Krestovsky Island is an attractive place for St. Petersburg developers and architects. Not so long ago, it was an island-park, a little later - an island-stadium. Today it is the island of the most expensive real estate in the city. The western part has remained democratic: attractions, greenery and the Zenit Arena, which has finally opened, attract many people. The eastern part is strikingly different: unusually deserted and quiet streets, closed courtyards, low-rise buildings with expressive architecture.
Over the past decade and a half, many popular workshops have worked here, and a rare house remains without architectural awards. The budget allows, if not everything, then a lot: high-quality materials, giant griffins, glazed greenhouse boulevards and moorings at the front doors. In addition, Krestovsky Island is not burdensome with the context - the massive residential development hardly touched it, the buildings stand separately, surrounded by greenery. It is all the more surprising that the new houses that appear here are generally far from pretentious. At the same time, it is interesting to walk here: a living encyclopedia of modern architectural techniques and experiments.
Quiet Esperov Street, on which the house designed by the architectural studio of Anatoly Stolyarchuk will be located, is hidden in the eastern part of the island. The trapezoidal section is located on the "second line" of the water, just behind
house "Venice" by Evgeny Gersimov, and is divided between the house designed by the architectural bureau of Anatoly Stolyarchuk and the Esper Club residential complex under construction according to the Intercolomnium project. Together they form a closed square, which will provide the perimeter building of the site. Other neighbors: the club complex Diadema Club House designed by Zemtsov, Kondiain and Partners, cottages for judges of the Constitutional Court and the Spartak swimming pool, built in 1972, now turned into a dolphinarium.
In such an environment, the architects of Anatoly Stolyarchuk's bureau set themselves the task of creating a house that would not be similar to the neighboring ones. “To adapt to any styles or architectural language of the neighboring houses is a dead-end and destructive way,” says Anatoly Stolyarchuk. "The result will look like a parody in most cases." The client also did not impose style solutions, which made it possible to create a simple and elegant home.
Its facade, according to the architect, is "an absolutely monotonous wall, background, without accents, perforated with windows." However, the wall is not at all monotonous: the wide slopes of the French balconies, which alternate in a checkerboard manner with ordinary windows within the large squares of the facade mesh, make the plastic quite active and difficult. At first, it even seems that the rhythm of the wall is chaotic and free, and only then, with curiosity, you realize that this is not so. The predominant material of the facade is light stone, but the inserts of terracotta panels form a nuanced response to the neighborhood of the brick surface of “Venice”, and the thin edges of the facade lattice echo the vertical rods and neo-Gothic consoles of Yevgeny Podgornov's house.
The two right corners of the building are rounded with wide arcs: here the balconies disappear, the tall windows "to the floor" receive slopes and their rhythm thickens. The slopes directed to one side accentuate the turn like the teeth of a giant gear - the house seems to be bent like plasticine. The third, wide angle - 120 degrees - is set by the turn of Esperov Street. Here the street meets the alley of the same name, leading towards the river, and a mini-square is formed at the junction of three streets. Here, overlooking the Neva, there is the main entrance with a through passage to the courtyard, on the ground floor accentuated by a recess-loggia on two pillars. Above the windows are solved in the same way as at other turns, only here not three, but five vertical rows are united - the wall is emphatically "stretched" at the fold.
The house is completely residential and consists of four six-storey sections with one tier of underground parking, which occupies the entire building spot; inner courtyard - the roof of the underground parking. The western section, stretching along Vakulenchuk Street, is occupied by apartments, the rest are apartments, on each floor there are from 2 to 4 with an area of 50 to 220 m2.
The first floor along Esperova Street is moved up to the red line, cut through by relatively small windows, and looks like a basement. The main entrance, as we remember, is designed in the form of a deep cut-out ledge on two pillars. On the northeastern side, the only one where the house does not have a street front and a "red line", but adjoins a group of natural thickets, the architects turned the first floor into a gallery: wide stained-glass windows are hidden here behind a rare series of round double supports, vividly reminiscent of the "red dorica" »Ivan Fomin.
The upper, sixth floor also recedes from the red line, but on the back side the indentation is small and covered with a thin pylonade that continues the rhythm of the facade, and on the river side, at the request of KGIOP, a strip of solid stained-glass window was moved deeply, five meters, and forms a wide terrace with river views for three penthouses in the northern part of the house. From this side, the house received a discreetly profiled deep-outward cornice - it simultaneously "stops" the growth of the building, hiding the receding sixth floor behind it, and continues, although not literally, the line of the cornice of Yevgeny Podgornov's house. The height of Anatoly Stolyarchuk's house to the eaves is 18 m, total, including technical floors - 23 m.
The ends of the two houses close together, which is not very typical for modern building practice, but typical for the historical development of St. Petersburg. At the junctions, the house, designed by Anatoly Stolyarchuk's bureau, loses its plasticity, preferring to make the transition laconic: a glass stained-glass window that articulates and at the same time softens the joints between two houses of fundamentally different architecture. On Esperova Street, a stained-glass window hangs over the passable arch, from the side of the dead-end Vakulenchuk Street, a solid glass plane is cut only by a cornice, which makes us recall the textbook works of postmodernism. The laconicism of the "docking" fragments passes into the courtyard: the gigantic surfaces of the stained-glass glazing are framed here with flat frames and are separated by the "towers" of the staircase and elevator nodes and are enlivened only by a number of vertical "loopholes" - the windows of the first floor and galleries, now on single round supports, mirroring inside the outer gallery of the northeastern façade.
“The found architectural solution will live only under certain conditions - high-quality expensive materials and high-quality performance,” emphasizes Anatoly Stolyarchuk. Indeed, the house seems to be the result of a combination of conditions that are quite rare in our times: the relatively successful realtor circumstances of Krestovsky Island, low height, restrictions, saturated surroundings - all this pushes to work with nuances. The house is environmental, but detailed, it is the very version of contextual modernism that requires high-quality execution and expensive elements - for example, the same natural stone or French windows. This genre was developed in the 2000s and then wilted along with the market; indeed, from a social point of view, it cannot evoke special sympathy, but from an aesthetic point of view, it may be interesting to look at such houses, looking for new combinations of old techniques. Therefore, one way or another, I would like the genre to continue its development.
