Pilgrimage To The Art Deco Country

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

Under the wing of Voronikhin

The house is being built on Vasilievsky Island, in the quarter overlooking the Lieutenant Schmidt embankment, and in a dense historical environment, next to houses of the 19th and early 20th centuries - on the site of the demolished Soviet building of the former Aluminum Institute. The main vis-a-vis is located not opposite, but in the zone of visibility, a monument of classicism architecture, the Andrei Voronikhin Mining Institute (1806 - 1811). “My favorite Voronikhin, gave odds to both Rossi and Quarenghi,” says Stepan Lipgart, explaining his love for the author of the Kazan Cathedral by his ability to create a special space of beauty around his works.

House with Courdoner

The name "Petite France" belongs to the customer Alexander Zavyalov and is based on the pearl Parisian flavor. Light gray fiber-reinforced concrete, combined with graceful wrought iron gratings and floor-length French windows, truly resembles the French capital. The customer proposed to make a courtier - and this coincided with the architect's desire. Because the composition of the house with the courtyard and courtyard system creates a very Petersburg image.

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1/3 Residential complex "Petite France". General bird's-eye view from the west side © Lipgart Architects
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2/3 Residential complex "Petite France". Site plan with landscaping © Lipgart Architects
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3/3 Residential complex "Petite France". Section © A-Architects

And although the Courdoners are characteristic not so much for Vasilievsky as for the Petrograd side, on the 20th line of Vasilievsky there is a historical house with an indention, that is, the rhythm, scale and parcel of historical buildings are taken into account. Stepan Lipgart himself refers to Lidval as the main source of inspiration, who has courdoners both in the Lidval house on Kamennoostrovsky and in the Tolstovsky house on Rubinstein. The motive of solemn propylae is taken from the same place.

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Profitable house, St. Petersburg, Fontanka 52-54, Courtyards, design and construction F I Lidval OAH Yearbook №7 © Stepan Lipgart
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Profitable house, St. Petersburg, Fontanka 52-54, Courtyards, design and construction F I Lidval OAH Yearbook №7 © Stepan Lipgart

My first association was the famous House of the Three Benois with its solemn Courdoners. In any case, it seems to me that there is a reference to the neoclassicism of Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt. This street, erected in ten years from 1905 to 1915 - the time of the vertical cultural turn of our country - is a mecca and a treasury for masters of traditional architecture, where architectural masterpieces and techniques are concentrated, which are also relevant today. In principle, it is easy to imagine a new house there in terms of style, scale, and the number of inventions.

The Silver Age tenement house as an ideal home

Neoclassical houses of the Silver Age and Soviet Art Deco are considered to be the ideal of modern housing. It is no coincidence that the same Tolstoy house or Levinson's house on Karpovka or Moscow skyscrapers are being promoted as fashionable residences in hipster local history.

“For me, the ideal scale and character of a city dwelling house are those that are inherent in the Petersburg profitable housing of the beginning of the 20th century. The attitude of the building to the street and inner space, common to private, in my opinion, is also found here in the best possible way, with the exception of a serious "but" - a cramped and dark courtyard - a feature that arose due to the imperfection of the town planning legislation of that time."

Today, there are no problems with the amount of light in the courtyards. In "Petite France" there are two courdoners: a ceremonial one and an inner quarter, plus a few more small courtyards with landscaping. If in the previous Lipgart Renaissance building the context was a multi-storey residential area, and the scale of twenty floors could not be canceled, then in the project on Vasilievsky, thank God and the regulations, there are exactly as many floors as needed in the historic city. The "French" house opens onto the red line as symmetrical four-storey buildings with a fifth attic floor, and, retreating into the depths of the courtyard, it rises by steps to the seven-storey main building. Already in this, the house differs from the Silver Age, where the buildings often have the same height. And where there are steps, there are terraces. In general, terraces, tiers and registers, a stepped arrangement of buildings in a modern city are necessary and good.

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Residential complex "Petite France". View of the central cour d'honneur from the 20th line © Lipgarth Architects
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Residential complex "Petite France". Perspective along the 20th line, view from the north © Lipgarth Architects

From Klenze to Burov

The architecture of the house on Vasilievsky is characterized by geometry and ornamentation, which at the same time do not interfere with the order. Here the author draws on the experience of his predecessors. Stepan Lipgart: “MF” contains references to the neo-Greek German style of the New Hermitage by Leo von Klenze. The architecture of this building impressed me a lot, especially its decorativeness associated with rigid geometry and repeatability. In my project, it is close to Art Deco, more generalized and geometrized, but from Klenze a number of plastic elements of the facade”. Indeed, some details of the Lipgart house, such as acroteria, framed by windows with pilaster porticoes and at the junction of cornices, came from the New Hermitage: they are different, but in the same places. The flatness and ornamentation of the side facades of the New Hermitage was unexpected for that time; it was somehow not noticed behind the portico with the Atlanteans, and this is almost the twentieth century.

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1/3 New Hermitage. Arch. Leo von Klenze © Maxim Atayants
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2/3 Premazzi Luigi View of the New Hermitage from Millionnaya Street. 1861 © Stepan Lipgart
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3/3 New Hermitage. Arch. Leo von Klenze © Stepan Lipgart

From the plane-ornamental order of Klenze, you can draw a line to the house of Andrei Burov on Tverskaya with sgraffito ornaments. Accordingly, Stepan Lipgart weaves this line into his work, and it begins to work as an intertext, actualizing different layers of the neoclassical tradition.

It is interesting that the order elements in the French house, although they are flattened by the ornament (pilasters with a pattern are always more incorporeal, because they are “dressed”), do not disappear. When Sergei Tchoban applied ornaments in Granatny Lane, he created a complex light and shadow surface of the facade - and this is his programmatic position, expressed in the book “30:70. Architecture as a balance of power”, - he was guided, rather, by rational modernity. Chiaroscuro - yes, but warrant - no. Stepan takes into account the experience of Sergei Choban (now samples are being made with fiber-reinforced concrete, of which the MF customer has its own production, work is underway on the surface, on how to make the relief beautiful and deep). But Lipgart retains a more detailed and traditional articulation of the facades: not just axes, but ordering, a structure of projections and piers. The theme of porticoes (two-storey window frames with pilasters and a pediment) on the risalit alternates with a less saturated part of the facade (interlude), where there is pulsation, the rhythm of the windows, and there are almost no order elements.

The facade of the central high building is marked by a solemn projection with an art-deco portal (almost like in the high-rise of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), a mezzanine portico and a wedding ceremony based on the clock tower from the Marble Palace. As usual, this facade in the depths of the Courdoner becomes a theatrical backdrop, receives a distance that enhances the effect of perception. The aforementioned "Lidval" propylaea at the entrance to the courdoner add pathos. After all, a courtier is always a strong spatial experience.

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Residential complex "Petite France". General night view of the sour d'honneur from the south during the winter season © Lipgarth Architects
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Residential complex "Petite France". General night view of the facade along the 20th line from the north © Lipgart Architects

In addition, Lipgart tried to designate the internal structure of the house, the division into apartments on the facades, mark the entrances to apartments and lobbies with the help of portals and order frames. There is such a rule - let's call it Mikhail Filippov's rule, because he proclaimed it in the 1990s - that the windows of different floors of a residential building should be different in size and decoration, because a family lives in an apartment that occupies an entire floor. This structure is typical for houses in the 1910s, but disappears in the country of the victorious proletariat in the 1930-50s, when the windows become the same. Filippov called for a return to the Silver Age. Today, there are few such families who can afford a suite of eight rooms, and in general society is more atomized, and accordingly, there are fewer apartments. In the house on Vasilievsky there are French windows in all apartments (I don't even know what social conclusion to draw from this - decide for yourself); they are the same in height, but different in width. Some are grouped in three, denoting the boundaries of the apartments. In this case, the internal structure is shown in other ways: these are tiers and projections, eaves removal, order composition, lower galleries of city houses and penthouse terraces.

So, the traditional tripartite, symmetrical composition from the side of the street, order methods of articulating the facades. At the same time, it is clear that the house was created in the 21st century. What is the novelty?

Dialectics of order and stained glass

This brings me to my favorite topic of order-to-glass ratio, which will dominate the 21st century. You can combine them in a thousand different ways, for example, as ingeniously as Samoilov did in the Nauka sanatorium in Sochi (1938), where rather sensual order elements, columns and porticos hovering in space. Stepan Lipgart's task, he said, was “to achieve a balance between order details and large glazed surfaces. Stained glass windows give a lot of light. But emptiness destroys tectonics. " In the house on Vasilievsky the windows are almost without bindings, therefore, in fact, the facades are perceived as an order frame in space. But the frame is strong, well-developed. For all its flatness, there are many layers in it, and the order itself of an elegant dry drawing is convincing and tectonic. This is not the romantic vitality of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, but transparent harmony and chivalrous resilience and gaiety of classics in the midst of general chaos. Something "contrary to", as Hesse said, the title of the story is paraphrased in the title of the article.

"Levinson softened by Lidval"?

Trying to give a formula for the style of the house on Vasilievsky, Stepan said that it was “Levinson softened by Lidval”. I don't really feel Levinson here, unlike the Renaissance house, where his influence is obvious. The large scale and spaciousness there required a powerful plasticity of the facades, expressed in a mega-order constructed from strongly protruding bay windows. But the flatness of Klenze is felt in the French house. More correct, perhaps, will be the formula: Klenze-Lidval-Levinson-Lipgart. This is virtual communication with the masters of traditional architecture - like what happens in Hesse's story "Pilgrimage to the Country of the East", where Mozart and Anselm of Canterbury, Paul Klee and Hesse himself, poets and artists of different centuries meet in one space.

Radiant ornament

In general, Art Deco sounds like a sip here. Most of all - in the portal of the main entrance and in the strongly extended laconic cornices of the courtyard buildings, as well as in the ornaments with rays decorating the propylae and pilasters, not so much Voronikhinsky as echoing the Soviet heraldic symbols. Stepan Lipgart claims that the motives of the diagonal and the arc, complemented by triangles in the friezes, were first invented, and then he suddenly realized that a triangle is a compass. In any case, the motive is radiant, expressive, originally from the Aeroport metro station. Art Deco is also felt in luxury apartments. Terraces, for example, are reminiscent of the Tribeca penthouses in New York artworks. The terraces offer views of the most beautiful city on earth.

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1/3 Residential complex "Petite France". View of the street facade terrace from the south side © Lipgart Architects
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2/3 Residential complex "Petite France". Perspective along the 20th line, view from the south © Lipgart Architects
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3/3 Residential complex "Petite France". Fragment of the courtyard, view of the exit from the two-story apartment and the front garden at it © Lipgart Architects

Personal gallery and personal login

Along with penthouses in Petite France, the luxury format of the so-called cityhouses is used - two-storey apartments with a separate entrance from the street. Cityhauses in Russia are not often found due to our history, but have recently appeared. It's like a townhouse built into a mid-rise apartment building, with a public area on the first floor and bedrooms on the second. This implies the friendliness of society, in the 1990s it was impossible to imagine such a thing. This affirms the dignity of the private person. In England, the entrances to the house are always separate from the street - remember these colored narrow doors, often with a coat of arms, framed by porticoes. In "Petite France" the entrance to the cityhouses is carried out through vestibules with a patterned wrought-iron fence - an homage to the Summer Garden, "where the best in the world is made of fences" - there in the summer you can leave a stroller or a bicycle. The tambours overlook the quiet and green, non-tourist line 20 of VO, on which there is almost no transport and few pedestrians. Essentially, vestibules are covered galleries in the body of a building. The city houses located on the side of the courtyard have small front gardens where you can plant strawberries and have a cup of coffee.