Of the Russian bureaus so far, only Studio 44 has won the competition at the WAF international architecture festival; in 2015, the architects received this prestigious award for the Boris Eifman Dance Academy on Liza Chaikina Street in St. Petersburg. Now "Studio 44" is completing the second stage of the same campus of the Dance Academy.
The campus is located on the Petrogradskaya side, in the block at the intersection of Liza Chaikina and Bolshaya Pushkarskaya streets, where there is not much room for new construction. Along its northwestern border, along Bolshoy Avenue of the Petrogradskaya Side, there is a string of tenement houses plus one "Stalinist" house, along Bolshaya Pushkarskaya, 14. The mansion of Julia Dobbert, an example of wooden Art Nouveau, is preserved, next to her is her tenement house, brick pseudo-Gothic. The first stage of the Academy of Dance, built in 2011-2013, was located almost entirely in the courtyard, only a reconstructed fragment - a neoampiric exedra, a memory of the cinematography of the early 20th century, peeps out on Liza Chaikina Street. Its background is a wall with brick QR codes, in which statements about ballet are encrypted, the end of an extended educational building stretching into the depths of the quarter, whose atrium is a high spectacular gorge calling forward and upward, has collected many professional awards. To the right, in the very middle of the courtyard, the educational building is expanding, a student dormitory is adjacent to it.
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zooming 1/3 Dance Academy under the direction of Boris Eifman, stage 2 Photo © Alexander Medvedkov
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zooming 2/3 Dance Academy under the direction of Boris Eifman, stage 2 Photo © Alexander Medvedkov
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zooming 3/3 Dance Academy under the direction of Boris Eifman, stage 2. Project © Studio 44
The Academy opened in 2013, and the next year the city gave it another building on the territory of the same quarter - secondary school No. 91 at the corner of Vvedenskaya and Bolshaya Pushkarskaya streets. The old school was “settled” on Sytninskaya Square, and “Studio-44” took up the project of the second stage of the complex, within the framework of which the Academy should receive an updated building for the general education program with modern classrooms and, instead of an assembly hall, a large stage suitable for full-fledged performances. with an auditorium for 400 people - in fact, a full-fledged theater, which, we admit, is logical for such a professional educational institution as the Eifman Academy.
In the process of designing, the volume of the theater, following the wishes of the founder and the permanent leader, grew like a famous dog - in the end the stage received completely "full" dimensions with all the ensuing technical possibilities. Its parallelepiped, carried out by the console above the passage to the courtyard, almost closed with the dormitory building, which, however, also protrudes towards the console - the two buildings stretch towards each other, leaving a gorge about three meters wide between the ends. The decision is not surprising for a historic city, where there is always little space, and predictable: we recall that when designing the first stage, there was a sorely lack of space and the architects had to use a lot of ingenuity in order to fit all the required functions and areas without conflict. On the roof of the stage there is a rehearsal room - a supportless attic space covered with bent wood-glued beams that form a rounded sloping silhouette.
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zooming 1/4 Dance Academy under the direction of Boris Eifman, stage 2. Rehearsal room Photo © Margarita Yavein
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zooming 2/4 Dance Academy under the direction of Boris Eifman, stage 2. Rehearsal room Photo © Margarita Yavein
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zooming 3/4 Dance Academy under the direction of Boris Eifman, stage 2. Rehearsal room Photo © Margarita Yavein
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zooming 4/4 Dance Academy under the direction of Boris Eifman, stage 2. Rehearsal room Photo © Margarita Yavein
The surface of the roof is covered with RHEINZINK titanium-zinc rhombuses, forming a shining “skin” that smoothly “flows down” to the end of the stage. From a certain perspective from Bolshaya Pushkarskaya, this method of decorating the “city gorge” that has arisen here, in the center of the quarter, looks romantic and even picks up the modernist notes set by the neighboring houses of Julia Dobbert - the southern side of the stage seems to be the back of a fabulous Roerich serpent.
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zooming 1/5 Dance Academy under the direction of Boris Eifman, stage 2 Photo © Margarita Yavein
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zooming 2/5 Dance Academy under the direction of Boris Eifman, stage 2 Photo © Margarita Yavein
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zooming 3/5 Academy of Dance under the direction of Boris Eifman, stage 2 Photo © Margarita Yavein
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zooming 4/5 On the left - the facade of the students' dormitory, on the right - the outer end of the stage of the 2nd stage. Dance Academy under the direction of Boris Eifman Photo: Y. Tarabarina, Archi.ru
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zooming 5/5 Dance Academy under the direction of Boris Eifman, stage 2 Photo © Margarita Yavein
The volume of the auditorium is a pure cylinder-tower of dense proportions, adjoining the stage from the northeast, and I must say that everything here “revolves” around it. The rounded side faces the residential buildings and the inner pedestrian street; it is faced with the "branded" light-beige brick, matched in due time to the recreated facade of the former cinematograph. The cylinder is laconic, like, say, the tower of the Antoniev Monastery in Novgorod, and also becomes an attractive stereometric accent, a sculptural surprise for someone who accidentally turns around the corner. The corner in this place was extended, adding a useful area to the school; the completed part is faced with bricks, clearly differing from the gray plaster facades of the building of the 1930s.
The second half of the cylindrical volume opens into the atrium. Actually, the atrium is the main plot of the project and the new building of the Academy. Covered with a pitched glass roof on an unusually thin wooden frame, small in area and high as a St. Petersburg courtyard, it both unites and separates different parts of the school, serves as both a covered school yard and a spectacular theatrical - or, let's say, theatrical - foyer. Here's the thing.
The atrium occupied the inner corner of the L-shaped building of the school - more precisely, part of the courtyard space south of the cylinder of the auditorium. The narrow vertical space is limited by the circular volume of the auditorium, two walls of the school and a staircase, which allows, in particular, pupils-actors to get from the school directly to the stage. But this is not enough, it would be boring and cramped, and the architects follow a paradoxical path - they squeeze the space a little more, saturating it with accents and meanings, making the density of matter in its various expressions critical - and as a result, saturated, not boring.
The cylinder of the auditorium in the eastern corner is echoed by the much slender tower of the school recreation. It is formed by round concrete pillars alternating with narrow trapezoidal walls of solid white marble. The openings on the first floor are fully glazed, higher only to a height of 1.2 m. Glass for safety, but it allows students from any floor to freely look into the atrium. The tower itself is immediately associated with the sometimes equally delicate staircases in the courtyards of Gothic palaces, take, for example, the Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo. In the bosom between the auditorium and the school wall there is a brick-faced ledge with a round window, the signature of Studio 44: “… all our projects have such a window,” explains Anton Yar-Skryabin.
Opposite - a string of stairs with a clock, almost like in Hogwarts; they, like the round tower, will be glazed and open towards the atrium. The two walls of the school, which form the background, are faced with white marble with an accented pattern of "rustic" joints, rather complex, in the spirit of the Neo-Greeks or Petersburg's 1930s - a more expensive and scrupulously drawn version of the historical facades of the same school.
The side of the stage is covered with sharp zigzag folds of rich beige, golden, but porous and veined, travertine. This type of stone is called Gold.
The result is, of course, similar to a curtain, either silk or velvet; on the large pleated curtain that fences off the theater building. Of course, its fragments “enter” the space of the staircase, embodying the principle of interpenetration of volumes and textures and making it possible to feel the integrity of the cylindrical volume of the auditorium. It turns out that the two walls of the atrium are similar to the walls of city houses; the staircase and the tower-balcony are more open and become points of disclosure-contemplation; and the curtain wall clearly shows that we are already in the theater, that's just the question - in the foyer in front of the tent-tent, or on the stage, and now the curtain will open, and we will have to perform, play some "Romeo and Juliet", good the balcony is already here.
On the other hand, the regularity of the stone folds is no less like a gear - then the hall becomes a cylinder-shaft, the axial part of the theatrical mechanism around which everything revolves here. And again: let's imagine that the rotation of the gigantic machina began, and now our entire atrium went onto the stage, and now, behind it, there were school offices. The comparison is, of course, figurative, but modern architecture loves to portray a frozen mechanism and this, as a rule, says something. For example - metaphorically - that everything here revolves around theatrical life, and the school, and rehearsals, and scenery, including frozen, architectural ones.
Each angle has its own plot and function - it is a variant of static scenography, unchangeable, but open to various content and compacted in a theatrical way. In a normal situation, this would be redundant, but here, next to the stage, it is appropriate - the atrium becomes a model of the city square (which is especially, like a carnation, fixed on the stairs for hours) - a traditional place for street performances and actions. A square that could be suitable for almost any, first of all, a classic Italian performance: there is a window, walls with windows, and a string of balconies strung on the vertical axis of the recreation tower. The atrium became a kind of projection of the basic elements of the theater and, in this sense, an ideal foyer. Which, however, thanks to the many emotions programmed here, is also well suited for the schoolyard, offering children an experience. Its proximity, cohesion with the school, perhaps, will allow students to feel life on the stage, to feel like a part of it all the time. The theme is supported by round lamps, similar to a flock of soap bubbles, and a "cloud" of fireflies soaring from the lower floors to the very ceiling.
The spectacular design, according to which here among the "ordinary" city, visitors would suddenly find themselves in a theatrical city-scenery, was unexpectedly disrupted by the intervention of the customer. Initially, the entrance to the interconnected buildings of the theater school was planned from the courtyard: the spectators, passing from the gate between the school building and the wooden mansion, would get into a small courtyard, from there - immediately down into the underground cloakroom, then go up a wide staircase in the center an atrium city rising right above them; then, along an equally wide staircase to the ground. But Boris Eifman considered it absolutely necessary for the theater to have a portico identifying it as a "temple of the arts." The architects resisted as best they could, drew about ten options, since the idea of the artistic director of the Academy to place the portico asymmetrically on the facade of the school building from the side of Vvedenskaya Street seems to them harmful and not justified either in urban planning or on the basis of the built logic of the internal space. The case ended with the fact that the portico, instead of the "obstinate" authors of the building, was drawn by an "understanding" contractor. The chief architect of the city had to accept this. So much for the story "about the role of the customer in the history of architecture." Both Nikita Yavein and Anton Yar-Skryabin are still shocked by what happened. But in vain. There are many other solutions in the building, and the portico - let's imagine - could have been added ten years later, which only happens in history.
Meanwhile, the planned path has changed. Now the spectators of the performances will have to pass through a small “entrance hall” of the school building, which will be isolated for the duration of the performances and the arrival of external guests for reasons of safety standards. That is not very convenient for the school and distorts the sequence of immersion in the theater space, originally laid down here, “played like notes”; the path becomes too whimsical: a narrow "entrance hall", an atrium, a staircase to the wardrobe (and even turned "back" to the entrance, - the architects explain), again an atrium, a parterre. On the one hand, it seems to be okay, on the other, the first, well, or zero act - acquaintance with the theater, will largely dissolve in the hustle and bustle of travel. In order to see the scene of the “Italian” city with the tower in the atrium, the spectators will have to make an extra effort, shake their heads or move further to the southern wall, whose entrance has now become a spare. However, what to do, it is useful for the audience to turn their heads.
The school, located in the heritage building of the 1930s, is arranged in a traditional way: the first two floors are for the lower grades, the third and fourth for the older ones. The classrooms are well equipped and painted in light and soft colors, with one of the walls in each room being different in tone, making it easy to identify the class or study. The corridors facing the glass atrium are fitted with fire curtains, as are the staircases. A lot of attention is paid to safety issues, including fire safety: the auditorium is lined with stone and non-combustible panels, which corresponds to the KM0 fire safety class.
As for other technical details, let us recall that the stage and hall grew during the design process and the stage grew to the maximum dimensions for this area, but as a result it received a professional size and all the necessary opportunities for staging not only educational, but also "full-fledged" performances. A static pressure chamber is located under the floor of the parterre, the ventilation system is quieter and smaller than usual, which made it possible to place a mezzanine floor with make-up rooms, an unloading room for decorations and a costume warehouse under the stage. By increasing the height of the stage and changing the geometry of the roof, we got space for the grates. In the auditorium, in addition to the stalls, there are two spectator tiers and one technical one.
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zooming 1/4 Dance Academy under the direction of Boris Eifman, stage 2. Hall Photo © Margarita Yavein
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zooming 2/4 Dance Academy under the direction of Boris Eifman, stage 2. Hall Photo © Margarita Yavein
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zooming 3/4 Dance Academy under the direction of Boris Eifman, stage 2. Hall Photo © Margarita Yavein
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zooming 4/4 Dance Academy under the direction of Boris Eifman, stage 2. Project Photography © Margarita Yavein
The school and the theater completed the ensemble of the Academy of Dance, now its buildings have occupied the quarter almost completely, providing the training cycle with everything necessary and even "grown before our eyes" real theater, the core and the purpose of classes necessary for the discipline of ballet and daily self-improvement of students. The buildings are not just visually closed, they are also connected by an underground warm passage - so you can come from school to the Academy for some big open lesson. In addition, different ways of working with heritage: restoration of a wooden mansion, a revived fragment of a cinema, renovation of a school building - within the framework of this creative quarter, are intertwined with condensed, invariant, somewhere emphasized laconic, somewhere - brightly theatrical modern architecture. All together - a delicate and painstaking work with a function packed by architects, almost like a snail in a shell, that is, with the constant discovery of hidden spatial reserves, within the close framework of a historical context. The result is a “city within a city”, a comfortable refuge for fans of professional dance.
