This is the second house of Stepan Lipgart on Vasilievsky Island and the third one in St. Petersburg (the Renaissance residential complex has already been built), all three were designed for the customer AAG. "Petite France", a house that is being built on the 20th line, is an attempt to bring the beauty of Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt into modernity, to rethink the Silver Age tenement house as the ideal of modern housing. The hotel and residential complex "Amo" on the 12th line continues and develops this idea.
It will be erected in the center of Vasilyevsky Island, between Maly and Sredniy avenues, surrounded by houses of the period of historicism: with bay windows in the mezzanines, an abundance of small plastics and St. Petersburg colors, interspersed with splashes of Soviet and post-Soviet times.
House of Bremme as symbolic capital
RC "Amo" fills the gap left after the demolition of the factory of essential oils, essences and paints, built by the Bremme brothers in 1897-1898. Throughout the 20th century, it produced vitamins and other medicines; the factory was demolished only in 2006. The wooden mansion is older, it was built at the beginning of the 19th century, reconstructed in 1851 and in 1906 - then ceramic panels appeared on the facade, which are now kept in the Keramarch Museum of Architectural Artistic Ceramics. During the blockade and later, a well-known vitamin pharmacy operated in the mansion.
Several years ago, the public was concerned about plans to demolish a wooden house and compensation in the form of reproducing its facade as part of a new residential complex. Then the investor and the architect of the project changed, and the mansion, which by the beginning of the 21st century was noticeably dilapidated, received the status of a monument of federal significance. Now it is planned to restore it and make it part of the identity of the place. The future function is still being specified, presumably there will be a private school or office. The new house bends around the mansion with its wings, without approaching it. The new house is received by the Courdoner, like the "Petite France", but it is interpreted differently - the restored monument occupies the central place on the red line.
The infrastructure of happiness
The second difference from the project on the 20th line is the southern building "Amo" - a hotel. The owner of the land already has a hotel "Our Hotel" next door, on the 11th line, the same operator will serve the new one. The hotel has a part of the courtyard area, with a restaurant on the first floor and a fitness club on the last, available to residents of the house. Thus, in addition to a unique mansion, residents will also receive a "happiness infrastructure" - sports, food and a meeting place (not to mention floor-length French windows with balconies and such "New York" housing formats as two-story city houses with separate entrances, terraces and attic - in short, you want to live in such a house).
The hotel adjoins the existing hospital building with a southern wall, and its windows face the western and northern sides. On the other side of the complex there is a green courtyard with a detached two-story Stalinist building of a former kindergarten.
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zooming 1/5 Perspective on the 12th line from the south side, in the foreground - the hotel. RC "Amo" © Lipgart Architects
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zooming 2/5 General view of the courtyard facade of the hotel. RC "Amo" © Lipgart Architects
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zooming 3/5 First floor of the hotel. RC "Amo" © Lipgart Architects
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zooming 4/5 Typical floor of the hotel. RC "Amo" © Lipgart Architects
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zooming 5/5 Section of the hotel. RC "Amo" © Lipgart Architects
The style of the house can be defined as Art Deco, with the five-story street facades closer to the scale of the historical buildings, drawn in more detail, decorated with sandriks above the hotel entrance and loosened gables above the entrance to the restaurant, and the line of cornices continues the cornice of the existing hospital building.
Organic Petersburg: a combination of man-made and natural
“Organic Petersburg is an idea proposed by me together with Alexei Levchuk, a method of organizing residential development in urban areas, based on a rethinking of the urban planning principles of historical Petersburg. We are not talking about ceremonial, regular parts of the city with their rigid hierarchical structure, but, on the contrary, about the most plastic urban fabric, primarily the development of the southern part of the Petrograd side. We interpret the historical urban home ownership as a space for a cell, in the role of which is the volume of an apartment building with its average dimensions and number of storeys. As you know, the main "malignant" feature of such a cell is the principle of organizing the courtyard - dark and cramped, poorly suited for a comfortable life. We see the solution, firstly, in the opening of the courtyard space, in the use of open courdoners, something that was found at the beginning of the twentieth century. In my opinion, Fyodor Lidval achieved the greatest success here. Secondly, in the construction of the structure of the entire quarter, where the central part is occupied by landscaping, in fact, a united super-courtyard, into which part of the aforementioned courdoners are revealed. The outer side of the building, facing the street, is regular, keeps the red lines of the quarter, while the inner side, on the contrary, is plastic, penetrates, flows into the living, natural environment.
We see great potential in the mentioned idea and plan to develop it further. In practical terms, the volumetric-planning structure of the house on the 12th line is the first experience in implementing the principles of Organic Petersburg."
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zooming 1/3 The “Organic Petersburg” concept proposed by Alexey Levchuk and Stepan Lipgart as part of the curatorial work for the Ottepel workshop, organized by Project Baltia magazine with the support of KGA SPb and AAG, 2018 © Stepan Lipgart, Alexey Levchuk
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zooming 2/3 The Organic Petersburg concept proposed by Alexey Levchuk and Stepan Lipgart as part of the curatorial work for the Ottepel workshop, organized by Project Baltia magazine with the support of KGA SPb and AAG, 2018 © Stepan Lipgart, Alexey Levchuk
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zooming 3/3 The "Organic Petersburg" concept proposed by Alexey Levchuk and Stepan Lipgart as part of the curatorial work for the Ottepel workshop, organized by Project Baltia magazine with the support of KGA SPb and AAG, 2018 © Stepan Lipgart, Alexey Levchuk
Houses on a medieval square
Petersburg courtyards have a rather whimsical shape. Although they are part of the mythology of the city, nevertheless, the courtyards-wells do not differ in particular beauty, with the exception of some, for example, in the Tauride House of Lidval on Rubinstein Street. The Amo courtyard is by no means a "well", it is quite spacious, but the inner walls are built in a zigzag pattern. That, in particular, allows you to better open the southern wall for sunlight, providing sufficient insolation. On the other hand, the rugged contour of the courtyard facades works for a variety of rhythm and composition: each fragment is subordinate to the general idea, but also has its own face - as if we are facing a group of small houses with narrow facades, structured rods and cornices, bay windows and windows, tiers with an offset axes. And each volume has its own painting, which facilitates navigation, making the perception of housing non-trivial: instead of the number of the entrance, here it will be possible to speak of a facade with a plant or sea pattern.
It is difficult for a person to perceive a monotonous facade 100 meters long, the ideal length is 20-30 m, as in a historical city. This was pointed out, in particular, by Alan Jacobs in the book "Great Streets". At one time, Mikhail Filippov in the "Italian Quarter" applied the method of composition of a large house, as it were, consisting of small buildings of different eras, with facades of three to five axes, and so he reproduced the humane principle of historical building. Amo offers a slightly different principle: connecting small houses around a square, but the goal is largely the same.
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zooming General view of the southern courtyard facade of a residential building. RC "Amo" © Lipgart Architects
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zooming Perspective of the western courtyard facade of a residential building. RC "Amo" © Lipgart Architects
In contrast to the ceremonial courdoner of "France", the inner square "Amo" is irregular in shape. In general, the improvement of the courtyard in our time is a virtue. Therefore, the type of yard is important. Moscow "Benjamin's" courtyards, in which the Russian village is hiding, are no longer suitable for us, since they tend to turn into wastelands. Petersburg courtyards-wells, expressive, but gloomy, - too. But the courtyard as a medieval square, allowing you to highlight private, semi-private and public spaces, is quite. Camillo Zitte in his book "The Artistic Foundations of Urban Planning" argues that the irregularity of medieval squares gives them picturesqueness, and a sense of harmony arises from them, they seem correct, despite the uneven outlines, because there is the main "hero" - the cathedral. In the complex on Vasilievsky the role of the "cathedral" will be played by the Bremme mansion.
Patterned style: the union of art and technology
Patterned facades - several types of patterns for panels with paradise flowers and trees were drawn by a graduate of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts Anastasia Direktorenko - they are addressed to Andrei Burov's "Openwork" block house on Leningradsky Prospekt and to his house No. 25 on Tverskaya with sgraffito paintings based on Favorsky's sketches … He knew how to combine technology with art and was going to replicate his "Openwork House", which we now consider unique.
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zooming 1/5 Perspective along the 12th line from the north side. RC "Amo" © Lipgart Architects
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zooming 2/5 Fragment of the south-western part of a residential building, view from the courtyard. RC "Amo" © Lipgart Architects
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zooming 3/5 First floor of a residential building. RC "Amo" © Lipgart Architects
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zooming 4/5 Third floor of a residential building. RC "Amo" © Lipgart Architects
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zooming 5/5 Section of a residential building. RC "Amo" © Lipgart Architects
Colors Stepan Lipgart suggested restrained modern, suitable for a rich home decor: pearl, ash, chocolate, coffee with milk.
A separate task was the implementation of the sgrafitto technique, beloved by the architects of the Renaissance and their followers of the middle of the 20th century, in modern conditions. From the 15th to the 20th century, sgraffito was embodied on several layers of plaster. In the residential complex "Amo" it was decided to imitate the Renaissance technique with the help of three-meter ceramic panels with carvings, where a second, contrasting layer is found under the first paint layer - which is more reliable and durable than plaster, and therefore better meets the requirements for a modern facade. The cornices are planned to be made entirely of fiber-reinforced concrete. It is highly likely that this technology has a future. The walls, cut into rectangles, refer not only to the Art Deco and Art Nouveau paintings, but also to the marble intarsia of the Quattrocento. The measure of the flatness and relief of the facades was observed due to the developed cornices. The small scale of the courtyard facades is important - private, chamber, literally two panels - often coinciding with the size of the apartments. The street facades structured by projections also correlate with the scale of the apartment, which means that correlation with a person is achieved - the main condition for a long and happy life at home in a historic city.
