Time is ruthless toward our notions of what is good and what is bad in architectural style, so the district and, indeed, the entire city are rapidly changing in keeping with the culture of their own time. You walk down certain streets on the Petersburg Side and among the “living” buildings, old albeit in need of repair, are the corpses of young houses. The finish is still fresh, and even the windows with the expensive coating are not dusty yet and glisten in the sun like a mirror, but the building is dead and there is nothing you can do to revive it.
Apparently, the deindustrialization of the district, whose consequences have been that industrial enterprises have been moved out to the suburbs or completely eliminated, has thus not yet been to the Petersburg Side’s benefit. However, the people who think this are those old enough to have seen a different Petersburg Side. It is possible and, perhaps, even likely that their descendants will think otherwise.
Sergei Petrov, On the Banks of the River Zhdanovka (Moscow & St. Petersburg, 2012), pp. 9–10
On [sic] Petrovsky Island Residential Complex, Petrovsky Prospect, 14, Saint Petersburg. Studio 44 Architects, 2007
“The project’s architects call its style ‘neoconstructivism.’”
Photos by the Russian Reader
The Russian Reader 