The Megalith on Neva residential building

The Megalith residential building was built at the site of the former Rechnaya hotel, near the Kurakina Dacha park and the River Boat Station. The 24-storeyed building façade is coated with natural stone (porcelain stoneware of warm natural colors) and faces the direction of Neva.

The façade decoration is distinctive, with lighting niches, four-storeys high, arranged checkerwise and visually dividing the building into blocks of various colors. During night-time, the niches are illuminated.

The building is of a rectangular form with an opening to the yard . In the yard, there is a subsurface parking with playgrounds on its top.

“The architectural image of the 23-storeyed building matches its name rather closely: the complex, indeed, looks as if it were composed of cyclopean blocks arranged in a checkerboard pattern. To achieve this unusual visual effect, the authors of the project had to utilise niches that light up the inner corridors of the dwelling units.

The brutalist decoration of the Megalith façades reminds one of formalist experiments by Nikolai Ladovsky and, at the same time, of the Dutch architecture fashionable nowadays. The architectural concept derives from the reasons of appropriateness in city-planning. The point here is that the area along the Obukhovskaya Oborona prospect has recently been actively redeveloped, with 70-meter-high new buildings emerging in the place of soviet industrial plants. The Neva landscape is here shaped by large objects confronting each other, each of them attempting to dominate. Gerasimov’s Megalith wins the battle not because of its tallness (this being the same in all the towers around), but thanks to a formal move, that is the division of the façades referring to the strength and steadiness characteristic of buildings from the IV-III millennia BC, the latter having given the residential complex its name.”

Danil Ovcharenko for the Project Baltia magazine