Architect Artyom Nikiforov built a completely wooden workshop in Repino, a famous country-house suburb of the northern capital. The workshop is located in a secluded forest corner, not far from the highway. It is designed for four offices: it consists of four two-storey wings with separate entrances, united by a longitudinal central atrium.
The construction is unusual in that this classic is in wood. Moreover, not a well-known historical derivation of wooden classics was taken - not a Chekhov house with a mezzanine, not a Blok estate, not a Soviet professorial dacha, but a Palladian pathetic villa. The main building with a high central portico and symmetrical lateral order compositions is faced with an unedged board (!) Imitating a stone rustic stone.
This is an ingenious find: instead of hand-made, naturalness arises, nature sculpted these uneven edges of the boards, which retained the shape of the trees. At the same time, the sensuality and monumentality inherent in stone and plaster rustication are preserved. And the central portico is just as ingeniously solved - a brutal doric like the revolutionary experiments of neoclassicist Ivan Fomin in the 1920s, but again in wood. The fluted columns with a flat abacus capital were specially designed by Artem Nikiforov. The flat pediment, sewn up with vertical planks, emphasizes the "honest" qualities of wood - not a fluid material, but made up of shaped pieces.
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zooming 1/7 Workshop of Artem Nikiforov in Repino Photo © Dmitry Tsyrenschikov
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zooming 2/7 Workshop of Artem Nikiforov in Repino Photo © Mikhail Rozanov
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zooming 3/7 Workshop of Artyom Nikiforov in Repino Photo © Mikhail Rozanov
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zooming 4/7 Workshop of Artyom Nikiforov in Repino Photo © Sergey Melnikov / Courtesy of ArchiWOOD
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zooming 5/7 Workshop of Artem Nikiforov in Repino Photo © Mikhail Rozanov
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zooming 6/7 Workshop of Artem Nikiforov in Repino Photo © Sergey Melnikov
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zooming 7/7 Workshop of Artem Nikiforov in Repino Photo © Mikhail Rozanov
The rest of the building, according to the author, is utilitarian, but this is not entirely true. Yes, with the exception of the main facade, the buildings seem to be solved in a Scandinavian spirit: a traditional wooden house with a pitched roof outside and a modernist free space inside. When moving from the main facade towards the forest, the classics "dissolve" not immediately, but gradually. The ends of the main transverse building are also order compositions, but simpler variations of the central portico (there were Doric pilasters in the project, in reality there are hints of them) and side rusticated arches. The ends of the forest buildings are even simpler.
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zooming 1/7 Workshop of Artem Nikiforov in Repino Photo © Sergey Melnikov
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zooming 2/7 Workshop of Artyom Nikiforov in Repino Photo © Sergey Melnikov
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zooming 3/7 Workshop of Artyom Nikiforov in Repino Photo © Sergey Melnikov
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zooming 4/7 Workshop of Artyom Nikiforov in Repino Photo © Sergey Melnikov
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zooming 5/7 Workshop of Artyom Nikiforov in Repino Photo © Sergey Melnikov
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zooming 6/7 Workshop of Artem Nikiforov in Repino Photo © Sergey Melnikov
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zooming 7/7 Workshop of Artyom Nikiforov in Repino Photo © Sergey Melnikov
The building is symmetrical in plan. The passage along the central axis is organized in an emphatically theatrical way. On the axis there is a transverse building (transept) with a Palladian facade, through which the main entrance, a longitudinal building with a public space and an open terrace flanked by "forest" buildings are located. We enter "into the light" through the central intercolumnium, which corresponds to a glass wall, through which the final destination of the path is visible - a glass window into the forest. In the foyer we find ourselves under a coffered ceiling and pass under a low arch with a coffered vault into the hall, which in contrast seems to be a high "nave". The central nave is simple, but solemn (there are also side naves, there are working rooms). Instead of vaults, the central nave is covered with a pitched roof, and this gives it a similarity to a basilica with a clear movement to the "altar", in the place of which there is a huge window into nature, and skylights in the roof count down the rhythm of the step instead of the columns. The “altar” in the form of a window to the forest is symbolic: the nature-centered nature of our world is increasing, the vector is shifting towards ecology, whether we like it or not.
Nature is both a temple and a workshop … and the person in it is an architect. So one could paraphrase the slogan of Turgenev's hero Bazarov regarding the workshop of Artyom Nikiforov, who said: "Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and a person in it is a worker." Artem Nikiforov conceived and built a workshop in the forest before the pandemic. But when in the spring of 2020 the cottages in Repino and in all the suburbs of St. Petersburg were totally rented by people who had moved to them to work and live during the quarantine, it became clear that the architect predicted the future prophetically.
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zooming 1/7 Workshop of Artem Nikiforov in Repino Photo © Dmitry Tsyrenschikov
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zooming 2/7 Workshop of Artem Nikiforov in Repino Photo © Dmitry Tsyrenschikov
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zooming 3/7 Workshop of Artyom Nikiforov in Repino Photo © Mikhail Rozanov
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zooming 4/7 Isometric. Workshop of Artyom Nikiforov in Repino © Artyom Nikiforov
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zooming 5/7 Forest. Workshop of Artyom Nikiforov in Repino © Artyom Nikiforov
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zooming 6/7 Plan. Workshop of Artyom Nikiforov in Repino © Artyom Nikiforov
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zooming 7/7 Column project. Workshop of Artyom Nikiforov in Repino © Artyom Nikiforov
