Saint Petersburg from an architectural perspective

– Evgeny Lvovich, do you think that Saint Petersburg has its own architectural school? And if it does, what is its idea and how does it influence your work?

–  I believe that such a school exists. To my mind, it is based on the classic architectural tradition – not the classicism in a strict sense, but the order-based, the ensemble-based architecture.
In this sense, the Petersburg architectural pattern is what makes the local developments differ from the newly built Moscow districts. The Petersburg city planning traditions live on. They are the reason for the meaningfulness, the regularity, the Petersburg sobriety, which define the image and quality of the Petersburg architectural school. One of its features is the details co-ordinating to serve a common idea.  Moscow was developed in separate buildings, thus the architectural mind of the capital is shaped through single houses, while Saint Petersburg provides for a different city-planning type of thinking: we think in spaces, in squares, streets, perspectives.

– Does the contemporary Petersburg let the architects think in categories of space and perspective? 

–  You don’t need to seek far, look at the project we implemented in cooperation with Sergey Choban, Nevskaya Ratusha (Neva City-Hall) –  what is it if not an ensemble? There is a general city planning notion that underlies the project, and the idea is now gradually materializing. The buildings of the first priority have already been completed. Now we are designing the next group of buildings. But we do preserve a common city planning concept of the project, the common space, the axis, along which the whole ensemble is arranged.

You can read the full text of the article at the site (in Russian).