The building plot is located in the historical part of the city, which was once called Karetnaya, not far from Ligovsky Prospekt and Obvodny Canal metro station, behind 28 Prilukskaya Street. In the opposite corner of the block, the complex "House at the Coach Bridge" is being erected, also ten-story, the rest of the buildings are older - tenement houses of the beginning of the century, Khrushchev, warehouse and industrial buildings, all of them are relatively chaotic relative to each other. Approximately the same morphology is inherent in the neighboring quarters. The most noticeable in the surroundings is the red-brick Palace of Culture of Railway Workers, recognized as a federal monument, the tallest is the ATS, which divides the space opposite the future residential complex with an unnamed public garden.
The house built in 1905, which is located on the site and overlooks the red line of Prilukskaya Street, is a building of a former mica factory, which has been occupied by offices since the 2000s. The building is planned to be freed from later extensions, then the facades will be renovated, the gable roof will be returned and adapted for a new function - sports. Since the layout is not a subject of protection, the floors will be removed completely - you will get three bright and spacious training halls, as well as all the necessary accompanying rooms, with a total area of about 500 m².
The head of the workshop, Anatoly Stolyarchuk, admits that working in the historical part of St. Petersburg requires a "jewelry" approach: in order to integrate a new building into the existing fabric of the city, one has to take into account many nuances and sometimes mutually exclusive requirements. In particular, the architect says that he would be happy to build new residential buildings in one line, but this was prevented by the insolation norms - in this case, the first floor does not receive enough light. The "coefficient of complexity" is also increased by fire standards, the logic of passages, the need to fit enough open parking spaces and a playground on the site. In addition, the architect continues, responding to the customer's requirements with his finished apartment and offering acceptable architecture is like walking on the edge of a knife. A situation that architects often compare to a mathematical problem, puzzle, puzzle.
The "equation" of this site can be solved in two ways: to put the building behind the historic building perpendicularly, or parallel to Prilukskaya Street. The workshop rejected the first option, because it believes that it is wrong to look at the street front with the "end face" of the house. Therefore, the buildings are located along the street and slightly in the depths of the site. This gives a lot of "air" to the historical building, hides the height of the new buildings, takes them away from the street with cars, opens more windows to the south side. Thus, the laconic pavilion of the entrance to the underground parking, a historic house, a transformer substation and open parking spaces go to the red line within the boundaries of the site.
The residential complex, after taking into account all the restrictions on the site, turned out to be two-part. The section behind the historic building is narrow and belongs to a gallery typology rare for Russia - all the apartments in it are oriented towards Prilukskaya Street, since it was impossible to arrange windows in the northern wall due to the close location of the border of the neighboring site. Therefore, the gallery turned out to be without windows, like a corridor, and the outer wall was laconic in Empire style. However, the absence of windows made it possible to find a place for a playground next to the wall of the house, since with a blank wall it is not required to observe the standard indent of 12 meters.
The second building, moved closer to Prilukskaya Street, consists of two sections; it is "thicker", the windows look both into the street and into the courtyard. Its tenth top floor is fully glazed and recedes from the edge to the depths, forming a series of penthouses - slightly larger apartments with terraces and views of the city. The retreating upper floor of the building pushed forward is included in a perspective game carefully calculated by the authors, thanks to which, from the intersection with Tambovskaya Street, the cornices of both buildings of the new house line up practically in one line with each other and with the cornice of the pseudo-empire house of 1899 at the intersection. The current façade pattern, combining pairs of floors vertically, also responds to the rhythm of the surrounding buildings: four tiers of visually doubled windows echo the four floors of the historic building (although note that the new building is almost twice the height of its historical "neighbor").
The facades are designed in the same way. The workshop believes that new buildings must scale to the existing ones, but they adhere to the internal ban on working “in styles”: in order to link the old and the new at a deeper level, architects, according to Anatoly Stolyarchuk, use rhythm, proportions and plastic …
The plastic is built on the active "layering" of the street facade, which helps to beat, and partly soften the step between the buildings. Groups of loggias in the western and eastern parts form protruding plates of flanking volumes of "risalits", loggias in the central part, closer to the place of joining of buildings, are arranged in an elegant and regular checkerboard pattern - in order to avoid "sore glass thermometers".
All loggias are underlined with thin verticals - a visual device reminiscent of ventilation slots, but designed to give the facade more harmony, to emphasize its "thin bone". The stripes on the "checkerboard" bay windows are regular, and on the risalits they alternate, being located either to the left or to the right; they invade the horizontals of the interfloor ceilings and acquire an empire beige color, which serves as the basis for a coloristic echo of the historic city.
The same color of soft ocher is picked up by the air conditioner boxes in front of the windows in the pauses between the bay windows and the U-shaped canopies above the entrances to the porches. The main color of the house is light gray, almost white, and yellow blotches form the decor - and it turns out that its facades "overturn" the logic of the walls of old Petersburg, the same pseudo-empire house: the background is yellow, the details are white, but here, on the contrary, a kind of inversion … The facades are planned to be plastered, which will also make them akin to the surroundings.
It is easy to see that a thin and "lamellar" light grisaille house has something in common with other projects of Anatoly Stolyarchuk - houses
on Esperov Street and on Krasniy Kursant Street - all of them, to one degree or another, can be called representatives of "environmental" contextual modernism, delicate author's architecture geometrically inscribed in the context. Note that a house, high enough, does everything in order not only to respond to the neighboring buildings, but also to “dissolve”, to reduce its volume and its influence - for example, with the help of gray pixel strokes at the ends. Meanwhile, here, behind Ligovsky Prospekt on the border of large-scale industrial zones, the 10-storey height, even for St. Petersburg, seems to be consistent.
