A New Memory

2024 Author: David Durham | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 02:26

Marketers, as they generally should, do not hesitate to call the "Russian House" at the intersection of Baskov Lane and Korolenko Street a new attraction, and it is difficult to disagree with this. The residential complex was commissioned a year ago, now almost all the apartments in it are sold out - 32 out of 350 are left. Over the seven years of the project's existence, it was constantly discussed: at the first stages of construction, there were many critics, but more and more fans became closer to implementation. The house receives prizes at professional contests, appears in photographs of townspeople and tourists, and 87.5% of respondents voted for it in the "popular" rating of the Kanoner portal. A rare example of a new building in the city center, which was not greeted with hostility, but rather accepted.

Жилой комплекс «Русский дом». «Евгений Герасимов и партнеры» Фотография © Андрей Белимов-Гущин

Despite the chosen direction - and historicism is clearly more popular with the townspeople than modernism - such a result cannot be called predictable. Russky Dom began with a loss - LSR Group

demolished the buildings of the artillery barracks of the early 20th century. The project itself became an experiment of the architects of the Yevgeny Gerasimov & Partners bureau to recreate an architectural direction interrupted more than a century ago, more neo-than pseudo-Russian; among fellow modernists, each such attempt is predictably arousing sharp rejection, and even the neoclassicists, each of which is committed to its own version of the revival of eternal antiquity, do not accept “eclecticism”. And even among the experiences of modern historicism, neo-Russian architecture is found least of all, if we exclude the temple direction and infrequent examples of retail, then, we admit, there is almost no neorus in residential architecture. According to Evgeny Gerasimov, the risk was obvious, the architects were very afraid to go into kitsch, but in the end the authors are sure that the balance was kept and the house turned out to be interesting. Let's try to understand the rather complex structure of the resulting building and the reasons for its success.

"Russian House" is primarily a St. Petersburg one. If you try to "unfold" the creative process in the opposite direction, then, probably, the first step that the architects took - they took as a basis a tenement house with a courdoner. There are many prototypes:

house of the First Russian Insurance Company, house on Pestela 13-15, house on Mokhovaya 27-29, Tolstovsky house.

The composition tends to symmetry: the main axis runs along the center of the courtyard, to the right and to the left of it are two almost identical wings with closed courtyards; towers, bay windows and other elements are also strictly ordered. The only significant difference is the scale of the house, which is almost twice as large as its predecessors in area and sometimes in height.

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1/6 Apartment building with built-in premises in Baskov Lane. Project, 2013. Plan of the 1st floor © Evgeny Gerasimov and partners
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2/6 Residential complex "Russian House". "Evgeny Gerasimov and Partners" Photo © Andrey Belimov-Gushchin
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3/6 Residential complex "Russian House". "Evgeny Gerasimov and Partners" Photo © Andrey Belimov-Gushchin
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4/6 Residential complex "Russian House". "Evgeny Gerasimov and Partners" Photo © Andrey Belimov-Gushchin
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5/6 Residential complex "Russian House". "Evgeny Gerasimov and Partners" Photo © Andrey Belimov-Gushchin
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6/6 Residential complex "Russian House". "Evgeny Gerasimov and Partners" Photo © Andrey Belimov-Gushchin

The next task is to combine the traditional planimetry of a St. Petersburg apartment building with "white stone chambers": Old Russian architecture of the 16th-17th centuries. And here many analogs are remembered: a house on Chkalovsky, 31, a house on Starorusskaya, 2, a house on Kolokolnaya, 11, houses on Furshtatskaya 11 and 20, the Cathedral of the Fedorov Icon of the Mother of God, Fedorovsky town in Tsarskoe Selo.

Evgeny Gerasimov explains the choice of the direction "a la russe" by the fact that it is an interesting task and challenge: there has always been a rethinking of pre-Petrine architecture in St. Petersburg, but no one has done it for a long time. Meanwhile, the architects abandoned the path of "ornamental" modernism, decided to conduct an experiment in purity, namely: instead of "the tinted corpse of modernism, go all out and make it" live "a la rus, with turrets, tongs, diamond-shaped roofs" - explains Evgeny Gerasimov.

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1/4 Residential complex "Russian House". "Evgeny Gerasimov and Partners" Photo © Andrey Belimov-Gushchin
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2/4 Residential complex "Russian House". "Evgeny Gerasimov and Partners" Photo © Andrey Belimov-Gushchin
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3/4 Residential complex "Russian House". "Evgeny Gerasimov and Partners" Photo © Andrey Belimov-Gushchin
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4/4 Residential complex "Russian House". "Evgeny Gerasimov and Partners" Photo © Andrey Belimov-Gushchin

Evgeny Gerasimov already worked in the pre-Petrine style: he won the Tsarev's Garden competition in Moscow, these ideas were developed in the Russian House. Note that the architect was a member of the board of trustees for the revival of the Fedorov Cathedral, in the image of which there are Rostov, Vladimir, Pskov and Suzdal motives.

“Russian House”, like many other buildings of the bureau, is the “third derivative” of the original source, “re-interpretation of the principles of pre-Petrine architecture”, layering and reincarnation of styles in one object. We analyzed in great detail the stylistic affiliation in this article, and then we differentiated five directions in the “Russian House”: pseudo-Russian, neo-Russian and modern as the main ones, as well as features of modernity and Stalin's Empire style.

Thanks to the abundance of references that are read unconsciously, "felt by the skin", the house becomes universal, capacious, and even within the framework of a seemingly specific theme evokes various associations: with a tower, a Pskov church, a romantic castle, makes you recall fairy tales with illustrations by Ivan Bilibin, the city of Kitezh, school travel.

All this allows us to talk about the developed handwriting. Take for example

House "Venice" is completely different, and yet close: in scale, "bulkhead" of styles, generosity in details, material, born of meanings.

The size of the "Russian House", by the way, gives an unobvious plus, since the residential complex turns into an ensemble - again, a rare case in new architecture. Plots in the city center are usually small and divided between different developers and architects who hardly coordinate their plans with each other. This, in the terminology of Vladimir Frolov, provides fertile ground for super-eclecticism: styles and techniques are mixed both within the framework of one house, and within the framework of a block or street. A striking example is Mira Street, where three buildings of modern architects - Anatoly Stolyarchuk, Yevgeny Podgornov and Sergey Oreshkin, are adjacent, different not only in the chosen style, but also in height, tectonics, and plastic.

The “Russian House” is a large and integral fragment, which firmly “sits down” in the old part of the city. It is curious that Evgeny Gerasimov does not consider it a dominant, but refers to "environmental" architecture - as, for example, located nearby

residential complex in Kovensky lane.

Evgeny Gerasimov states that modern architecture is more standardized in comparison with the past. Materials are changing - you cannot find high-quality plaster and even masters who can work with it, and even this will be very expensive, the tectonics and social structure of the building are changing: if earlier the floor above the shopping gallery was considered "lordly", now the most spacious and expensive apartments located in the attic floor.

And yet "Russian House" fascinates with details, albeit of factory serial origin. The drawings for the bas-reliefs were made by the graphic designer Mikhail Ivanov - "based on", of a certain size and quantity, "so as not to go overboard, and so that it would not be boring." The task: so that the house would like to be viewed from 200 meters, from 20 and from two, so that one would like to touch it. Indeed, pot-bellied columns and lions with kreens gather a lot of people who want to be photographed - to check this, just select the “Russian House” geotag on Instagram.

As Evgeny Gerasimov notes, “everyone yearned for the feeling of hand-made, human warmth. Who will come closer to constructivism? Everyone admires the boldness of the forms, the technique is understandable from afar, but does not provoke tactile interaction."

Vadim Bass says about the same: we often walk around the city without raising our heads, not paying attention to the composition, proportions, but with pleasure and a kind of affection we consider mascarons, palmettes, all kinds of owls and Atlanteans. “Details are such a close, at arm's length, tactile layer of architecture. Which in many ways determines our comfort, the quality of everyday existence. Perhaps because of them, we are going from the sleeping areas to the city center, it is the details that we lack in modern architecture.

It seems that the "Russian House" is a rather sensitive response to the request of society, however, without any flirting: a little Russophilia, escapist romance and new geniuses of the place.