Landscape rejected skyscrapers

This year will mark the 20th anniversary of presenting in Petersburg the first skyscraper construction project. Eventually, it was not implemented, like many others. Over the last years, the city has built only two buildings exceeding 100 m in height.

Historically, the bedroom districts of St Petersburg witnessed the construction of high-rise buildings that housed principally the production associations, for example the buildings at Tikhoretsky Avenue 21, Kantemirovskaya Street 12, Kirishskaya Street 2, and Yuri Gagarin Avenue 34. However, their height does not exceed 100 m and they are not higher than Petersburg’s best known architectural dominant, Peter and Paul Cathedral.
At the moment, the city has only two buildings exceeding the height of Peter and Paul Cathedral, the Alexander Nevsky residential complex and the Leader Tower business center. Those, incidentally, sprang up only recently. The city plans to build at least a further three skyscrapers, i.e. Okhta-Center; Ingria Tower facility; and Icebridge multi-role establishment near the Bolshevik Square Metro. The latter will only partially perform as a residential facility. Thus, the high-rise construction is concentrated mainly in the periphery, i.e. in bedroom districts, and will not affect the “skyline” protected by the UNESCO.
“Across the world, most of the buildings, being built by the companies for their own use, such as the Okhta-center, are primarily image-building projects. As for high-rise business centers, the major issue here is their occupancy rate since the potential demand on St Petersburg’s office accommodations market is not so high,” says Albert Kharchenko, EastReal Director-General.
“In Petersburg, there are only a few dozen buildings 70 to 100 m high. At present, quite a few high-rise residential building projects are being realized in the city’s bedroom districts near the Ring Motorway. This trend can hardly be considered positive given that the comfortable and residentially pleasing environ implies low-rise developments. It is good news, however, that now it pays to comprehensively develop the areas, so an increasing number of developers look to low-rise building programs,” says Mr.Kharchenko.
The key issue for a high-rise developer is usually the provision of sufficient parking area. This issue can be addressed in different ways. For example, in London’s City it is not common practice to build large parking lots since it is implied that those working in the building come to work by public transport, bicycles, taxi, etc. In our city, however, it is necessary to create parking facilities at the rate of at least one car space per 100 sq meters of office floor area. “It means that for 100 sq m of the building’s floor area we must build 30 to 50 s m of parking. Locating such a parking lot without shelter would kill the very idea of high-rise construction which implies the maximally effective utilization of the land plot. The parking problem is said to be the biggest challenge of the Moscow-City project. The global experience shows that it is extremely difficult to create large-scale business areas with predominantly high-rise buildings and well equipped with parking facilities and approaches for convenient entry and exit of a potentially large number of vehicles on a relatively small area. Such districts must be serviced mainly by public transport,” reflects Igor Kokorev, Knight Frank St Petersburg Company’s deputy head of the department of strategic consulting.
Sergey Bogdanchikov, ORIGIN CAPITAL managing director, agrees, saying: “For the development of high-rise construction in the city it is necessary to have a well developed public transport. So the US megacities provide an extensive market of taxi service along with the subway. On the contrary, Europe today abides by the low-rise but very dense construction policy. Considering the existing public transport system in St Petersburg, the high-rise housing construction is not a very important issue for the city. The high-rise structure will only deteriorate the transport situation.”

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The first skyscraper construction project (the building of the Peter the Great tower in the estuary of the Smolenka river on Vasilyevsky Island) was initiated in 1994 by the Twentieth Trust Corporation controlled by Sergey Nikeshin, now deputy to the St Petersburg Legislative Assembly. According to the authors’ concept (co-product of AO LENNIIPROJECT, Britain’s WilsonMason, and Russia’s XXth Trust Corporartion) this 133 m high office tower must become the most unique structure not only in St Petersburg, but in the entire North Western region of Russia. However, the project was never implemented and the land plot was sold to the LenSpetsSMU Company (engaged in special construction projects).