The new sports complex of the SKA hockey club is located on the eastern outskirts of St. Petersburg; from the elliptical bulk of the Ice Palace, which now serves as the "home" arena of the named club, it is separated by the Okkervil River, praised by Tatiana Tolstaya, which has a completely park-like appearance in this place. From the Ice Palace to the sports complex you can walk along the pedestrian “Ice Bridge”, or the bridge with griffins, in about three minutes - the new building has become a direct continuation, a new building of the complex. It is intended for the training of the SKA hockey team and local competitions.
And they built a sports complex in the eastern part of the Yablonovsky Garden, a small city park that has survived from the village of the same name. The park is included in the register of green zones, but not all, but only its opposite western part, because in the 1970s all the waste from the construction of neighboring micro-districts was brought to the eastern part, forming a hill there, which received the name "kurgan"; in winter we went downhill there. But among the waste were toxic ones, so it was dangerous to ride and walk, and the dump, even overgrown, is inappropriate in such a populated area of the city. The construction of the sports complex was accompanied, therefore, by the cleaning of the territory, from where more than 150,000 m3 waste. And its improvement: both for athletes - in addition to the building, an open stadium, running and cycling paths, and for the townspeople appeared. As part of the project, a playground was built in the eastern part of the park, benches and lighting were installed. Residents of neighboring houses, initially dissatisfied with the construction, are now mastering the renovated park.
Sergey Oreshkin won the competition for the design of the SKA sports complex - representative, with strong competitors - in 2012. Then the concept of A. Len in the form of a curved horizontal plate, interpreting the image of the movement, speed and posture of a hockey player, impressed the management of the club. But in 2014, under the influence of the economic crisis, the club strongly optimized the estimate, which made it abandon the original plan. The second option took shape in new conditions: the refined, plastic form of the early project gave way to a more ergonomic parallelepiped in terms of construction. However, strictly supervising only the issues of functional content and the final budget, the rest of the SKA management gave the architects freedom, so that the scope of the reduced budget - and the desire to make a sports, that is, in fact, a public building noticeable, in some ways even "star" - became a challenge for team, and led to a very decent result. The building has not only become an elegant continuation of the Ice Palace complex and a striking addition to the "sports" part of the city, which is now fully formed near the metro station "Prospect Bolshevikov". In the process of implementation, the project also managed to receive three “silver” diplomas of the St. Petersburg awards: two “Golden Capitals” and one “Architecton”.
Strongly elongated - about 200 m long, 19 m high - the parallelepiped is designed to resemble a block of ice. The similarity is easy to read, especially if we abstract from the regularity of the rectangular shape of the building: the walls are faced with large plates of natural white clay ceramics of four types - glazed, matte and corrugated - whose oblong proportions correlate with the contours of the volume and form a fine mesh on the facades. The slabs are made to order in China under the strict supervision of a customer, one of whose requirements was the simplicity and durability of the surface, which does not require frequent cleaning. However, to save money, some of the slabs were made without glaze, but this uneven glitter also blended into the icy image.
The volume is strictly white, not like an iceberg, but rather like a blank of artificial ice prepared for ice sculpture. The effect is heightened by the nervous diagonal strokes of thin glass stripes that immediately evoke the buildings of Daniel Libeskind, in particular his Jewish Museum. But in this case, the strokes of the windows do not deconstruct the whole, but only outline it, add dynamics like an abstract picture superimposed on the volume regardless of the angles. This drawing is just as similar to Libeskind as it is to the flying strokes of abstractions of the mature revolutionary avant-garde of Malevich - which is further convinced by the window-star, to which they converge, or from which cuts and bevels emanate, linearly and brightly illuminated in the evening. The five-pointed star still flaunts on the emblem of the club, which has existed since the 1940s as the Army Sports Club. The emblem-star subjugated the entire facade, made it speakable and endowed a fundamentally calm volume with the dynamics of flight, going back both to the romance of the struggle ("beat the whites with a red wedge", and any match is a struggle), and to the image of a trail, cut through skates on the ice, and even the tilt of a hockey stick. At the same time, the drawings are orthogonal; not all windows are thin slits; there is enough light inside.
A certain restraint in the external form is a deliberate decision of the architects, justified in particular by the possibility of advertising and posters, of all that Sergey Oreshkin calls the word "life". Facades are quite capable of accepting such additions and not appear tainted. But the building does not merge with the environment: the white monolith attracts attention, the dynamics of the lines makes it a non-standard landscape object, although it does not dominate either in size, or proportions, or even in its external form over the neighboring Ice Palace of Andrei Bokov, Dmitry Bush and Sergei Sokolov.
The plasticity of the lobby interior will impress the visitor much more: without exaggeration, it serves as the emotional core of the building; besides, there are more tangible parallels with Libeskind. The interior is strict, laconic, but expressive and filled with inner symbolism. Wall decoration - a high-quality imitation of concrete to the point of indistinguishability - is shaded by gray-striped ribbons of suspended ceilings, in places curved like frowning eyebrows, and a white floor lined with porcelain stoneware slabs of elongated proportions, resembling a thin grid of facades. The black color of the round columns matches the tone of the glazing bindings, which is why it turns out that the figuratively white building is stretched over a black frame, while supporting the gray concrete blocks. Cold green glass of balustrades with metal handrails in the hinged passage to the elevator receives a gradient of “snowy” silk-screen printing below, passing into the glass “ice” of the floor. There are many indications that when entering inside we find ourselves in an icy space, literally entering a frozen block, the image of which is outlined on the facades. But let's emphasize: the theme could push you to something fabulous, but there is no snow queen cave here. This is a cool, harsh and strong image, consonant with courageous sport: “…
do not care that they spit their teeth on the ice …”©.
The center and the most spectacular part of the lobby is a small atrium, a staircase under a skylight leading to the second tier to the entrance to the main arena. Its plasticity, according to Sergei Oreshkin, goes back to the rounded, curved shell of hockey equipment. A concrete "shield" encircles a turn of white steps, brightly illuminated from the inside by a complex system of lamps - thin strokes that form a whirling of large snowflakes above the head of the walker, reflected in the glass of orgations. Many other lamps, suspended on almost invisible thin cables and equally thin - seem to be frost, pieces of ice crystals scattered from the snowflakes of the central axis - but they also resonate with the diagonal light slots in the walls. The plots are interconnected and develop sequentially from the star of the facade to the stream of snow "stars" above the main staircase, culmination, sculpture, the plastic of which, in general, is in no way inferior to the world-famous examples of "star" architecture.
For the casting of the inclined walls of the atrium, the architects of "A. Len" created a ribbed volumetric formwork capable of withstanding the weight of raw concrete at an angle. The atrium is sculpted - in modern Russian architecture you rarely find such an artistic approach to the accent of public space - especially with, as we remember, a cut budget. The reduced budget is not felt at all in this interior.
The hockey field itself, in contrast to the lobby - the very conditional coat rack with which, according to Stanislavsky, the theater begins - looks very simple, technogenic: a grille, gray-blue walls, red-blue chairs, branded colors. In addition to the main hockey rink with stands for 1000 seats, VIP boxes and sound equipment, there is a second training ice field inside. The main engineering block is located between two ice "boxes", which made it possible to shorten the length of the networks. In addition, the building houses several gyms, a swimming pool, a medical rehabilitation center, a hotel for athletes and a cafe. The interiors and engineering "stuffing" were mainly made by Russian contractors at Russian production facilities.
In addition, the complex is convenient and functional, even multifunctional: in addition to landscaping the territory open for sports activities for citizens, a children's sports school will open inside, an ice rink for everyone, concerts and even children's Christmas trees will be held.
Large - after all, almost 35,000 m2 on 7 hectares - an efficient and economical hockey sports complex, open for the townspeople - a new word in the sports infrastructure of St. Petersburg, more and more typical sports complexes prevailed here and for a long time sports facilities of this level have not been built. Add to this - we have before us a completed, albeit with changes, project-winner of the competition, restrainedly appropriate from the outside and spectacular to match the theatrical foyer inside - this building is an undoubted success in the portfolio of Sergei Oreshkin. Surprisingly enough, it turns out that even if you fit into the budget, you can get a completely convincing public building.
