The Magic Of Rhythm, Or Ornament As A Theme

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

The Veren Place house is located in the center of St. Petersburg, on the street with the dacha name 10th Sovetskaya (I wonder how many hundreds of Soviets still remain in Russia?), Not far from the Nevskaya Town Hall by the same SPICH bureau. Ten Soviet ones used to be called Rozhdestvensky after the Church of the Nativity of Christ on the Sands of the middle of the 18th century, blown up by the Bolsheviks, and now being restored. Streets have been trying to be renamed back to Christmas since the 1990s.

But let's start with a small digression on the "30:70" strategy (the book"

30:70. Architecture as a Balance of Power”was published in 2017, Sergei Tchoban presented it many times at lectures in Russia and abroad). Its most important point is that a harmonious city cannot consist only of iconic buildings, there should be no more than 30 percent of them, and the rest of the buildings should be better background, but with detailed facades. This is not necessarily neoclassic, even, rather, not she, more often it is a variety of Art Deco, but other options are also possible.

On the short 10th Sovetskaya street, there are two houses at the beginning and at the end. One of them - corner, iconic, modernist - was built in 2005-2006 according to the project of "Studio 44" Nikita Yavein. This building, according to Sergei Tchoban, is a typical corner dominant with an unusual plan and active forms. On the other corner of the 10th Sovetskaya, passing to Mytninskaya, is the former apartment building of I. P. Smirnov in the Art Nouveau style (1902, architects M. Andreev, F. Pavlov). Both houses occupy about a third of the street. The plot between them was given to the residential complex Veren Place. The complex is designed in the spirit of Art Deco, albeit with clear signs of modernity. That is, the Veren Place building joined the background development of St. Petersburg, and the ratio of houses on the street turned out just according to the strategy - 30:70. All the houses on the opposite side of the street are profitable early 20th century, moderately decorated and quite ordinary for their time, with one pause in the square.

The residential complex Veren Place consists of two buildings on a common stylobate: one building is stretched along the street, the other is placed almost parallel in the depth of the block, and between them on the roof of the parking there is a landscaped private courtyard for residents. From the side of the courtyard, through the glass front door, one can get both to the lobby, the design of which is related to the general artistic concept of the house, and to the parking lot. In the crowded conditions of the historic city, the parking system is organized without the usual ramp, using a parking lift. The house has 80 apartments and 45 parking lots - a good value for the environment. Apartment sizes from 40 to 105 m².

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1/4 General plan. Residential complex Veren Place © SPICH
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2/4 Plan of the 2nd floor. Residential complex Veren Place © SPICH
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3/4 Plan of the 7th floor. Residential complex Veren Place © SPICH
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4/4 Section 3-3. Residential complex Veren Place © SPICH

The street building has a developed plastic with bay windows, which is typical for St. Petersburg houses. The courtyard building overlooking the mini-square has no bay windows, but with the same pattern structure.

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Residential complex Veren Place Photo © Dmitry Chebanenko
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Residential complex Veren Place Photo © Dmitry Chebanenko

The traditional three-part composition of the facades vertically: bottom, middle and top - basement, four mezzanine floors and two upper floors plus an attic - is preserved in both buildings. And, of course, they are connected with each other by ornaments in the walls. The musical principle is applied here: the general form inside is subdivided into themes that sound, repeat and develop, slightly changing. Both front facades are rich in details, while the yard ones are traditionally more strict and restrained.

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1/3 Veren Place Residential Complex Photo © Dmitry Chebanenko
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2/3 Veren Place Residential Complex Photo © Dmitry Chebanenko
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3/3 Veren Place Residential Complex Photo © Dmitry Chebanenko

The main street façade is organized with the large rhythm of three bay windows. But the main thing, as already mentioned, is what this large form consists of, themes and details. For starters, the Veren house intelligently bows to its neighbors. It is as black and white as Yavein's house (white top - black bottom), it continues the undulation of the "neighbor" in its trapezoidal bay windows, while "calming" and ordering it. And in the next apartment building, the corner bay window is even more strict, rectangular. The motif of the two narrow windows that cut through the bay windows of Veren Place echoes the adjacent apartment building. Such windows are characteristic of the Art Nouveau era, but having passed into modern times, they acquired a more strict rectangular shape. The rest of the windows have a proportion of two squares, like many historical Petersburg windows, with the pleasant difference that they are French, to the floor.

If there is an order, it is latent: Sergei Tchoban believes that order classics are similar to Latin, and limiting ourselves to it is like preparing all dishes from one ingredient. In the black "granite" (actually fiber-concrete) plinth, only a hint of pilasters in grooved blades is left. The windows are separated by smooth horizontal ribbons, and in this context it is not important, the window rests on the ribbon or the ribbon serves as an upper frame for the window, a kind of architrave.

ЖК Veren Place Фотография © Дмитрий Чебаненко

The solution of the facade layers is very remarkable. On the one hand, the wall certainly has plasticity, layers, depth, chiaroscuro - all those qualities that are so necessary for a city house to deserve the love of residents. On the other hand, this is not just an interpretation of a traditional wall. The layers are quite intricately intertwined, forcing to peer and understand. The analogy that came to my mind with high fashion (with which Sergei Tchoban agreed), when everything is simple only at first glance, is not accidental, and when you look closely, you discover an abyss of design thought. For example, in a simple black jacket, a non-standard design is found - the lapel of the jacket goes into the pocket, like in a mobius strip: it was just an additional surface and suddenly became the main one. So on the Veren facade, there is a wall level, and there is a level of framing on top of it: wide horizontal ribbons between floors play the role of upper frames for windows (instead of a casing or architrave), and vertical narrow rods become side frames (instead of pilasters). At the same time, these ribbons and rods are part of one surface, which divides the facade into cells. In some of the cells, ornaments are arranged sequentially and regularly. And the main surface of the wall, along with the rods, also flanks the windows, while the external window sills form another layer, the most protruding, emphasizing the role of windows on the facade. As a result, the eye constantly solves the riddle - where is the main surface, where is the additional surface, where is the ledge, where is the depression, where is the background, where is the frame. And this is exactly what Sergei Tchoban declares in the book: the eye must have something to cling to, what to look at. In general, the shape is slender and convincing. (About the expediency of vertical windows in St. Petersburg in comparison with panoramic ones, see the interview).

The hallmark of the house is ornamental panels with flowers and leaves, stars and fruits (it is always useful to remind a resident of a metropolis about the Gardens of Eden). Several types of repeating patterns in the walls of the windows look like "stone" carving, but in fact these are slabs of high-quality fiber-reinforced concrete with a thickness of about 5 cm, where the depth of the pattern is 3 cm. In social networks in the comments people are wondering whether it is a stone or not, which says about aesthetic luck. The surface of the street building inherits the house at 6 Granatny Lane, designed by Sergei Tchoban back in 2008. There, stone horizontals and verticals were covered with carvings; in a St. Petersburg house there are more smooth surfaces, but the principle of patterns, ribbons and several layers is consonant.

I specifically wrote about the semantics of ornament, which any person, child or old man, man or woman, layman or intellectual, reads in a similar way. I was always amazed at the activity of Adolf Loos, who more than a hundred years ago in a provocative manner declared the ornament a crime and a sign of a savage who is afraid of clean surfaces. Although magical protection is only one of the many meanings of ornament, it is not the most relevant. Obviously, other meanings - the connection between man and organic nature, the symbolism of the flora and fauna, mathematical relationships within the rapport and between repeating patterns - but you never know what else ornament means. Ornare in Latin means to decorate. The philosopher Hans Gadamer generally considers the human need for decoration as a source and in some way a synonym for beauty. Well, in Greek, κοσΜάτος - decorated and κόσΜος, the ordered space of a person's life, or simply "order" - are cognate words.

It is very gratifying that Sergei Tchoban is consistently implementing his strategy. He does not offer a private solution, but a path that many can follow after him. Since the writing of the book "30:70" such large projects have appeared, such as the Admiralteyskaya Sloboda district in Kazan and the renovation quarter in Kuzminki. The recently completed VTB Arena Park architectural ensemble combines the art deco houses of Sergei Tchoban and the modernist houses of Vladimir Plotkin, and this is a case of finding a common denominator for styles: classicizing modernism and modernized art deco converge through rhythm. It is in the rhythm, and not in the order details, that Sergei Tchoban, according to him, sees the secret of the impact of architecture on its viewer - and the viewer is, in the final analysis, every citizen, not just a resident of the house. The dialectic of freedom and order, felt in colonnades, in repeating ornaments, in musical constructions, gives the sought-after magic of rhythm that heals the spirit and the eye. These qualities are an important basis for a person's perception of a city. Although, of course, it is the architecture of Sergei Tchoban that most consistently revives the ornament, embedding it in the logic of modern facades: in addition to the "Byzantine House", here you can also recall the Wine house, and the corner house at the same intersection of Leningradskoe shosse and TTK, the "business card" of the residential complex "Tsarskaya Square", where the motifs of the carving of the Terem Palace of the Moscow Kremlin were borrowed for the drawing of the shoulder blades.

In other words, the ornamental facades of Sergei Tchoban can already be built in a whole string, a separate plot, which the author has been developing for more than ten years as one of the directions of his work to find modern architecture that would suit both the historical city and its inhabitants.

Veren Place is another step in the same direction. It picks up the rhythm of the surrounding city and embodies, on the one hand, traditionally, maintaining the height, rows, the sequence of bay windows and the classic three-part logic of building in height. On the other hand, it should be noted that the house is very modern - to feel it, it is enough to look at the apartment buildings on the opposite side of the street. In this comparison, the house does not even look like belonging to "seventy percent" of ordinary buildings: modern construction in the historical center, in addition to respect for the context, requires a sufficiently high quality of materials and workmanship, clarity of lines. And the house - bright, built in the contrast of almost white and black, lined with panels and ribbed "flutes", but at the same time "wrapped" by bay windows like a wave, does not at all look like a replica of neighbors, but rather represents the sum of modern technologies and ideas about quality and author's beliefs regarding the semantic and emotional value of the ornament. It is this role of the building on the verge of modernist and historical Petersburg, dictated, one must think, not only by the neighborhood of a relatively new and relatively old building - the house, perhaps, was the best one.