The conversation about the Veren place residential complex in Petersburg grew into a discussion of the possibilities of regulating the spatial development of cities, about the order and rhythm, the admissibility of imitation, the tasks and possibilities of modern architecture, the relationship between the interests of the owner of the site and the logic of the spatial development of the city, the impossibility of pitched roofs in modern buildings above 5 floors … We have taken these topics out in a separate interview.
Archi.ru:
Bloomberg recently released the results of a survey of Americans of all ages, genders, and political beliefs about architectural preferences. Respondents were shown comparable traditional and modernist buildings (such as John Russell Pope and Marcel Breuer) and asked which one they would choose for a federal public building. 72% preferred traditional architecture, 28% preferred modernism. The ratio is almost like in your book with Vladimir Sedov “30:70. Architecture as a balance of power”. I would like to consider the 30:70 strategy using the example of your projects. Does the residential complex Veren Place in St. Petersburg coincide with the strategy outlined in the book?
Yes, Veren Place is part of this strategy. If you look at the 10th Sovetskaya block, there are only three houses on the side of the street where Veren stands. The corner building of Nikita Igorevich Yavein is a representative of the category of thirty percent of iconic buildings. It faces the crossroads, has a modernist clipped ground floor, four main white floors that open in plan like a maple leaf, and a cylindrical volume as the top of the corner. This is an active form, which has been deservedly recognized with professional awards. This house certainly falls into the category of outstanding gestures, which I described in the book as the most suitable for designing corner buildings.
On the other corner of the 10th Sovetskaya block there is a typical four-storey apartment building with a fifth attic floor. In the middle, the site was vacant and was intended for new development, and it seemed to me that complementing the existing buildings with a background object would be as correct as possible. Therefore, I chose a simple form, but more interestingly articulated, with fine detailing of the facade. Within this street, the form has shown itself to be effective. The only one, in terms of height, our building turned out to be one floor more than, in my opinion, it should be. The customer insisted on raising the house, since he had the right to do so. It seems to me that if the building had not two corrugated floors that rise above the cornice of the neighboring apartment building, but only one, it would be better. I write in my book that the profile of the street should be combined with the height of the houses - this is an integral part of the concept. When houses get too high, the ideology of a detailed facade stops working, because at high altitude it is more difficult for a person to see these details.
How can you describe the scope of the 30:70 strategy?
The philosophy and program set out in the book are related to regulation, that is, a certain set of laws and rules. From the customer's perspective, there is a flaw in it. For example, if you own a corner plot, you can do something more imposing and taller on it, with greater density, but the owner of a neighboring plot cannot. It turns out that one of them won from this program, and the rest lost. In St. Petersburg, people are brought up in a certain way, there is a security zone in the center of the city, so there practically no questions arise. But if we talk about another city with less stringent security characteristics, for example, about Berlin, there everyone can ask: “Why can't a tall house be built on my site? Why is it possible only at the corner? . I was asked such questions many times when I presented this strategy in different countries. The democratic approach associated with protecting the equality of rights of developers working on different sites is violated when building such a regulatory strategy.
Personally, it seems to me that this is aesthetically correct approach, and in those cases when the development is carried out according to a single master plan, it is acceptable. It is this strategy that we adhered to, say, in the project of the Admiralteyskaya Sloboda district in Kazan. In the general five-six-storey building, the points of location of tall buildings were highlighted, and these bright in their architecture dominants worked to form the perception of the area from distant points, in particular from the water, while the background buildings had emphatically detailed facades, but at the same number of storeys.
But, of course, in a city where there are already established interests of land owners, it is not easy to implement such a theory. I believe in this program and try to implement it, but the city is a much more multi-layered “pie”. As recently as on the weekend I was walking along Bismarck Strasse in Berlin, watching how different in architecture and time of construction buildings form its silhouette. Buildings of the 1960s, 1930s, early twentieth century and very modern buildings are built there not according to the principle of "two background - one is not background." But it is incredibly interesting to “read” these epochs - as if you are reading the history of architecture! Berlin is, of course, one of those cities that got used to this architectural discipline and continues to get used to it with difficulty. Moscow, of course, also belongs to this category. In such cities, dogma is more alive. As they say, it is not the golden ratio itself that is interesting, but the fluctuations around it. It is not the theory itself that is interesting, but what ultimately develops around it. But, of course, the starting points are necessary, and it was them that Vladimir Sedov and I tried to outline in the book.
How does your strategy compare between traditional and modern techniques when we are talking about wall solution and facade structure?
The modernists decided that a smooth wall is sufficient to perceive the volume of the building. A smooth wall combined with an opening is the main motif of modern modernist architecture, a language that is more than a hundred years old. It would be nice if the houses did not age, but remained glossy, like brand new cars and refrigerators. New always looks good, and when it gets old, we throw it away and buy something else. But this principle does not work with buildings: a building is aging faster than we are ready to throw it in a landfill. And even if a building has an interesting silhouette and an unusual plan, but smooth facades, devoid of details, it ages ugly and quickly, gradually acquiring an appearance simply ugly, and this, of course, is the main reason why buildings of the 1960-1980s are being demolished today. And this is bad: resources are spent on demolition, not to mention the resources that were once spent on the design and construction of these houses.
For example, the Lenizdat building on the Fontanka. It has vertical windows and featureless smooth vertical and horizontal rods that have aged due to lack of maintenance and details that would help the façade become patinated without cleaning and repair. My idea was to make the skin of the building that age predictably well. Lenizdat Business Center in St. Petersburg
If you embed the background building in a historical context, what about the roof? I have a fondness for pitched roofs, but I have to admit that the Dobuzhinsky-style rooftop landscape has been lost in the modern city
I, too, have a fondness for pitched roofs, but then drainage problems arise. You yourself know what historical drainpipes look like. And how they get clogged with ice in the cold. And if, in the case of relatively low buildings, the fight against icicles is a difficult, but still technically solvable task, then ice build-ups at a height of 10 floors are a potential disaster that cannot be allowed. As a result, if today the roof is made sloped, a counter-slope is needed in the cornice zone to organize an internal drain. At one site, I was even asked to heat the eaves. And, it is clear that against the background of such decisions, a simple flat roof becomes much more expedient from an economic point of view. But above a flat roof, as a rule, "suitcases" of equipment grow, which, alas, have nothing in common with the roofing landscape of Tuscany.
The purpose of architecture is a symbolic expression of cosmological structures. How do you feel about the order, which in European architecture, and more broadly in European civilization, aesthetically and symbolically expresses the presence of a person and his place in the world?
I like classic buildings. But for me, the warrant is frozen Latin. Of course, you can do a lot of improvisation around the order. But there is a feeling that you have a huge number of ingredients from which you can prepare a dish, and you only use tomatoes. The order very quickly ceased to be constructively justified - it would not be a great exaggeration to say that it is not such for about as long as we know it. It's just a way to grind the surface. Why is the pylon façade impressed on us? For the James Simon Gallery in Berlin, David Chipperfield came up with a seemingly simple technique: a beam-shaped entablature and standing pylons. And this endless rhythm - a kind of colonnade in Palmyra - makes a magical impression on us.
The rounded spaces make an equally magical impression on us. Let's say the colonnade in Sanssouci, or the colonnade of St. Peter's, or the colonnade of the Kazan Cathedral. There are motives that produce a magical effect. So it is with the order: you do not need to copy it, but you have to ask yourself what exactly in it makes such a magical impression? The common thing between Berninievskaya, Voronikhinskaya and Chipperfield's colonnades is rhythmization. Or take the stunning twin column motif. I don't care if these columns have an order or not, but the sequence "double column, pause, double column" is absolutely magical. Or a motif from the Palladian basilica in Vicenza - a tertiary division of an opening with one large and two small spans … The magic of rhythm, like the magic of grinding the surface of a wall, is a powerful tool. If we lose this means of expression, we will lose a lot. In any case, the surface of the facade, in my opinion, should be crushed: with materials, ornaments, a system of frames, ledges. The look must cling to something.
How do the windows of the Veren Place residential complex relate to the historical buildings? What kind of windows are generally appropriate in the new architecture of St. Petersburg?
There are no square or horizontal windows in St. Petersburg. The verticality of windows in houses until the 1910s of the twentieth century is predetermined. Nikita Yavein's house has horizontal windows, but this is an iconic building. And for the private, we made vertical ones, the distance between them is two-thirds of the window, so that the ratio of windows to the facade is about 50 to 50 percent. This is due to the cold climate: you need to keep warm, but give access to light. The streets are quite narrow, the details of the façade at close range matter. The panoramic glazing theme is counterproductive for the St. Petersburg center. Tape windows dematerialize the building. But in St. Petersburg, dematerializing the facade, you do not get a better view than if you look through the passe-partout of the window.
In the solution of the facade layers in the Verenplace residential complex, I see a connection with high fashion. When the lapel of the jacket continues down and goes into the pocket, turning into the main surface …
I like the high fashion analogy. When the clothes are outwardly modest, but there is something else in these clothes. Not just a black jacket, but the transition of materials, surfaces or innovation in cut. This is a feature of our world: what is simple at first glance is actually difficult. In architecture, this leads not only to distinctiveness, but also to targeted aging, when aging occurs with respect to the building: for example, places where dirt is deposited are predicted, etc.
Is it possible to use detailed fiber-reinforced concrete facades in more democratic housing?
Yes, I use fiber-reinforced concrete in so many homes. And by the way, architectural concrete was also used on the facade of Veren Place, mainly due to the dictates of the budget. Today, it is definitely one of those materials that are very often used in business class projects, along with brick and brick tiles on the subsystem. There is also concrete tile that imitates brick. I must admit that I am not happy with this, but given the need to withstand a certain cost of construction that is insufficient for more expensive technologies, I do not see a problem in imitation. We are not surprised that in historical buildings they made imitation of materials on the facade with the help of painting. Remember grisaille, or artificial marble, or the imitation of stone rustic plaster and other details inherent in stone facades on the houses of historic St. Petersburg. I understand the desire with budgetary funds to achieve materiality and smallness of the division of the facade. It is better to achieve by any means than not to achieve at all.
In 2018, Russia adopted the Housing and Comfortable Environment state program, according to which 600 million sq m should be built by 20242 housing. We are used to evaluating cities by layers: we often talk about the cities of Catherine the Great, since under Catherine the Great they began to create centers of historical cities from albums of exemplary buildings, which we still value today. It's not about monuments, but about fabric. Also, the fabric of the later times of Alexander, Nicholas, and so on, up to the Silver Age and Soviet neoclassicism, has been preserved. These are the areas that are in demand and loved by the townspeople today. It was only in the 1960s that the fabric of panel boxes, so to speak, of a disposable nature, which is not preserved, appeared. And now there is a danger that this one-time building will be reproduced again, but five times higher than the Khrushchevs, and in 30 years it will turn into a slum. The question is: can your 30:70 strategy be implemented and adapted for mass development?
Yes, there is a danger. It would be possible to implement my strategy, but, on the one hand, such a strategy does not imply a density higher than 25,000 square meters per hectare, and, on the other hand, leads to slightly higher construction costs due to a more attentive and detailed attitude to the surface. building. But without this attitude, the creation of a durable and well-aging urban structure is impossible.
