Victory Park

In our work on this project, our task was to create a new functional core for the park. A core that would add new functions to the existing park, develop the potential of available activities and attract new visitors.

We started our work with analyzing the park in the context of its development and current use.During the 1990s and the early years of the 21st century the park, which was created in the 1930s, kept dwindling, losing parts of its territory now occupied by an apart hotel, an amusement park separated from the park by a metal enclosure and other facilities. The Kirov stadium, originally planned as a cyclopean landscape object serving as a logical conclusion of the composition of the park, was taken down in 2006. In its place a new stadium with a developed infrastructure was built, separating the park from the Gulf of Finland and violating the original layout logic of the seaside park open towards the sea.As a result, this park, which was once open outwards, towards the sea and its environment, is now included into the sprawling urban fabric, at times very aggressively. This changed its nature, making it an introverted city park.

Nevertheless, despite numerous losses of the last years and the fact that the design of the park’s author Aleksandr Nikolsky was never fully implemented, the park is still worth preserving as a monument of landscape architecture of the first half of the 20th century. It is a unique object which combines regular and landscaped elements.Therefore our task was to find the spot that would permit the inclusion of new objects into the body of the park while not harming the surviving spaces beloved by the residents of the city.

Such a spot was the park’s service area, the review of which showed unreasonably used spaces suitable for potential placement of new facilities.

The service area, which also includes expressive hothouses for park plants, is situated on the southern boundary of the park, apart from its main spaces and zones, but nevertheless in close vicinity to them.

Basically we used a post-industrial approach towards the development of the element of the park that needed to be developed. We did not get rid of the operations functions (hothouse, planting, compost production, engine yard with workshops) but offered modern, efficient and compact versions of these. The new approach to the use of service areas also permitted making the processes of the operation and life of the park visible – now the visitors can see how the great work of caring for the park is done. The optimization of the processes and the opening of the service area for park visitors found its logical conclusion in the addition of a number of new functions into the park space, which were embodied in a number of pavilions and light tents.We chose glulam as a material for building new facilities.

From the architectural point of view, we tried to find a contextual solution that would be calm enough so that the new objects would not oppose the park environment, which consists of classical elements. We used as a basic structural element the bearing components (columns, pylons and abutments) with parabolic contours, continuing the recurrent motif of the objects designed by the author of the park Aleksandr Nikolsky at the junction of avant-garde and art deco styles of the 1930s. Many of these objects were never implemented, because the war started, and after the war, the aesthetic demands of the government as a customer changed.