Among the monotonous visual noise of the sleeping area, the Renaissance house by architect Stepan Lipgart is a sudden retinal burn. The house clearly belongs to a more perfect civilization, with a developed language and a sense of beauty. In principle, it is clear what kind of civilization it is. This is a fragment of the precious historical center of St. Petersburg that accidentally flew into a sleeping area as a result of an unknown explosion. It would be nice to send such a house-block to each sleeping area, and then they would change the life of the area, like pine trees change a swampy climate to a healing one. The customer Alexander Zavyalov, the head of the investment and construction holding AAG, sees his mission in this way: to build houses worthy of old Petersburg. Thanks to the intention to cooperate with the architect, the house was brought to the realization close to the author's text. Note that both the architect and the client belong to the younger generation of 30-40 year olds, so the house seems to be a rather programmatic statement.
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zooming 1/6 View of the facade along Dalnevostochny prospect, evening lighting. Residential complex "Renaissance" Photo © Dmitry Tsyrenshchikov / Courtesy of Liphart Architects
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zooming 2/6 View from the north-east, fragment. Residential complex "Renaissance" Photo © Dmitry Tsyrenshchikov / Courtesy of Liphart Architects
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zooming 3/6 General view from the south-east. Residential complex "Renaissance" Photo © Dmitry Tsyrenshchikov / Courtesy of Liphart Architects
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zooming 4/6 North facade view, evening lighting. Residential complex "Renaissance" Photo © Dmitry Tsyrenshchikov / Courtesy of Liphart Architects
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zooming 5/6 Renaissance residential complex © Liphart Architects
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zooming 6/6 Renaissance residential complex © Liphart Architects
The house is called "Renaissance", and although this is the name of the client, and not the architect, nothing is accidental. He revives so many things that ultimately lead to new discoveries. What does he revive? First, Renaissance refers to the Leningrad Art Deco of the 1930s. This hermetic architecture, a classic with a graft of constructivism, has not yet been unraveled and is full of energy. The artistic value of its form is exceptional. Spears are broken about its content at scientific conferences and in social networks. Secondly, in Renaissance, an organic form is achieved, similar to the New European symphony, because there is work with a large form and contrasting themes, motivational development, culmination - well, all sorts of things that have long been considered optional, but not superfluous in art. Thirdly, this architecture picks up the general cultural Faustian meta-plot of the 20th century "man - machine", clearly continued in the 21st century. Fourthly, the artistic tasks of traditional architecture are solved here on the basis of modern technology and modern materials.
Large form
House "Renaissance" is a monumental ensemble, in some places reaching a height of 24 floors, which holds the space for kilometers around. It is not easy to create a composition of a high-rise building so that it does not simply turn into a sum of floors. The architect masterfully copes with this task. Residential complex "Renaissance" forms an elongated quarter at the corner of Dybenko Street and Dalnevostochny Avenue. On the long side of the complex there are solemn propylaea leading to the inner-quarter park with a plan of the Roman Piazza del Poppolo; opposite them - a high stepped tower (2nd stage of construction), facing the courtyard.
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zooming 1/4 General plan. Residential complex "Renaissance" © A-Architects
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zooming 2/4 Plan of the 1st floor. Residential complex "Renaissance" © A-Architects
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zooming 3/4 View of the southern facade of the building of the second stage from Dybenko street. Renaissance residential complex Photo © Stepan Lipgart / Courtesy of Liphart Architects
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zooming 4/4 Renaissance residential complex © Liphart Architects
The left wing of the complex, as viewed from the propylaea, is still under construction (stage 3). This article presents mainly stage 1 - a building with the letter P in the plan, adjacent to Dybenko Street and Dalnevostochny Avenue. To the high 19-storey part, overlooking Dalnevostochny Avenue, lower side steps rise in steps. The building seems to be directed forward - this is the same avant-garde dynamics when the resultant of forces is outside the building. But the division of the facades into high-rise registers, the varied and slender articulation of the wall are classic, which helps the architectural ensemble to maintain integrity and intelligibility.
The taken out corner divides the powerful volume into separate buildings that are better accessible for perception, and, instead of hanging over the street, ramming it with an acute angle, the house retreats in a polite curtsy, with an inviting gesture of a semi-rotunda.
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zooming 1/4 Residential complex "Renaissance" Rendering © Liphart Architects
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zooming 2/4 Residential complex "Renaissance" Photo © AAG
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zooming 3/4 Residential complex "Renaissance" Photo © AAG
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zooming 4/4 Fragment of the facade along Dybenko street, evening lighting. Residential complex "Renaissance" Photo © Dmitry Tsyrenshchikov / Courtesy of Liphart Architects
The large form of the classic house-quarter, invented in the Silver Age (like the Benois house on Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt), developed in the neoclassicism of the 1930-50s, for example, in Moscow block-shaped houses with courtyards-parks on Kutuzovsky and Leninsky Prospekt, preserving more or less successfully organic composition. In the 1950s, the tradition was interrupted after Khrushchev's excesses decree and was no longer revived, with the exception of isolated examples in post-Soviet neoclassicism. Stepan Lipgart has his own reasons for addressing her. This is how he formulates his goal:
“Housing is a space for an individual (many individuals) to live, a type of housing that we inherited from the modernist twentieth century, growing above 9-11 floors in the overwhelming majority of cases, the personality excludes from the system of measures. In the best examples, the courtyard becomes such an environment, but rarely the multi-storey building itself.
Therefore, I saw the main task in connecting twenty-storey volumes with a human scale, without splitting the volume itself, without destroying it, giving it a clear logic and rules of its own. In addition, it was necessary to find those compositional principles and those details that would make it possible to combine a fairly multi-storey and extensive complex with a single theme, but this is not monotonous.
Actually, the main methods for solving these problems were in a certain way outlined in Moscow residential construction in the early 1950s. A residential building, as an element of the urban fabric, could also be a dominant of a significant scale - right up to the city-wide one, but the articulation of individual parts of such a significant volume was indispensable. This work with the volume consists in its dismemberment into separate elements: tiers, floors horizontally, risalits, bay windows vertically. The cornice becomes the basis for the entire system, and the outlines are quite simple: a strict shelf and a plastic gooseneck, from these two "notes" the whole building is assembled.
The main proportion is the decrease in volume along the vertical. The difference in textures and materials is rather a secondary, additional feature. As a result, the seemingly abstract and speculative method, due to the anthropomorphic nature of the order system and its elements, gives the building a structure of compositional harmony readable by the human eye. In fact, it humanizes a huge volume of one hundred thousand cubic meters, allows a person to relate himself to it."
Rotunda Lipgart
The Renaissance House is a dialogue with the Leningrad Art Deco of the 1930s, and specifically with house number 14 on Ivanovskaya Street, Fomin-Levinson. There, a free-standing semi-rotunda on thin and high faceted columns forms the end of the house, serving as a variation of the same, dried by constructivism, porticoes that form the plastic of the facades. In the Renaissance house, the role of semi-rotunda is more important. She, like a brooch fastening the cloak floors, encloses all parts of the composition. The rotunda is located on the corner, like a kind of inversion of the Silver Age tower, but more graceful and empathic compared to the tower. In a symphony, it happens that all themes develop according to certain laws: exposition-development-reprise, everything goes on as usual, but sometimes at the climax a completely new theme suddenly appears, piercing and important - some oboe solo by Shostakovich or an elegiac melody with new paint from Mozart, and it becomes clear that everything was started for the sake of this theme. Around is a huge slender symphony building, and this fragile theme holds the whole composition. Here, too, a graceful rotunda on the corner conducts the house, which will house about 3,000 people - the population of a small town. (I really expect that the rotunda will be built anyway. Parts of it are still in the factory owned by the customer, where other order elements and details from fiber-reinforced concrete were also made).
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zooming 1/5 View from the south-east to the rotunda. Residential complex "Renaissance" © Liphart Architects
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zooming 2/5 General view from the south-east. Residential complex "Renaissance" © Liphart Architects
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zooming 3/5 View from the south-east, evening illumination. Residential complex "Renaissance" Photo © Dmitry Tsyrenshchikov / Courtesy of Liphart Architects
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zooming 4/5 General view from the north-east. Residential complex "Renaissance" © Liphart Architects
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zooming 5/5 I. Fomin, E. Levinson. House number 14, Ivanovskaya st., St. Petersburg. 1940 Photo © Stepan Lipgart
The Renaissance half-round can be perceived as the “signature” of the architect. Here there is a cadence named after Mozart, and here we have a rotunda named after Liphart. Although this is an homage to the architecture of the 1930s - and even to the Cameron Colonnade of Apollo in Pavlovsk - a new quality was obtained here. The semi-rotunda has four floors, it is not lost against the background of a high 19-storey building, but, on the contrary, absorbs, like a radar, all the energy of space, closing on itself three streets: Dybenko, its continuation and Dalnevostochny prospect. This is the culmination, and the calling card, and the main motive. And an element with a rich cultural memory, which is always good for a building.
Love-hate of man and machine as a metaplot of architecture
This is an important meta-plot of the architecture of the XX century, which has passed into the XXI century. After Corbusier saw ideal architecture in dams, and Malevich in steam locomotives, technopoetics took root seriously and for a long time, man disappeared from the poetics of modernism, but he survived in Art Deco, and the collision between man and machine still excites minds.
Man and machine are not necessarily opposed to each other. Here it is rather a mutual attraction of two extremely extreme principles, and sometimes a dubious compromise. The invariant metaplot "man - machine" is the relationship "artist - power", the Faustian theme "in the beginning there was power." The ambivalence of this force, as well as the ambivalence of technology and the ambivalence of power, are known to all. Will technology be our tool and helper, softening the burden of life, or will it eventually kill the human race? Is power a necessary limitation of the chaos of our fallen nature, or a repressive apparatus that suppresses freedom? These seem to be trivial questions, but in Art Deco architecture they appear like nowhere else, and that is why the topic remains “hot”.
In the article "Search for a Hero" dedicated to the exhibition of the same name, Stepan Lipgart explained why he chose the Art Deco style, not modernism. While studying at the Moscow Architectural Institute, he went to a lecture by the famous modernist-deconstructor Tom Maine and asked him about the place of man in the poetics of architecture, but he did not hear anything in response. In the same article, Stepan formulated how the theme of architecture of the 1930s is close to him. He is interested in “the unresolved contradictions inherent in Russian culture and history, which manifested themselves especially strongly in the 1930s. The collision of the machine with the traditional and man-made. The line of heroic Petersburg architecture, embodied both in the art deco of Levinson and Trotsky, and in the gloomy archaic of Belogrud and Bubyr, and even earlier in the arch of the General Staff and the monument to Peter. A line of burdened impulse, overcoming, associated with the nature of the city, which has been subjected to violent Europeanization several times. Moreover, sometimes Europeanization turned out to be a blessing and gave rise to a culture that enriched the world, and sometimes led to collapse, as in the Russian revolution."
The conflict of love / hate between man and machine is embodied in the Art Deco aesthetics, sometimes in a combination of glass mesh and an order, sometimes in a combination of mechanistic identical windows with delicate classical details. In a series of paper projects by Stepan Lipgart "At the Reactor", playing the role of a manifesto, the combination of anthropomorphism and grid, modified order and glass gives enchanting images. The architect himself says that the wave-like motifs on the facade embody the image of a nuclear reactor as a force that warms this world, but also threatens to destroy it. This energy has a similarity to human passion. A nuclear power plant is like a temple, and the theme of the deification of a machine is also present here. In the Renaissance house, all these motives have received a new development. The techniques found in "Reactor" were transferred to the residential complex on Dybenko: stylobate, mesh, and rust. And the semicircle of the rotunda is also a kind of shadow of the round tower of the atomic "temple".
Stylobate forms a solemn podium for the house and a promenade terrace for offices on the second floor. The stylobate houses public functions, the first floors of the brick tier - small offices with separate entrances, higher - housing. Just as the introduction to the first movement of the symphony contains a leitmotif that is repeated in the next four movements, so the stylobate covers all the corps and sets the theme of the order in the form of a brutal Behrens colonnade (as in the German consulate of Behrens in St. Petersburg) with glass mesh intercolumnias and Egyptian granite portals. The semi-rotunda and two-story propylaea to the courtyard are part of the stylobate.
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zooming 1/6 Fragment of the facade along Dybenko street, portal of the entrance to commercial premises, evening lighting. Residential complex "Renaissance" Photo © Dmitry Tsyrenshchikov / Courtesy of Liphart Architects
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zooming 2/6 View from the south-west, evening lighting. Renaissance residential complex Photo © Stepan Lipgart / Courtesy of Liphart Architects
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zooming 3/6 View of the north-eastern side of the colonnade of the stylobate, fragment. Renaissance residential complex Photo © Stepan Lipgart / Courtesy of Liphart Architects
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zooming 4/6 Fragment of the facade along Dybenko street, decoration of the auxiliary entrance to the residential front doors. Renaissance residential complex Photo © Stepan Lipgart / Courtesy of Liphart Architects
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zooming 5/6 Colonnade of the stylobate. Fragment. Evening lighting. Renaissance residential complex Photo © Stepan Lipgart / Courtesy of Liphart Architects
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zooming 6/6 Fragment of the stylobate. Renaissance residential complex Photo © Stepan Lipgart / Courtesy of Liphart Architects
Mega portico. Subject in magnification
Returning to the composition of the high-rise building. How to make this colossus perceived organically, harmoniously and proportionally? In organizing the facades, Stepan Lipgart develops a technique known since the Silver Age. When an order form, a portico or an arch, stretches over the entire facade, this gives it integrity (a person associates himself with a column due to the generality of proportions). Let us recall the house of Mertens in 1912 on Nevsky Lalevich with a giant warrant on a glass, in fact, modern facade. In another of his projects, Stepan Lipgart used an arch-frame as high as the facade. The rectangular arch is created by large articulations - glass biaxial bay windows act as supports, and a powerful cornice serves as a ceiling. Such powerful plastic is typical for the Renaissance house. Six rectangular bay windows form a sort of six-column portico. The subject in the magnification keeps the structure very well. The gigantic six-column "portico" is covered with an entablature of the two upper floors. The reception of the mega-colonnade is familiar partly from the Parisian residential complex of Bofill, where semicircular glass bay windows served as giant columns, although Lipgart's mega-order does not resemble Bofill at all. That is, the forms are not alike, but the general romantic mood is.
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zooming 1/3 Fragment of the facade along the Dalnevostochny prospect. Residential complex "Renaissance" Photo © Dmitry Tsyrenshchikov / Courtesy of Liphart Architects
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zooming 2/3 View of the facade along Dybenko street. Renaissance residential complex Photo © Stepan Lipgart / Courtesy of Liphart Architects
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zooming 3/3 The concept of facade solutions for a residential building within the project of the Atayants Architectural Workshop "Opalikha O3". 2014 Computer graphics © Lipghart Architects
Bay windows, the main theme of the Renaissance, are composed of two contrasting elements: a glass mesh and a plastic order. The theme develops, is carried out in different tonalities - first against the background of ribbed brick rustication, then against the background of a flatter stucco one, above - on a smooth solid wall. In the upper tier, bay windows become triangular, and in the "attic" part they are echoed by balconies of a similar outline, arranged "in a run". The balconies rise above the graceful "Pompeian" semi-columns, which, in turn, are continued by the "rapiers" of high flagpoles, piercing both the balconies and the cornice, and directed to the heavens: the vital "departure" order seems to be cramped on the facade, and it goes up supported in the corners by denser volumes of pinnacles (the theme is somewhat similar to Art Nouveau architecture, where semi-columns often “gush” with flowerpots. By the way, remember the music of Scriabin, which inspired Stepan Ligart's paper projects).
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zooming 1/7 Fragment of the facade along Dalnevostochny prospect, bay windows and balconies of the upper floors, evening lighting. Residential complex "Renaissance" Photo © Dmitry Tsyrenshchikov / Courtesy of Liphart Architects
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zooming 2/7 Renaissance residential complex © Liphart Architects
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zooming 3/7 Residential complex "Renaissance" © Liphart Architects
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zooming 4/7 Renaissance residential complex © Liphart Architects
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zooming 5/7 Residential complex "Renaissance" © Liphart Architects
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zooming 6/7 Renaissance residential complex © Liphart Architects
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zooming 7/7 Residential complex "Renaissance" © Liphart Architects
The vertical structure of the Renaissance house is traditional, clear, classic: four tiers descend upward according to the principle of the golden section, in them, respectively, eight - five - three and two floors. Other facades vary the themes found. Bay windows are replaced by loggias. The tiered and golden ratio are preserved. The ribbed brickwork of the first tier, which gave the surface of the wall a richness of lines and chiaroscuro, is preserved throughout the complex, imparting to the facades the charm of man-made art.
Goose and grandma's pancakes
About 10 years ago, we argued with Alexander Skokan. He argued that, although he loves Palladio and Zholtovsky, he does not believe in modern classics. Because, I quote, “the old masters - both architects and molders - knew how the cornice traction, the goose, how this goose turns around the corner. The current architect doesn't know how to do this. It's like a recipe for grandma's pancakes: if you read it in a book, you will also make pancakes, but lumpy. And if you cooked together with your grandmother, then you will get the right pancakes."
But in the 21st century, as it turned out, in the absence of manual sculpting, the method of jib and cornice pulling can be adapted to modern fiber-reinforced concrete production. And Stepan Lipgart tells in a very exciting way how difficult the path from hand drawing through a drawing to a render, then to a working drawing, then to its correction and production of parts at a factory owned by the customer, was. And everything worked out, albeit at the cost of a lot of effort. At first, the customer's designers distorted the proportions of windows, piers, cornices, and the whole process had to be rolled back and redrawn, and then the designers already strictly adhered to the project, coordinating rare changes. Despite the fact that the order details were produced at the factory, the artistic quality of the drawing was preserved. Cornice rods are reinforced at the corners, duplicated by additional profiles, and on the walls are flatter. Again, musical analogies arise: the orchestration of cornices at the corners is more powerful and dense, on a smooth wall it is more transparent. That is, the effect is achieved, but by other means.
Glass mesh and order. Forecast
As already mentioned, the “man-machine” meta plot of the architecture of the XX and XXI centuries is expressed in the juxtaposition of the order and the glass grid. The glass grid is responsible for the Cartesian mathematical order. Columns and other order elements - for the presence of a person in the artistic system of the building. Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1930s, inspired by the possibilities of glass, proclaimed: "Glass did it, it destroyed classical architecture from root to branch." As we can see 90 years later, glass with an order get along well and enrich each other. Actually, already in the House of Artists on Verkhnyaya Maslovka (Krinsky / Rukhlyadev, 1934), belonging to the same era in the early 1930s, the grid with the order was connected to create solid glass walls of bright workshops and an expressive physiognomy of the facade. Modern neoclassical authors also worked in this direction, for example, Quinlan Terry in the Tottenham Court building in London. The topic of interaction between the glass grid and the order is a promising one, far from being exhausted. In terms of function, it ideally fits the tasks of modern architecture: light spaces, interpenetration of interior and nature, but at the same time the facade remains with columns and other order details, human agents in the poetics of the building. In the charismatic and romantic image of the Renaissance, a line that is important for our century has been found and realized. And it, in my opinion, can be continued.
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UPD: comment on the installation of air conditioners
Places for air conditioners are provided on the courtyard facades, where they can be installed in agreement with the management company. In apartments that overlook only the street facade, air conditioners, also in agreement with the management company, can be installed on cold loggias in bay windows. A significant part of the bay windows are just cold balconies.
