The community of the Apostolic Christian Church is one of the denominations of Protestantism. In St. Petersburg, the number of its adherents is about 10,000 people. Many people remember the “Rus” cinema near the Pionerskaya metro station, on the site of which the Hollywood shopping center is now being completed – it was there that divine services were held in the 1990s. Currently, the community has several houses of worship, the oldest of which is located in Pargolovo. In 2021, the community decided to build a new temple here and turned to SLOI Architects for a project. The choice in favor of the young practice, which offers the city new vectors of development, is quite consistent with the values of the reformist church.

The temple is already being built on the site of the house at 5 Baikalskaya Street, near the Pargolovo station, amongst ordinary dacha land plots. Nearby is the Orthodox wooden church of St. Joasaph of Belgorod, built on the site of a building lost back in 1938.

Valentin Kogan

In this project, we presented the building as an independent metric of space. This, in our opinion, is in line with the spirit of Protestantism, where the daily life of a person is structured rigorously enough, and prescribes significant self-organization of the individual.

The temple is a group of five identical two-story volumes, interlocked with a slight offset in the plan. As a rational urban planning technique, this solution helps to sufficiently accommodate the spaces required for the church on the land plot formed at an angle to the street. Each block has a four-pitched roof with a hidden drain, which together with the equal offset in the plan creates a rhythmic silhouette.