background of fractional multi-storey facades, a small compact building stands out with laconic avant-garde forms and red inserts. In the perspective of Bogatyrsky Prospekt and Yakhtennaya Street, it is perceived as a strict modernist "box", referring to the Corbusian prototypes.
At the same time, the façade overlooking the amorphous space between the International Business Center and the O. Kay supermarket is completely representative, according to the rules of a classic three-part composition, albeit in a modern way. The main facade plane is framed by two projections - staircases. In the center is a modern metal canopy over the street stage. Thanks to the open stage with an inviting "portico", the building is included in the public space: here you can listen to summer concerts, go rollerblading and skateboarding, just chat.
The side fronts are asymmetrical; instead of a stable centric composition, there is dynamics with a translational movement in the direction of elevated projections. The main entrance, shifted from the center, is located on the side of Yakhtennaya Street and is marked by a decisive protrusion of the original red portal. Like a canopy over a street stage, its exposed metal structures are avant-garde. An important plastic accent is the open galleries with simple cylindrical columns at ground level.
The first floor contains a rehearsal room, rooms for various circles and premises for administrative activities, which are grouped around the central entrance area.
An auditorium for two hundred people on the second floor became the core of the composition. Its red box towers over the main gray body of the building, drawing a distinctive modernist silhouette. There is an exhibition hall in front of the hall; along the perimeter there is a gym, computer class and other premises.
“It was not easy to work on this object, given the extremely economical budget,” says Anatoly Stolyarchuk, head of the team of authors. - Unfortunately, we were not allowed to make interiors; finishing the premises took two years. However, we felt moral satisfaction, because the goal of the work is noble - to give young people a worthy platform where teenagers could realize themselves, choose an occupation for their liking, and not hang out in the alleyways. Later, the Department of Architecture at the Institute. I. E. Repina approved this topic as a course assignment for fourth-year students. The guys came up with such interesting options that they could only once again regret the extremely meager funding of such important objects and envy the free imagination of our students in an amicable way. On the other hand, narrow frames always stimulate creativity and often help to come to the best option."
In parallel with the MDC on Bogatyrsky Prospekt, Anatoly Stolyarchuk's workshop was working on a similar object in the Krasnogvardeisky District (Peredovikov Street, 16, building 2) with a similar volumetric solution, which is also awaiting opening.
Given the importance of the topic, it seems logical to organize open competitions for the solution of the IDC (individual or reuse) as part of the same task of involving talented youth in a full-fledged creative life. Perhaps it could be competitions not only for a large-scale solution, but also for a complex concept of creating and locating such centers, with sociological surveys and statistical research. The repeated linking of the site allocated by the city for the ICC to a giant hypermarket, impoverishing and vulgarizing the idea of an urban public center, seems to be quite controversial. An amorphous asphalt wasteland, partly occupied by a parking lot, is not yet a square. Taken more broadly, this topic leads to the need to comprehend the local center of new buildings as such.
But that's in theory. In the meantime, lined with cheap panels and surrounded by asphalt, youth clubs are ready to shelter our children with all possible architectural hospitality …
