Description of the attraction
In St. Petersburg, between Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt and Malaya Posadskaya Street, opposite the exit of the Gorkovskaya metro station, there is Lidval's house.
The land for the construction of this building was purchased by Ida Lidval, who, left as a widow with eight children, listened to the advice of her third son Fyodor and invested in a relatively inexpensive land plot. Ida Lidval was right. After the beginning of the construction of the Trinity Bridge in 1897, the price of plots and houses in that area increased greatly. Since the place was considered promising, Ida Lidval decided to build a large apartment building here. With a request to develop his project, she turned to her son Fyodor Ivanovich Lidval, a graduate of the architectural department of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. In 1898, the young architect Fyodor Lidval started his first major architectural project.
In developing the concept of the future building, Fyodor Lidval used the style of the Northern Art Nouveau, which was very fashionable at that time. In plan, Lidval's house is an irregular polygon facing Kamennoostrovsky prospect with a large open courtyard. In the main part of the architectural ensemble there are three buildings of different heights, which visually connect the central five-story building with the avenue. Asymmetrical side buildings - four-storey on the right and three-storey on the left - form a cozy courtyard with front gardens and flower beds. The multi-storey buildings are associated with the peculiarities of the internal layout of apartments, all of which are functional, spacious and comfortable.
The decoration of the building is quite strict. The first floor is completely decorated with chipped rubble stone. The composition of the facade is strictly symmetrical. However, the decoration contains unobtrusive light decorative elements that give the Lidval tenement house a poetic look: reliefs of animals, plants, birds, forged and cast metal elements, colored plaster, slight curvature at the ends of windows and cornices. According to some reports, glass with a facet was originally inserted into the windows of the house, which created a wonderful effect - under the rays the glass shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow. The arches and portals of the entrances are decorated with carved reliefs of talc-chlorite depicting forest animals, plants and wild birds. One of the plots is associated with an owl, which is an invariable attribute of buildings built in the Northern Art Nouveau style. The portals are decorated with reliefs with intertwined tree roots in which lizards are hiding, a wolf watching from an ambush for hares, forest ferns, mushrooms, insects. These motifs echo the ornaments of the balcony lattices on which there are spiders in their cobwebs, flowers, leaves.
The Lidval House was completed in 1904. The Lidval family was assigned the northern wing of the building. Ida Amalia Lidval lived here until her death in 1915. For a long time, the design bureau of Fyodor Ivanovich Lidval was located on the first floor.
After the revolution in the summer of 1918, Fyodor Ivanovich Lidval left Russia forever for Sweden to live with his family, which had emigrated earlier. During the years of the revolutionary terror, his life was out of danger only due to the fact that, being a native of St. Petersburg, he had Swedish citizenship, which all his household had. Reunited with his family, he lived in Stockholm. He took part in the design of 60 buildings. However, not all of the architect's creations can stand at least some comparison with his first brainchild - the house on Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt. The architect died in 1945.
The renowned Russian painter K. S. Petrov-Vodkin, Lieutenant General A. N. Kuropatkin, People's Artist of the USSR Yu. Yuriev.
