Greetings friends, today I propose to spend some money for a visit to a metro station. I've chosen the Obvodny Canal metro station for this little excursion. First I have to buy a metro ticket, which costs about $1. The lobby of this station is on the ground floor of a shopping centre, and it's not an architectural landmark. I go through the turnstile and down the escalator. The station is quite deep, at 61 metres. Finally I find myself down in the underground hall.
The architectural design of the station focuses on a time when industry and transport was booming. The arches of the underground hall are stylized as metal trusses - a feature of many 19th-century industrial buildings.
The walls of the station are decorated with a photographic panorama of 'Industrial Petersburg'. Glass-ceramic panels show what the banks of the Obvodny Canal looked like. The embankment of the left bank of the canal runs along one wall, and a panorama of the right bank of the canal runs along the opposite wall. It is a kind of monument to industrial Petersburg.
You can walk along the track walls for a long time, looking at the panoramas and trying to compare historical and contemporary views. Some of the buildings no longer exist, others have been changed beyond recognition. In some places, the authors of the panorama have put together elements of the urban landscape in such a way that even familiar places are hard to recognise. The panorama is not a photo chronicle in its pure form. The authors of this panel have combined sights, buildings and urban incidents from different years into a single work.
In some places you can see a geometric drawing in the form of a semi-circle with inscribed triangles. The casual viewer might think of it as a free-form geometric composition, but someone familiar with the groundscape of the area will immediately recognise the characteristic pattern of the spans of American bridges. An important function of the Bypass Canal was transportation. In the 18th century you would have seen numerous barges in the canal waters, but in the 19th century a significant amount of goods were transported by rail. American bridges were thrown over the Obvodny Canal in the 19th century to carry the railway to the nearby railway station.
I decided to add to the story of this metro station with a photo of the Obvodny Canal embankment, which I took on a rainy evening. This is how the area looks now: busy traffic, an old railway station, a beautifully lit church building, and red-brick industrial buildings somewhere in the back. Some of these buildings have managed to change their purpose. For example, the old railway station building now houses a large food mall, and beyond - where the access roads used to be - there is now intensive construction of residential buildings. But you can't see the new buildings from this angle, and only the clean, flat asphalt and bright street lights will prevent you from mistaking the century.
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| Smartphone | Google Pixel 3a |
| Location | Saint Petersburg, Russia |
This is my entry for the #marketfriday challenge by 