This house was designed by an architect. Ivan Knyazev as a work of "pure art": at the time of designing, he did not have a real owner, and a construction company acted as a customer, which then intended to sell it. The forced "non-addressing" of the project served as a powerful creative incentive. As a result, the suburb of St. Petersburg was enriched with a vivid example of modern architecture.
An architect tells about his new project. Ivan Knyazev.
SALON: How did the idea to create a project of a house with such a bright artistic image, while it was originally intended for sale? Indeed, in most cases, objects that do not have an addressee, developers endow with unified features.
- I agree with you that this is a truly rare example of authoring design. In my practice, this happened for the first time. The customer gave me complete freedom of action, saying: "Draw the house, what you want." Well, I drew. As it turned out later, the move was correct. Author's architecture always finds its customer, although, of course, not mass.
S: In one of the interviews you said that, in the stylistic sense, you prefer a synthesis of national romanticism and modern. In this case, you turned to hi-tech.
- Hi-tech, despite its wholeness, is very diverse. For example, Richard Rogers has it industrial, Norman Foster - brutal, but Michael Hopkins always promoted the romantic high-tech, where along with steel and glass natural materials are used: stone, wood and some kind of greens. The image of this house was just formed from such allusions, besides, I was always attracted to the romantic high-tech. The second source of inspiration - "ship" Victorian England. I worked in the UK for a while and took to my heart the aesthetics of old ships, because this is nothing but a synthesis of the high technologies of their time and romanticism. Peculiar hi-tech in ship architecture of the XIX century. Thus, the design of the mansion was conceived, in which the artistic image is transmitted through structural elements. Take, for example, powerful steel trusses, which, on the one hand, bear on themselves only steel visors, on the other - in some places they themselves hang on the strings. In the outlines of the facade and windows, the silhouette of the arch is guessed. Wide overhangs of the roof from the inside are hemmed with a ship's board, and when you stand under them, it seems that you look inside the boat turned upside down. The outer walls are lined with Putilov limestone. This is a very interesting stone, more precisely, petrified trilobite deposits. When you look at it, you see tiny shells everywhere - evidence of another life. Here is in all these details the romanticism of hi-tech. But in the conditions of Russian reality, high-tech, especially in private architecture, is a conditional concept. After all, the mansion is a portrait genre. Well, this style does not correspond to the character of the modern Russian. And all attempts to prove that this is not the case, are not moving further than modernism.
S: And how do you feel about the fact that the interior of the house is made just in a modernist manner?
- In my opinion, this is not contrary to the general plan. I have already said that the mansion's genre is portrait, and in this case rational modernist aesthetics corresponds to the character of the owner. This is a good example of the adaptation of an existing project to the habits and preferences of a particular person.
Ivan Knyazev: "In this house, the imagery of romanticism and the constructiveness of hi-tech were combined. I have long been attracted by the romantic high-tech, an apologist for which is Michael Hopkins: he first began, along with glass and steel, to widely introduce stone, wood, living plants into his projects . "
Passing the gallery 
