The House of the Singer Company (House of the Book) is a historical building in St. Petersburg, located at 28 Nevsky Prospekt, an architectural monument of federal significance. The house was built in 1902-1904 according to the design of the architect Pavel Syuzor for the Singer company. Until the revolution, the building housed the headquarters of the Russian representative office of Singer and various tenant offices. In 1919, the building was nationalized, the Petrogosizdat store, branches of various publishing houses and editorial offices of newspapers and magazines were transferred to it, the whole wing was occupied by the state censorship committee. The name "House of the Book" was fixed in the speech of the townspeople about the store, which had been working in the building since 1938.
Information about the development of the site dates back to the end of the 1730s. In 1738, by decree of Empress Anna Ioannovna, the arena, previously located at the Winter Palace, was transferred to it. In 1742-1743, a wooden opera house was built on its foundation, designed by the architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli. On October 19, 1749, the building was destroyed by fire. Only in the 1770s, Archpriest Ivan Panfilov, confessor of Catherine II, built a three-story stone mansion in its place. Later the building belonged to the Borozdin family. In 1820, the pharmacist Carl Imsen bought it. Already in the first quarter of the 19th century, the premises in the house were rented out for commercial rent - they opened tea, coffee and grocery stores. From 1829 to 1836, I. V. Slenin's bookstore worked in the building. Around the same period, the house housed the music shop of the publisher of the Nuvellist magazine, K. F. Goltz. In the 1840s, according to the project of the architect Vikenty Beretti, the house was reconstructed and the fourth floor was built on. In 1849, the "Daguerreotype institution of Sergei Levitsky" (later - "Levitsky's Light Painting") began to work in the house. The photo studio worked until 1859. After Levitsky left for Paris, it was closed and restarted in 1878 for another 16 years. In the 1860s, the site was acquired by Major P.V. Zhukovsky, having registered the ownership of his wife Olga Karlovna Zhukovsky. At the invitation of the Zhukovskys, in the 1860s the house was reconstructed by the architect Fyodor Rudolf. In 1895, on the site of Levitsky's studio, the photo studio of Lev Aleksandrovich Bergholz was opened, which worked until 1902. Over the years, the former house of Imsen also housed the banking house "Lampe and Co", the editorial office of the newspaper "Birzhevye Vedomosti", the French bookstore R. Violet. Some apartments in the house remained residential - for example, in 1893-1894, apartments No. 8 and No. 17 were rented by the families of Victor Georg Lampe and his brother Oskar Georg.
In 1900, the widowed Olga Zhukovskaya bought the plot from the Singer
sewing machine manufacturer. The amount of the transaction exceeded one
million rubles. Two years earlier, the company acquired land in Podolsk,
where it planned to launch its own production and subsequently enter the
markets not only in Russia, but also in Turkey, Persia, China and Japan.
For the building of the headquarters, which would be engaged in the
expansion of products to the east, the main business street of St.
Petersburg was chosen. The project of the building was commissioned to
the leading architect of that time - the architect Pavel Syuzor. I. B.
Isella, Evgeniy Baumgarten, Marian Peretyatkovich and N. I. Konetsky
acted as co-authors in the work. Some sources claim that Suzor did not
create the project from scratch, but reworked the drawings of Ernest
Flagg, who at that moment was working on the creation of the Singer
Building on Broadway, which, however, contradicts the surviving
documents: from the correspondence of the vice-president of the Russian
branch of the Singer Douglas Alexander, who acted as the main customer
on behalf of the company, with the director of the Podolsk Singer plant
Dixon, it turns out that it took Suzor more than a year to develop the
project, and as a result, extremely tense relations were established
between the architect and the customer. By the summer of 1901, Suzor
presented three projects. Discussion and agreement went on for another
year. It is known that "Singer" originally wanted to build an
eight-story building. However, in St. Petersburg there was a height
limit of 11 sazhens (23.47 meters), which was determined by the height
of the Winter Palace, and Suzor had to seek approval for a six-story
building, as well as bring the project in line with other strict city
building codes. Douglas Alexander ultimately described Suzor's creative
search and the proposal of several options as an unsystematic approach,
and for some time even tried to reduce the architect's fee. The customer
also wanted Suzor's project to be brought to a single stylistic pattern
with the projected complex in New York. Suzor failed to realize the idea
with a rotunda in the corner of the building, as it had more decorative
than practical meaning, and, in the absence of the latter, did not
receive the client's approval.
When dismantling the old house, it
was found that the granite plinth had sunk below the level of the
pavement, and fragments of the old paving were uncovered. In order to
make the most efficient use of the site, Suzor designed the building in
the form of two six-story buildings, united by a common attic and a
transverse wing, which formed two courtyards. They were covered with a
glass roof, forming atriums. Thanks to the metal frame and cement-based
brick infills, many of the outer walls were made non-load-bearing and
large-scale windows with interfloor lintels were cut into them.
The façade cladding was made of polished fine-grained red and gray
granite. The work with the stone was carried out by the Moscow firm of
G. List. Forged bronze decor was made in the workshop of K. I. Winkler
and A. O. Schulz. The sculptures were Alexander Ober and Amandus
Adamson. On the corner of the façade, there are two female Valkyrie
sculptures, created according to Adamson's sketches. The figures were
made using the green bronze knockout technique, each holding a spindle
with a steel thread, and at the feet a sewing machine, symbolically
referring to the customer company. At the base of the dome, a sculpture
by Auber was placed - an eagle with outstretched wings.
The
architectural dominant of the building was a tower with a dome crowned
with a sculptural composition and a glass globe. The globe was
surrounded by a metal ribbon on which the name "Singer" was written in
gold letters, symbolizing the spread of the company's products to the
whole world. The dome was oriented along the line of the Pulkovo
meridian. The composition stylistically rhymed with the tower of the
City Duma and the tents of the Savior on Spilled Blood.
The
building received the most modern engineering communications systems at
that time, the project of which was developed by the St. Petersburg
company Franz San-Galli. Among other things, San-Galli created an
original mechanism for steam cleaning the roof from snow and ice for the
Singer house. Drainpipes, in order not to spoil the aesthetics of the
facades, were built into the walls. Three Otis elevators and safes from
the Berlin company Panzer were installed in the house.
The
interiors of the building were distinguished by expressive decoration,
for which the highest quality materials were used. For example, the main
staircase was made of Carrara marble, the flights of stairs were
decorated with mosaics, the railings were made of mahogany, and the
decorative elements were emphasized with gold leaf. It is in the
interiors that the features of the Art Nouveau style are especially
clearly reflected - smooth curvilinear forms of window openings, doors,
decorative grilles.
In 1904 the construction was completed. The
headquarters of the Singer company occupied the entire attic floor, and
its store was opened in the main columned hall. In addition to the
Singer office itself, third-party tenants also settled in it - for
example, the banking office of Zakhary Petrovich Zhdanov, since 1910 -
the Russian-English Bank, a branch of the New York Mutual Life Insurance
Society, the Northern Trade Partnership, the joint-stock company A . G.
Gerhard and Hay. Architectural historians call the house of the Singer
company the first business center of St. Petersburg. In 1917-1918, the
US diplomatic mission was located in the house.
Contemporaries
spoke critically about the new house: they scolded it for its overly
pretentious appearance, which stood out against the background of the
surrounding buildings. Alexander Benois compared the dome of Singer's
house with a bottle of perfume, Lev Ilyin criticized the "inappropriate"
neighborhood with the Kazan Cathedral, and Suzor's former student
Gavriil Baranovsky spoke of Singer's house as monotonous and boring.
After the revolution, the headquarters building was nationalized. In
1922, the Singer company left Russia. Singer's house was given over to
institutions and offices. On December 19, 1919, the Dom Knigi store was
opened in one of the premises under the state publishing house
Petrogosizdat. In the 1920s, the figure of an eagle disappeared from the
dome of the house.
In 1941, a bomb hit the building number 30.
The blast wave in Singer's house knocked out the windows. In the winter
of the same year, pipes burst in the house, so trade was moved to the
street and books were sold from stalls. In total, during the years of
the Second World War, the “House of the Book” stopped work for only
three months.
In the post-war period, the Singer House became an
important center of the book industry: in different years, branches of
the publishing houses Young Guard, Mir, Fiction, Education, Art, Fine
Arts, Agropromizdat were located within its walls. , "Chemistry",
"Fizmatgiz", "Soviet Writer", "Muzgiz", editorial offices of the
magazines "Sparrow", "New Robinson", "Hedgehog", "Chizh", "Book and
Revolution", "Literary Study", "Leningrad ”,“ Star ”,“ Literary
contemporary ”. In 1925, on the fifth floor of the Singer House, the
children's department of Gosizdat Lenogiz was opened, later renamed
Detizdat. Also in the period from 1922 to the 1950s, on the third floor
of the building, a whole wing was occupied by the Committee of Soviet
Censorship - the Leningrad Regional and City Administration for
Literature and Publishing Houses.
In the late 1990s, publishing
houses moved out of the house, the building was leased for 49 years to
the St. Petersburg Real Estate Agency (PAN).
For almost a hundred years since the construction, the building has
not been fully restored. When the building was taken over by PAN in
1999, the contract included an encumbrance in the form of an obligation
to restore the building. Historical and cultural expertise of KGIOP
lasted three years. During the study, it turned out that all
iron-containing elements were subjected to severe corrosion, and design
errors were made, due to which the load from the main load-bearing walls
partially fell on the partitions. In the Soviet years, redevelopment of
the interior spaces further redistributed the load, as a result, in the
late 1990s, the deformation of the ceilings was visible to the naked
eye. Engineering structures by 1999 were worn out by 70%. Until that
time, two residential apartments remained in the house. During the
reconstruction, the load-bearing structures were replaced with
reinforced concrete ones, the foundation was strengthened by introducing
2,500 piles into it, and multi-stage waterproofing was carried out. In
2003, all forged and stucco decoration elements, statues of Valkyries, a
glass dome with an eagle were restored. According to the surviving
drawings and photographs, the interior decoration was recreated,
including mosaic floors, a marble front staircase, and Venetian plaster
on the walls. According to the project of the sculptor A. A. Arkhipov,
the figure of an eagle on the dome was restored. The first floors were
restored and opened in 2006. The work was finally completed in 2009.
According to the estimate, the cost of restoration exceeded 1 billion
rubles.
In 2010, the seventh floor of the building was rented by
the office of the social network VKontakte. With the growth of the
company, premises on the fifth and sixth floors were gradually rented
for her office.
In 1999, the Singer House was leased from the city by the private
company Petersburg Real Estate Agency (PAN), which at that time was part
of the Baltic Bank structures of Oleg Shigaev and Andrey Isaev. The
right to lease was issued to the Northern Capital mutual fund, for the
management of which the PAN-Trust company was established. Baltic Bank
owned 99 out of 100 shares of the fund. In 2014 PAN-Trust issued another
137 units. Isaeva, who bought them out, Fortis LLC, received control
over the building. Since August 2014, Baltiyskiy Bank has been
reorganized by Alfa-Bank. Among other dubious transactions, the court
considered an additional issue of shares, due to which the Baltic Bank
lost control of the Singer house.
In the fall of 2021, the owner
of the building, Alfa Bank, filed a lawsuit with the city Arbitration
Court to invalidate the sublease agreement. The plaintiff claimed that
as a result of the conspiracy of the manager of Zinger CJSC (former PAN)
Alexei Isaev, the sublease contract with Bookstore No. 1 LLC was
concluded at a deliberately low price: 1,800 rubles per month for 1 m²,
and for 2020 payment to accounts didn't do it at all. Alfa Bank won the
case, Singer LLC filed an appeal. On March 15, 2022, the Court of Appeal
re-approved the decision to annul the contract; on March 21, the Book
House was closed. According to the vice-governor of St. Petersburg Boris
Piotrovsky, it is planned that the lease should be received by JSC
Trading Company St. Petersburg House of Books, whose bookstore was
located in the building from 1938 to 1999.
Opening in 2022
On
November 12, 2022, the Book House was reopened in the Singer House,
which operated from 1938 to 1999. After many years of litigation, the
city government again became the owner of the store. Stained-glass
windows and Venetian plaster were restored in the premises, and new
furniture was purchased. The main difference of the new bookstore was
the range of presented literature - the place of tourist guides and
souvenirs was taken by books of independent publishers and St.
Petersburg authors.