The competition task ordered young architects to arrange the life of hundreds of scientists and research institutes by combining accommodation, production activities and infrastructure in a single space. The task is not new - the designers of Soviet science cities such as Obninsk, Korolev, Dubna or Zelenograd have faced it more than once. Now the same topic has been picked up by special economic zones.
One of the distinctive features of the competition task is an unusually high level of comfort for a "business" residence, not to mention the latest equipment of laboratories and other parts of the technopark. According to the customer, a "prestigious" environment can raise the status of the profession of a scientist, emphasize the importance of intellectual work in this area and, as a result, attract high-class specialists here.
Yes, the main thing is that the project is not fantastic, as is often the case at student competitions, but quite real. The customer came to the Moscow Architectural Institute in search of the author of the project. The town should be built on an area of 230 hectares on the periphery of the historical center of the ancient city of Zvenigorod, in the bend of the Moskva River in its eastern part. The place is luxurious, it is included in the zone of a natural complex. The Naukograd complex is gigantic by local standards - it is 12 times larger than the surrounding buildings, it is a new peripheral area that is going to "grow" to the old city, being connected with its architectural monuments by walking routes and partly imitating historical buildings. Research institutes working for the military-industrial complex are becoming city-forming enterprises.
The competition was attended by 19 works of 5th year students of the Department of Urban Planning, whose scientific leaders were Ilya Lezhava and Nikita Kostrikin, in the past - the founders of the famous NER group, who for the first time proposed to consider the city as a dynamic process and from this position to build its architectural and planning structure. The jury included, by the way, one of their students, and now the head of the ARCH + bureau, Vladimir Yudintsev, as well as Irina Korobina, Alexey Muratov, Dmitry Fesenko, Mikhail Shubenkov, chaired by the rector of Moscow Architectural Institute Dmitry Shvidkovsky. Ilya Lezhava did not hide his pleasure from the competition, according to him, they were gone for so long that the teachers and members of the jury were even worried, argued, imbued with interest in the project. Lezhava highly appreciated the results. True, they decided not to award the first prize, but merged with the second and divided it in half between A. Prokudina and T. Shchelkanova, they also did the 4th and 5th, which were received by I. Zabavnikova and S. Gaponenko. The third went to the project of I. Burshtein, the sixth - to M. Tomskoy. Meanwhile, no one left without a reward - the prize fund of 500 thousand rubles was divided among all the participants.
The winning projects - A. Prokudina and T. Shchelkanova - became the leaders among almost all judges, mainly because they beautifully solved the problem of internal "tricks" or, as Vladimir Yudintsev called these town-planning nodes - "strings" life would "wind up". The presence of such "clots" was due to the very formulation of the problem - some kind of continuity from the old city had to be preserved, this historicism had to be imitated. Many participants turned to the plans of old famous cities such as Venice, but not everyone succeeded in making this system viable.
Against the background of the rest, A. Prokudina's project proposed the most thought-out system of urban centers, like the one we admire abroad, visiting old Salzburg or Italian cities, where you do not notice how one space flows into another. In Prokudina's project, 4 squares become the support "strings" - in a residential area, Sobornaya in a public center, Universitetskaya in the area of scientific development and another one in the area of a sports and entertainment complex. All of them are entangled with the links of pedestrian streets and boulevards and even a small canal around the Cathedral Square.
In T. Shchelkanova's project, the "ovaries" are made more schematically, and the project itself is presented traditionally, but the environment is richer there. The quality of the urban environment, according to Vladimir Yudintsev, is one of the main indicators of the quality of the project itself. The author needs to imagine his own life in the city he creates, to assess how diverse his environment is. Some, according to Yudintsev, approached this task formally at the level of decorative lattices, while others were looking for more solid approaches. There was, for example, a project that was removed from the competition for the lack of layouts required for the assignment in 2000 and 1000 (or 500) scales. The environment in this project turned out to be interesting, but apparently, the author was "bogged down" at this stage and did not have time to do the rest. Finally, not everyone has managed to build strong and reasonable ties with the existing city. Someone, however, simply ignored them, remaining within the limits of the road system that exists today in Zvenigorod, as a result of which, on some projects, “tails” of roads “crawl out” and break off.
In general, the student "Science Cities" (which turned out to be part-time coursework) pleased the teachers with their professionalism. According to Ilya Lezhava, "for the first time in 30 years in the fifth year, projects have been made at this level." It is also pleasant because the current competition, after a long break, has become a precedent when the demand for urban planning ideas on the part of an outside customer returned to the walls of the Moscow Architectural Institute. But what kind of project will be implemented - nothing was said about this at the awards ceremony for the participants of the competition. Since there is no main winner, it can be assumed that the customer himself will choose the designer, if any.
