Development of a perspective St. Petersburg block, located in between the streets of Shkapina and Rosenstein, has been frozen again. At this time this has happened because of the party Yabloko (‘Apple’): opposition won a lawsuit in the struggle with the already canceled "Ohta center" and might have put a cross on the project of Glavstroy or at least has made its approval complicated enough. Both architects and builders have learned that "nice" news at a meeting of the Town Planning Board after lengthy discussion on modern architecture.

Discussion on the draft residential district in the territory bounded by streets of Shkapina and Rosenstein passed slowly and resembled a memorial service for an unrealized architectural dream. The authors, Kaplunov architectural workshop, presented the residential area project, which should appear on the south, the most distant from the Obvodny Canal area. Project customer is OOO “Glavstroy-SPb”.

Sergei Shmakov presented the project, he immediately informed that the workshop had designed "houses in the area of public and business buildings”; that the site is very complex - it is sandwiched between the industrial buildings, and nearby there is a railway station and the Baltic railway station, and the project itself is an effort to find a compromise between three mutually exclusive components. "We tried to reconcile our own esthetic preferences according to the customer's desire to squeeze out of the territory all the possible square meters in line with the regulations", he explained honestly.

Reviewer of the project - architect Vyacheslav Ukhov - added a story announcing that each of the industrial enterprises in the vicinity of the future residential area has its own sanitary protection zone. "But now the process of reducing the protection area is going on, Institute of Hygiene is engaged in it, he added. And, based on our experience, most likely, the buffer zones will be reduced."

They said in every speech that it was not the authors fault, and that boring and too small building was caused by the desire of the investor to squeeze the maximum out of the territory. Kaplunov workshop was sympathized, they compared it to the project of Khrushchev's quarters and then added - "in a good sense of the word"; praised for the outstanding work and expressed confidence that "they will cope with fronts." Customers, who were present in the room, did not react on the architects’ performance about the "greedy" investors.

"That is all right”, the chief architect of St. Petersburg Yuri Mityurev summed up the discussion. He said that the quarter for which the project had been designed "is not yet Leningrad”, so he would like to see a building of more St. Petersburg style that would be in harmony with typical architecture for this area. After that he poured a bucket of cold water into the assembled: "While we were preparing the materials for this meeting, some changes had happened. Yabloko won a court, and now all the height increase rules set in the Rules of land use and development in the area of ZPZ-2 are discarded. Height is controlled only by the law "On modes of protection zones", so for this quarter the permissible construction of buildings is only 28 and 33 meters high instead of projected 63 meters.

Source: "Fontanka.ru" on 12/29/2010