The ambitious project started back in 2007, when Evgeny Gerasimov & Partners and nps tchoban voss won an international competition to design a new “house” for the city administration (see our story about the initial competition project and its changes after the crisis). The main goal of the project is to gather in one place various services and departments, previously scattered in different mansions. The next step was to try to fit the administrative building and the work of officials into the daily life of the city. And not just fit, but tightly and inseparably weave - in the most rational and organic way, making the complex permeable for pedestrians and abundantly saturated with public spaces, so that the townspeople can almost literally observe the work of the administration, freely crossing the atrium of the “town hall”.
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According to one of the latest versions of the project, the complex, for which an area of 6 hectares was allotted, was supposed to consist of the city administration building and eight office buildings: two large buildings with courtyards are built along the northern border of the site, five smaller buildings form the southern beam. The eighth teardrop-shaped volume is located in the wide part of the triangle of the inner square, whose sharp top indicates the entrance to the main, ninth building of the “town hall” itself. Underground parking is planned under a large part of the territory. The total area of the complex upon completion of all works should be 370,000 m2.
Now three buildings of the first stage have been built: "Smolny-2" and two office buildings. The town hall was commissioned in March 2016, but it was only in September that the city administration made a decision to move, according to fontanka.ru. It is not known when the third and fourth stages will be built: six months ago, VTB considered the possibility of changing the function from office to residential.
This is how the whole complex looks according to the 2013 project:
So, the town hall, or the building of the city administration, is located at the beginning of the "ray", its outer facade faces Novgorodskaya Street and, over the five-storey Bekhli factory, the upper floors of the town hall look at the Neva, which is two blocks from here: about 500 meters. The contours of the building are close to a trapezoid widening in depth, but the lines, which should be parallel in the trapezoid, are slightly curved, echoing the barely readable bend of Novgorodskaya Street, strengthening it, closing the street's perspective when viewed from the north and forming a small square in front of the building.
Thus, the two main facades of the town hall turn out to be curved - the eastern concave, the western curved - in addition, they are equipped with thin porticos of a giant, eight-story order with columns of a smooth cylindrical section, without capitals, bases and flutes. The stone columns bear the same stone lattice of the visor, but the openings of the lattice are glass. It turns out quite delicate, especially if you look at the columns of a giant, extra-Gothic, height from below in perspective. Shadows are laid down in the same way. A high portico does not protect from rain and sun, it rather denotes its presence, forming a transitional space in front of the building and giving the entrances and exits a certain, rather unobtrusive and readable from afar rather than up close, splendor.
There are no porticos on the side facades; instead of columns, half-columns remain - a hint of a reduced version of the peripter of the “temple of city power”. Their slender fusts intersect with wide, approximately the same width as the columns, flat "friezes" that unite the floors in pairs, leaving more room for glass: so the facades are lined into large square cells with thin, when viewed from a distance, but rather massive bridges, which are echoed by dark horizontal stripes inside the cells. The lower floors are divided a little more fractionally, which is intended to humanize the scale for the pedestrian's view: here the cells are stretched vertically and receive additional internal lintels, similar, albeit distantly, to the window of a Tudor house.
The town hall plan resembles the Academy of Arts of A. F. Kokorinov and J. B. Wallene-Delamot with its famous round courtyard, but the signs are rearranged: there are also four courtyards in the corners, but in the middle there is a glass cylinder of a covered atrium.
In the center of the atrium is a massive but shiny axis of a round panoramic elevator with a flattened ball of a television studio strung on it, that is, suspended in space. The original, rather elegant design of the 2000s, was to accommodate a conference room, and the townspeople, taking the elevator to the dome, could catch a glimpse of the work of the city meeting as a story from "Star Wars". But by 2013, the hall was replaced, in the spirit of the trends of the time, with a television studio. Four bridges lead to it, and when viewed from below, a cruciform silhouette is obtained.
At the same time, the offices of the city administration employees, according to the original plan, were located along the perimeter of the building, so that even a passer-by can, however, again briefly, witness the daily work of officials. Moreover, the main pedestrian path, cutting through the entire quarter, passes here, providing a close connection with the city and echoing the compositional axis, which is obligatory for the ensemble, whose classifying preferences are quite obvious. The outline of the cylindrical atrium consists of rooms with glass walls, but in the lower tier they are supported by round columns resembling those of a portico and thus connecting the external and internal space. But in the interior, the round supports, although they line up in a rotunda, remind not only of the classics of Fomin, but also of the principles of Corbusier.
The shape of the flat dome crowning the atrium, also elliptical, echoes the volume of the TV studio in an enlarged form, as if large glass bubbles rise up from the center of the building. The disc-shaped structure of glass and metal is formed by twelve steel ribs of complex shape in the lower part of 1.5 m in cross-section, and in the upper part it is already only 40 cm, and transverse crossbars. As a coating, we used Guardian SunGuard Solar Light Blue 52 glass, including bent glass. In the upper part there are sun-protection glasses, and in the lower part there are enlightened glasses that are hardly noticeable to the eye and do not distort the picture, so that you can enjoy the panoramas of the city not only in the light of the sun, but also in the evening.
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The top point of the dome reaches 55 meters, which is noticeably higher than the established altitude regulation (33/42 m). During the design process, this elevation was one of the most
Image controversial issues and a building permit was given only after a scrupulous landscape analysis. The decision was influenced by the fact that the dome as a form of wedding ceremony for the building is a natural component of the morphology of classical Petersburg; on the other hand, the form is noticeably unclassical and recalls rather the techniques of late Soviet modernism.
An abundance of glass, which is extremely relevant for a clear demonstration of the ideas of openness of power and transparency of management processes, is also observed on the facades of the administrative building. However, the architects easily combine glass, symbolizing modernity and progressiveness, with natural stone and colonnades, demonstrating the high status and respectability of the object - the architects motivate the use of stone in the St. Petersburg context. Africa Nero granite was used in the plinth cladding, and Travertino Romano was chosen for the facades.
The main difficulty of the project was that during the design and implementation, we constantly had to look for some additional solutions. Some of them were associated with budget cuts, since the construction fell on the crisis. - says Andrey Perlich, chief architect of the project from the SPEECH architectural bureau, who was responsible for the design of facades and interiors of public areas.- It was originally planned to use only natural stone. But in times of crisis, it turned out to be too expensive a solution, and a very worthy alternative was found using thin plates of natural stone and honeycomb aluminum."
Travertino Romano in combination with other types of stone and glass, as well as the obligatory clear division of the facades of office buildings, allows you to create the feeling of an ensemble despite the differences in architectural solutions included in this complex of buildings. “From the very beginning we didn’t want to consider the option of one large volume on the site,” says Evgeny Gerasimov, “but proposed to create an ensemble of different buildings: different in function, slightly differing in materials on the facades, even, perhaps, not built at the same time., but united by one urban planning idea and one architectural technique”.
The two side housings, which set the iconic ray composition for the entire ensemble, are really quite individual. One is larger, with a courtyard, with a more active color combination (reddish and beige stone on the facade), with plastic wide round supports in the lower part. It is somewhat reminiscent of the Emperor Augustus Square in Rome. The terracotta red color of the lobby supports echoes the red color of the stone on the facades.
The second, southern building is smaller and does not have a courtyard, but is trimmed with light stone and received an elegant inlaid ornament. Sergei Tchoban considers this motive, which is relevant today, to be characteristic of Soviet architecture, recalling Andrei Burov's "Openwork House" on Leningradsky Prospekt in Moscow.
It is significant that Evgeny Gerasimov names the works of Ivan Fomin as a figurative prototype for the entire complex. But he chooses not the aesthetically perfect polysemantic pre-revolutionary ensembles created for St. Petersburg, but the uncompromising and brutal “red dorica”, devoid of not only entablature, but also of any irony. Everything there is imperially serious and significant.
As already mentioned, openness and what is now commonly called the urban component - external and internal public spaces - became an important part of the project. Let us remind you that the atrium of the town hall is planned to be opened for the townspeople and for the through passage. The pavement of the triangular square is accordingly planned: here, against the background of gray granite, wide dark lines intersect at an acute angle: some are parallel to Degtyarny Lane, others to Moiseenko Street, which, as is customary now, shows the hidden logic of urban accidents and regularities. In addition, the drawing of the stone grid is simply beautiful and in the minds of many tourists goes back to the Capitol Square, decorated by Michelangelo. There is no greenery on the square - courtyards are reserved for it - but there is a pronounced promising game, arising from the fact that the rays converge (or diverge, if you look from the town hall). There is also a clear resemblance to the European square, stone, with porticoes in the lower floors.
At the same time, the center of the square is enlivened by a fountain, and at the point of perspective descent, the facade of the town hall looks completely different from that from the side of Novgorodskaya street: a number of verticals prevail there, but here they turn in direct projection into a very calm lattice of simple squares, again returning us to experiments of the 1930s with restrained, "checkered" classics. Which changes not only the scale, but also the nature of the square's space, bringing the differences between the buildings on the sides of the square to a symmetrical, regular cell, as if putting everything on the shelves.
“I would like the project to be completed,” Gerasimov continues, “then a cozy inner square will appear, which we created as a reference point for the development of the entire district, which, unfortunately, is still rather depressing. The rest of the office buildings and the hotel put on the red line will finally form the outer rigid planimetry of the quarter, the teardrop-shaped building will close the cobbled square with a fountain, and cafes, shops, fitness centers on the ground floors, and also covered galleries along the internal facades will turn it into a comfortable urban space. quite typical for European cities: you can remember the Place des Vosges in Paris, San Marco in Venice or the Plaza Mayor in Madrid."
It is not known at the moment when the construction of the second stage of the complex will begin and whether the planned urban ensemble will be completed at all. But the three already completed buildings of the Nevskaya Ratusha administrative and business quarter clearly demonstrate the reasons for the success of the creative alliance between the Evgeny Gerasimov & Partners workshop and the nps tchoban voss bureau. The declared ideas of openness of power, transparency of city management processes, and the formation of an anthropocentric urban environment are not only correct and fashionable, but, one might say, fervently desired. At the same time, the openly imperial character of the architecture being created is also more than in demand. Contradictory intentions, oddly enough, coexist, creating a new mainstream. Two more of its obligatory features: the absence of ultra-bold solutions and a whole cascade of various historical allusions, that is, the status respectability of architecture with the obvious quality of materials and solutions. As a result - the maximum fit into the context of the era.
