Classic revenge

Residential building with 12 apartments. Architects Evgeny Gerasimov, Zoya Petrova with the participation of Oleg Kharchenko. (Photo: " Evgeniy Gerasimov and partners ")

“The classics,” as one cynic said, who himself, however, later became a classic, “are those whom everyone respects, but no one reads.” It’s a similar story with architectural classics. It is as difficult to admire its harmony and harmony again and again as it is to admire a sunset or sunrise, without falling into sweetness.

The twentieth century knew two options for dealing with the classics. One is more recent - postmodernism. They take a detail (or details) from the classics and begin to play with them: columns hang in the air, arches break, pediments become glassy. An adherent of the purity of the classical style will call this simplification and coarsening, a postmodernist will answer “irony,” but still there is no one to judge them.

Another option is 1910s neoclassical. There was sincere love, and most importantly - taste. That’s why they took something more significant from the classics than details. Namely, tectonics, that is, artistically expressed laws of structure, the materialization of the force with which the load presses on the support. And this tectonics was deliberately sharpened: the columns swelled, the arches grew to the roofs, semi-rotundas protruded from the walls, towers grew at the corners.

It was precisely these houses that were built on Kamennoostrovsky Avenue in St. Petersburg in the 1910s: Shchuko and Krichinsky, Lyalevich and Belogrud provided unsurpassed examples of neoclassicism here, turning the avenue into the most coherent and stylish street in the city. Therefore, when the architect Evgeny Gerasimov began to build a new house here, he naturally decided to continue this series. And, in general, a passerby may well mistake what happened for an apartment building from the beginning of the century. Especially now, when (just a couple of months after the completion of the work) the house was dressed in restoration scaffolding, the balconies began to fall off.

That is, there is no doubt that Gerasimov honestly wanted to make a house that did not fall out of context, and no intention of playing with the classics like the St. Petersburg postmodernist Mark Reinberg (who decorated the same type of house on Malaya Dvoryanskaya with a high-tech roof - and everything “flew away”) he didn't have it. Why didn't it work? The simplest answer is from inability. But in truth - from misunderstanding. Failure to understand that the facade of a neoclassical house is not a flat composition, not a screen that is hung on a finished structure, but the embodiment of the very tectonic forces that hold the house together.

This misunderstanding may stem from the fact that the middle generation of Russian architects, to which Gerasimov belongs, grew up in the era of modernism, where the defining principle is not heaviness, but flight. But his house is, alas, not a modernist interpretation of the classics, but a primitive combination of two opposite vectors. Classicism is determined by symmetry, but if it disappears (as happened in neoclassicism), it must necessarily be motivated by something. And then a completely incomprehensible bay window tower appeared at the end of the house, or rather, “stuck” to it. In neoclassicism, such towers appeared on corners, becoming a kind of “tuning fork” of gravity. And here she is just “for beauty”. But the author suddenly remembered about symmetry and placed the tower clearly in the middle of the end - it turned out to be a church apse. Why, why?

The same can be said about other parts of the building. The overall volume was intended to be massive and heavy (which corresponds to the spirit of the street), but the house is so riddled with windows that the idea turned out to be compromised (the corner of the building, which turned into some kind of perforation, is especially funny). The powerful rustication (relief cladding of roughly hewn stones) of the first floors in neoclassical style created the feeling that the building’s weight seemed to crush the stones on which it stood. Here the lower level is neatly plastered, and the rustication begins higher up. And two pitiful half-columns, of course, are not enough to “hold” the mass of the building, and their almost identical bases and capitals hint that the columns can be turned upside down - and nothing will change. The keystones above the windows of the first floor, to which the arches actually rely, in their absence seem like meaningless blotches. The semicircular windows cut off by the cornice give the impression that a second one was added to one house. And the space between the columns flowed down somewhere, as if “corroding” the rustic granite.

So it’s absolutely fair that the balconies began to fall off. They were the same applique as the entire neoclassical decor of the house - meaningless and having no connection with its constructive scheme. Classics took revenge on the architect.