Preservation of individuality
Cities are expanding to include suburbs. In those few of them where real estate is in constant demand, there is an active expansion. Dozens of small, but non-trivial towns with their own history and character are absorbed by a wave of typical commercial development. They disappear, turning into new districts, and their once resounding names become part of the branding of residential complexes, elite and not so.
For Studio 44, which has extensive experience in the historical environment, with a special feeling and responsibility approaching the introduction of new objects or reconstruction of old buildings, the order to develop a planning project for a large residential area at the entrance to the city of Pushkin provided a chance to demonstrate alternative approaches to commercial residential development on the territory of the city with a pronounced urban planning and architectural originality. The architects immediately identified for themselves the main vector of searches - the use of the characteristic features of the city to create new buildings that harmoniously complement the old one.
Nikita Yavein formulated the original problem as follows: “To investigate the structure - planning, residential, park, that defines Tsarskoe Selo. Its genesis. And from this to make modern architecture, growing out of the city in which it appears. Not artificial, but organically continuing the tradition, developing and transforming it, focusing on the needs of the modern world."
Pushkin - Tsarskoe Selo
The city of Pushkin is a real treasure. One of those cities that have developed like a necklace around St. Petersburg at the royal palaces and park ensembles. It is not surprising that UNESCO included it in the list of protected sites with the wording “The historical center of St. Petersburg and related groups of monuments”. The city was founded in 1710 and until 1918 bore the name Tsarskoe Selo. Until now, St. Petersburg residents use both names, the former - when talking about the historical heritage and monuments, and modern, when it comes to its today or tomorrow. The main attraction of the city is the Tsarskoye Selo Museum-Reserve - a monument of urban planning art and a palace and park ensemble of the 18th - 19th centuries. The reserve includes the Catherine Park with the Great Catherine Palace (founded in 1717), the Alexander Palace (1792–1796) and the park of the same name, as well as other structures.
Bosquet-pavilion system
A feature of the planning structure of Tsarskoye Selo was the use in its residential part of the same planning module as in the park one: the city center is divided into orthogonal quarters, repeating in size (130-180 m) large parterres, curtains and bosquets of the Catherine and Aleksandrovsky parks.
"Studios 44" are familiar and familiar with the principles of regular planning and its possibilities in terms of adaptation to modern tasks. Using a regular composition, the bureau designed and built a hotel
complex "New Peterhof". In 2007, in the competition project for the reconstruction of the Apraksin Dvor complex in St. Petersburg, built at one time on the former territory of a regular park, the architects carefully preserved and accentuated its linear structure. In addition, since 2010, Studio 44 has been engaged in a project of reconstruction and adaptation for the museum function of the Alexander Palace in Pushkin.
It is not surprising that with such a deep immersion in the topic and a clear understanding of the continuity between the historical heritage of Tsarskoye Selo and the new buildings of Pushkin, as a prototype and source of inspiration for the planning project of the residential microdistrict "Studio 44" chose the structure and format of a regular park, with all its features, quirks and even architectural quirks.
The latter are typical for Pushkin buildings "in styles" - park pavilions and towns stylized as exotic: Chinese, Egyptian, Turkish, neo-Gothic, a la rus, and so on. The owner of the Grand Palace, Empress Catherine II, called this architecture "entertaining", since it was intended not only for entertaining guests, but also for their enlightenment in architectural and ethnographic terms. In Nikita Yavein's project, this "entertaining" architecture was used as a source of shaping for new residential buildings. Of course, all of these sources have been creatively reworked in the easily recognizable manner of "Studio 44".
Regular variety
The territory allocated for the construction of a new microdistrict - with an area of more than 100 hectares, is located at the entrance to the city of Pushkin. The trapezoidal site adjoins from the east to the Petersburg highway, from the south to the Kuzminskoye highway, and from the north to the Kuzminka river that spills into a small lake. An additional section stretched along the river bed, intended for the second stage of construction.
The layout of the first stage has a clear structure with a basic spacing of passages and streets of 180x180 meters and a whole collection of variations on the theme of this module, carefully masking their relationship with it.
The center of the first stage is occupied by four quarters, which with captivating sincerity assume the role of homage to the parterre of Alexandrovsky Park. The given block sizes allow you to place another building in the center of the block. This complicates the task of the designer, but also helps to make the building more similar to the landscape, in which curtains have been turned into houses, and flower beds and lawns into courtyards and playgrounds. According to Nikita Yavein, “a residential structure is made from a multilayer bosquet pattern. The scale, nature and the very design of the new urban development are so natural to the context that when looking at the plan of the microdistrict, combined with aerial photography of the city, it is practically indistinguishable from the historical part and the front park zones."
The principle of planning the central quarters is the same - a perimeter with gaps and a central block with a small courtyard. The easy-to-read resemblance to fortifications is not accidental. This is a paraphrase of "joke" fortresses or towns with round and square corner towers. For the sake of resemblance to bosquets, the architects took the luxury of using building layouts with 45º cut corners and diagonal cross-sections of courtyards. The beauty of the composition and the purity of the idea require sacrifice.
Around these four "exemplary" bosquets are their variations. Somewhere the module is reduced by half, forming an angular composition of four small diagonally dissected houses, somewhere - on the contrary - it increases by one and a half times, turning into a kind of Quarengiev ideal quarter, with an area in the center surrounded by a labyrinth of L- and T-shaped buildings …
On the other side of the site, along the beveled edge of the trapezoid, blocky houses in the English style were built in like a ledge.
Public buildings were designed on the basis of a square module; a school, kindergartens, a clinic, a sports and cultural center are located along the northern border of the microdistrict, and a market is located at the southern border.
Their volumetric-spatial solution is based on another decorative motif popular in the 18th century - the Egyptian theme, of course, in the form of its most characteristic image - a pyramid. Hipped roofs and spatial structures with a variety of pyramidal elements are used as coverings.
Next to the "bosquets", the architects placed another unusual architectural object - a multi-section residential building that forms a ring. It is difficult to say which prototypes have worked here. Probably, it could be the legendary "Bottle" from "New Holland" or some funny park structures. In any case, these were hardly the famous Moscow ring houses built for the 1980 Olympics. In the general schedule of the general plan, this deliberately non-square formation looks quite provocative - as if the designers first declared the rules of the game, and then broke them with great pleasure. But only in one case. The main building rules are defined and remain unchanged.
Code of practice
As part of the territorial planning project, the structure and the main functional areas of the building are clearly defined, the route tracing, the location, the dimensions of the blocks and their specific configuration, referring to the "joke" prototypes, as well as other parameters that will determine the quality of the environment in the future and must be observed by the developers developers of projects of individual quarters. With a standard density, the height of buildings is strictly limited. The main residential area, which occupies 32% of the territory, is formed by four-storey buildings with elevators (plus an attic floor) with pitched roofs. The height of the buildings is 18 m.
Under the buildings and part of the courtyards there is a one-storey underground parking, which provides a sufficient number of parking spaces, slightly exceeding the number of apartments. The large parking height - about 3 meters, allows Gazelles to drive inside for unloading, freeing the courtyards from loading operations and the long-term presence of freight transport.
The architecture is only outlined, leaving future developers a wide enough range for creativity, both in terms of styling and in the selection of finishing materials. Nikita Yavein comments on this moment: “The appearance of each quarter is determined individually. A variety of materials can be used in the decoration, corresponding to a given style. We would like to see here a white-stone town in the Russian style, a brick English quarter, a discreet northern Scandinavian-Petersburg Art Nouveau, colorful Mediterranean houses and white and gray constructivism. In our planning project, we set the general outline, parameters, the nature of the building and the range of options. Specific architectural solutions will be determined by the designers of individual buildings and complexes within the microdistrict”.
Parks and recreation areas
In the north of the territory, along the banks of the Kuzminka River and in the east, along the Petersburg highway, green recreation areas have been left. And although their design is radically different, demonstrating different traditions of landscape design, they form a single recreational system with bicycle and walking paths, areas for recreation and sports. The river part is designed in a landscape style, more precisely in its modern interpretation, with the preservation of picturesque clumps of trees and green lawns, passing into the beach area by the water. A grand esplanade of two hundred meters wide stretches along the highway, at the beginning of which, at the entrance to the city of Pushkin from St. Petersburg, a church will be built. So far, the layout of this zone has been decided by the architects of Studio 44 in full accordance with the rules of a regular parterre park, with bosquets and geometric routing of paths as a paraphrase of historical samples located in the neighborhood. In the future, after the transfer of this territory to the ownership of the city of Pushkin, the issue of planning and design of the park along the highway will be considered by the city authorities.
"Frivolous" manifesto
Analyzing the project of the microdistrict planning in the city of Pushkin, it is difficult to get rid of the feeling that we are dealing with an academic research or an experimental concept in the spirit of an “ideal city”. Already too verified and correct geometry is the basis for the structure of the building and houses that are too intricate in terms of configuration are installed in it. In all this, there is a certain architectural irony, which is inevitable when a modern master, who knows historical samples perfectly and at the same time has his own, easily recognizable professional language, creates a project-paraphrase or, if you like, stylization under the monuments of the past.
The question involuntarily arises, how relevant and viable is the created system? What was good and organic in the layouts of regular parks in the 18th century - will it be able to meet the needs of the modern real estate market?
In any other case, it would be difficult to answer these questions. But not with Studio 44. This team knows how to work with the historical heritage, saturating the forms of the past with new energy and functions, returning them to life and relevance.
When asked about the irony and idealism of the project, Nikita Yavein said: “Tsarskoe Selo is a place where people rest. It seems to me that this place requires just such a slightly ironic and literary approach. It presents a whole palette of solutions, deliberately endowed by us with a certain fabulousness, frivolity in the good sense of the word. The environment itself dictates design decisions that take into account the history and legend of the place. The entire planning project is full of such transfers and direct associations. And in this sense, the project of the microdistrict in Pushkin can be perceived as our manifesto, showing the ideology and methodology of our design. Moreover, it shows in a clear, crystal form the relationship of the prototype, the source of inspiration and the original project created by us."