OREANDA-NEWS. On 25 July 2008 was announced, that the results of the international architectural contest to design the residential area Yuntolovo were declared at Architect’s House in St Petersburg on July 11, 2008. The area is to be developed by Glavstroy corporation of Moscow.

The winner of the contest is British PRP Architects Limited. All in all, 5 companies competed for the best architectural project of Yuntolovo including Architectural Devices AG form Switzerland, Krier Kohl Gesellschaft von Architekten mbH from Germany, Cino Zucchi Architetto from Italy and Dick van Gameren architecten b.v. from the Netherlands.

Replying to the journalist of Construction World, Aleksander Viktorov, chairman of Committee of Urban Development and Architecture of St Petersburg, said that it was hard to reveal the winner, it had left the losers not far behind.

However, Igor Evtushevsky, manager of LLC Glavstroy-Spb, noted that all of the contestants would be able to participate in the development of Yuntolovo residential area in St Petersburg. The commercial offers to develop the individual blocks of Yuntolovo will be sent to them. According to the official, if all the 450ha area is built by one company, everyone will run mad from the monotony. Mr Evtushevsky added that everything should be adjusted stylistically as the foreign architects had been invited but the Russian mentality differs from the foreign one; the special groups included both foreign and local architects should be formed.

The manager of Glavstroy-Spb informed that the first stage of the construction of the new area was scheduled to be launched in the second half of 2009.

The international architectural contest to design the residential area Yuntolovo was conducted by Committee of Urban Development and Architecture of St Petersburg and Glavstroy corporation of Moscow. They declared that the contest goal was the forming of an architectural outline of the residential area to be built in St Petersburg by Glavstroy. The architects who contested were to present an image of Yuntolovo by an example of the development of one of 47 city blocks with the area of 5.9 ha and population of about 1,200 residents.

According to the organizers of the contest, the block to be designed was to be an area with low-rise apartment buildings, public and business objects and objects of civil engineering infrastructure.

The contest jury included Valentina Matvienko, governor of St Petersburg, Aleksander Vakhmistov, vice-governor of St Petersburg, Aleksander Viktorov, chairman of Committee of Urban Development and Architecture of St Petersburg, Artur Markaryan, general director of Glavstroy, Igor Evtushevsky, manager of Glavstroy-Spb, Cameron Sawyer, chairman of the committee of directors of GVA Sawyer, and Oleg Romanov, vice-president of St Petersburg’s Union of Russian Architects, academic of Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences.

The total area of Yuntolovo residential area is 455 ha. Glavstroy is to erect around 2.2 million sq m of housing oriented for middle class and approximately 600,000 sq m of social objects and commercial real estate on the site. It is expected that 60,000-70,000 people will live there. The project is scheduled to be completed by 2017.