Greetings, friends! Today I want to tell you about a neighborhood of our city, which appeared both on maps and in reality quite recently. "Appeared" - in the truest sense. I still remember the time when there was a sea here. I sometimes came to these places to sit on the shore and admire the endless sea surface. The street where my walk started was once a promenade. At the beginning, I walked a little bit along this old promenade. An unusual silhouette immediately caught my attention. I stepped closer to it:
This site looks very unusual, but it bears little resemblance to a landscaped public garden. Perhaps the sculptor's studio is in this house? I can't say that for sure. It could be that what appeared to me to be blanks for future sculptures are already finished works, and everything together is a complete composition. It can be very difficult to make sense of contemporary art!
The boulevard is located on the opposite side of this street. In this place there used to be a small beach - a strip of land, sand, stones. Fishermen and vacationing locals could be found here. The waves carried logs to the shore, you could use one of these logs instead of a bench and admire the sunset in relative comfort. To my right were old urban neighborhoods, with houses overlooking the bay side. I turned in the opposite direction, to the left.
I have to go where all these people are going. Take a closer look at this picture - do you see a series of strange curved structures? You can only see the top of these structures in this picture, but we're going to get closer to them now.
There is an expressway that runs along the border of the old city district. This highway wraps around the city on the bay side. Much of this highway is elevated above ground and sea level, and trestles and bridges have been built to span it. But in this place a different method has been used; here the highway does not go up, but down. It is almost a tunnel - only without a roof. To get to the new neighborhood, I cross one of the bridges that span over this expressway.
In order to build a new neighborhood, the land reclamation technology was used. The bay in this place is very shallow, its depth is only about 1.5 - 2 meters. The shallow water zone was backfilled with a large amount of imported soil. The technology of strengthening old banks and filling in shallow water is not something new for our city. St. Petersburg is located in a low-lying area, works to improve the quality of urban soils have been carried out since the XVIII century, but only in the XXI century such projects have acquired scale and scope. Sand from the sea sand deposit in the waters of the Gulf of Finland is used to form the land. The sand is transported to the site by self-propelled barges.
The part of the new territory that is closer to the old sea line has already been built up, and the new houses have already been partially inhabited. Beyond the bridge, a quite landscaped street began - with asphalt underfoot, streetlights, and stores. But very soon I came to the border of the built-up neighborhood. The beaks of construction cranes towered over the high-rise buildings under construction. Thin twigs of saplings marked the place of the future park. In the distance, the lights of the production site shone, which continues to shape the new shoreline.
The Golden City residential complex is likely to become the architectural dominant of the new neighborhood. The golden spire of the main building of this complex can be seen from different points. The complex is built in the fashionable architectural style "Chaotism". Followers of this style seek to get away from the monotony and strict rhythm of architecture. A characteristic feature of this style is broken symmetry, it can be manifested both in the external forms of the building and in the chaotic arrangement of windows on the facade of the building.
The golden spire has a curved irregular shape. From some points it may appear symmetrical, but if you walk around the building the irregularity of the shape becomes very noticeable. The architectural project was worked on by the Dutch consortium KCAP+Orange Architects together with the St. Petersburg A.Len Architectural Bureau (https://archi.ru/en/78419/the-grand-faade).
While I was walking, it was getting dark. I decided to walk straight to the bridge, but it wasn't a good decision: I ended up on an unimproved area and had to walk on a rutted road, trying not to get into a puddle. But I was comforted by the thought that I was able to take historic photos at this location. In a few years, looking at these photos will evoke the same emotions that I feel now when I look at photos taken during the early development of the southwestern or northern suburbs of the city.
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| Smartphone | Google Pixel 3a |
| Location | Saint Petersburg, Russia |