The first council considered the concept of building the territory bounded by the Sverdlovskaya embankment and Arsenalnaya, Mineralnaya and Vatutin streets in the Kalininsky district. The architect was the architectural studio "Soyuz-55", the investor was LLC "Development - SPb".
Conditional architecture
The problem of the vast gray belt of St. Petersburg only recently began to be systematically comprehended at the city level, which was expressed, in particular, in the organization of an international competition for three pilot territories at the end of last year. At the same time, the organizers themselves recognized the "paper" nature of the competition, which would be more accurate to be called simply a show. As for the legal framework necessary for the overdue transformations of the former industrial zones - here, as they say, "the horse was not lying around" …
Meanwhile, the development of the designated areas with "square meters" is in full swing - without any meaningful strategy, according to the patchwork principle. The concept of the architectural studio "Soyuz-55", already presented to the City Council for the second time after revision, became another example of this.
On a huge plot of complex configuration with a total area of 56 hectares, crossed by Kondratyevsky Prospekt, the designers have placed a huge residential complex of ten-storey buildings. The authors tried to give it a representative character, having come up with a symmetrical composition with a round square and an axis that shoots at Rastrelli's Smolny Cathedral on the other bank of the Neva. At the same time, the high-rise buildings do not show any desire to somehow interact with the preserved historical red-brick buildings of the Krasny Vyborzhets factory, although for the architects it was a good chance, already at the preliminary stage, to reflect on the theme of the “genius of the place”. The new complex is just as indifferent to the scale of the buildings existing here, where, along with depressive "gray spots", pre-revolutionary industrial buildings, Stalinist and panel houses, modest and far from any pathos, coexist. However, as the speaker Alexander Viktorov recalled, architects are strictly subordinated to the requirements of the order, on the one hand, and the existing legislation, on the other.
In order to realize the scale conceived by the investor, the authors even suggested expanding Kondratyevsky Prospekt in this section, since it is clearly too narrow for 33-meter flanking buildings, in order to then return it back to its former course. However, the city council did not like this idea: Evgeny Gerasimov called it nonsense, as did the proposal to build a pedestrian bridge over the avenue along the main axis of the ensemble.
A significant remark was made by Vladimir Popov: the round square proposed by the authors should be located at the intersection with Kondratyevsky Prospekt, which would correspond to the St. Petersburg urban planning traditions, and not with an indent from it. One cannot but agree that having an area in the depths of the block, the authors get just one more landscaped courtyard. Why give it the appearance of a monumental square is unclear, while the nondescript Kondratyevsky Avenue would be very useful for the square.
Mikhail Mamoshin urged architects to take a more responsible approach to the front of buildings overlooking the Neva. Indeed, in the sketches of Soyuz-55, it represents a rather loose and inexpressive background to historical factory buildings, which, I repeat, are not included in the system of connections of the future complex - neither mental, nor functional, nor compositional. The territory surrounding them has not been thought out in any way, but this is the future public zone between the residential complex and the Nevskaya embankment. Or … just parking?
Of course, the preliminary nature of the architectural concept should be taken into account. However, it is clear that another piece of invaluable territorial resource is likely to turn into a banal sleeping bag.
Better than Versailles
Against this background, the Studio 44 project was simply doomed to success. The workshop presented the concept of development of the territory bounded by the Petersburg highway, Kuzminskoye highway, the border of the Tsarskoye Selo plant and the Coastline of the river. Kuzminki in the Pushkin region. The customer was ZAO Corporation Petrostroy.
Unlike the previous speaker, Nikita Yavein demonstrated architecture that was not at all conventional, but quite specific. Even redundant for the concept stage.
A bright ideology, a clearly author's concept - all the well-known advantages of the workshop, which once again manifested themselves in the presentation of Nikita Yavein. Although in recent years, in my opinion, the collective somewhat obsessively exploits a set of favorite "proprietary" techniques. For example, the archetype of the crossbar on the racks, which determined the composition of a number of Studio 44 projects. Another trick is the ideal neighborhoods familiar from the Ideal City Residential Complex project. It was it that was used by the authors of the concept presented to the city council for the city of Pushkin.
Among the starting points for shaping, the speaker named the planning module of the Tsarskoye Selo quarters, the drawing of its regular French parks, the Chinese village, Fedorovsky town, exotic Tsarskoye Selo pavilions and chamber half-timbered buildings.
As a result, another version of ideal neighborhoods emerged - squares lined like bosquets, where the role of playfully trimmed bushes belongs to houses. How comfortable it will be to live and navigate in such a complex game construction is not entirely clear what Vyacheslav Ukhov paid attention to. Sergei Oreshkin pointed to the fragmentation of the volumes that occurs when translating into the volume of the bosquet pattern.
It would seem that "corporate identity" can only be welcomed. But in the creative style of the workshop, the rigidity of the method is confusing - dictating, not dictated (by the landscape, function, etc.). This structuralist approach, which prefers schema to living content, contains an element of violence.
However, colleagues liked the concept. Project reviewer Svyatoslav Gaykovich said that the architecture of Nikita Yavein is better than in Versailles - however, meaning the modern quarters of the former residence of the Louis.
As a result, both projects were agreed.
