The discussion of the problems of the living environment quickly spread to a related issue - the quality of mass housing. Both themes are burning, both were raised at the last and the one before last "Arch-Moscow" and the architectural biennale; the foreign experience in this area was also shown there. And now - a discussion in the union of architects. At the same time, as an illustration to the conversation, in the foyer of the house of architects, an exhibition of recent projects for the development of neighborhoods in Moscow and the region was unfolded. The projects are drawn on a computer, but at the same time they demonstrate how far Russian city planners have so far moved away from the methods and standards they stopped at in the 1980s.
What do foreigners demonstrate in their urban planning projects? Decrease in number of storeys, contrast of zones in order to avoid repetition, zoning by category of development and differentiation by property composition of residents within the quarter. What are they doing in Moscow? Elite housing is being erected only in expensive, central or environmentally friendly areas, and municipal housing only in the worst, moving people on the waiting list outside the Moscow Ring Road. As noted in her speech, Cand. architecture Nina Kraynaya, this practice leads to social tension and rupture, therefore, in Europe, for a long time, they have been building complexes with a mixed level of housing, for someone penthouses and townhouses, for someone inside this quarter - apartments in ordinary sectional buildings.
This was a bit strange to hear, since it is known that in Moscow, by order of the mayor, investors have given half of the commercial buildings for a relatively long time to municipal needs. That, of course, did not concern the super-elite golden mile and others like it, they paid somehow differently, but the houses that were simpler were all too often half sold, half given out to those on the waiting list. People. those who bought apartments found themselves in the same entrance as the settlers from five-story buildings and were not happy about it, because received an elevator traditionally painted with obscene language to their expensive housing. True, recently, they probably decided to fight this problem, distribute free housing as far as possible, and about a year ago, the Moscow mayor's office received a project for a municipal house with a minimum ceiling height and scanty areas.
As for the quality of the houses themselves, all the charms of typical housing described in the film "The Irony of Fate" in the form of monotonous and overly dense development of residential areas seem to be deeply rooted in the mentality of Russian urban planners. Industrial construction methods were poeticized by the constructivists in the 1920s, but in reality the first and, perhaps, the only program in Soviet history to provide people with housing was launched in the 1960s. Life is moving forward, but the methods and standards are still Soviet. In the lobby of the Central House of Artists, an exhibition of recently completed projects of residential quarters and individual houses ("Yugo-Zapadny", "Shuvalovsky", a project for Krasnogorsk, etc.) was launched - according to Alexander Skokan, all this is not much different from what they stopped at in 1980 -e years As if in two decades of capitalism the way of life, consumption, leisure has not changed. All the standards remained from that previous life, and this discrepancy with reality acts, according to Skokan, the main brake.
During the conference, two interesting urban planning projects were shown - in Omsk and Yekaterinburg, demonstrating a kind of step forward in the design of middle-class residential quarters. The Zarechye microdistrict in Omsk was designed by the Ostozhenka bureau of Alexander Skokan, who told about his project. The district is located opposite the city center, but they began to settle in it recently, after the construction of the metro bridge. On the site of the future microdistrict, there is a village with a characteristic grid of streets parallel to the river. According to the old Soviet tradition, it was supposed to be “rolled out under a bulldozer,” but apart from the dilapidated buildings in the village, there were also more impressive houses, whose residents did not want to move out. It is planned to preserve these parts of the village inside the new quarter as enclaves, and their location is taken as the basis for the planning.
The territory of the microdistrict is divided into 4 shares, the lines of the old streets are “moved apart, the middle part is given to schools. There is a gap in the center of the composition with a view across the river to the city center. The microdistrict consists of small quarters, each with a capacity of 100-200 families, which is optimal, according to Skokan, for organizing homeowners' associations. The configuration of the houses is complex, of different heights, and was the result of calculations based on insolation. Under all the houses there is a parking lot on the 1st and 1st floors, which is also complicated in terms of the difficult geology. The quarters, meanwhile, are all colored, neutral outside, white, and inside them there is a multi-colored “core”.
Another microdistrict - "Akademichesky" in Yekaterinburg, which became famous after an international competition, is being designed by the French bureau "Valaud and Pistre" in collaboration with the local institute of the general plan. Yekaterinburg is the most compact in area among the cities with a population of over one million. The general plan of its development assumes the expansion of the city by the development of new territories around, but for a long time it did not work to start, because there were no large investors in the city, and it is impossible to sell these plots at retail, because there is no engineering support there. When the Moscow investor Renova appeared on the horizon, the city authorities readily supported his project.
An area of 1.3 hectares is intended for building, from the north and south - forest parks, in the center - a river. This is a former farmland. In order to preserve the environment, new industrial enterprises are located along the bypass road and are located around the microdistrict. The urban planning scheme proposed by the French may seem too dry and perpendicular. It "grows" into the existing city from the north, where large city streets are drawn to it. To soften the correctness of the street grid, we decided to penetrate into it with forest "wedges", and also to make canals. The latter, however, were soon replaced by "dry rivers" - green boulevards. A park is laid out along the river in the center of the microdistrict, around which offices and entertainment are gathered. Towards the center, the height of residential buildings increases to 25 floors. By the way, according to the class of housing here, 50% is occupied by economy and only 15% is elite.
A couple of projects of individual houses were shown by the architect Viktor Tokarev from Kazan, who proved that with skillful design it is possible to reach practically the same cost per sq.m. public housing, making a home far superior in quality. Yuri Gnedovsky did not even believe his ears and specified the cost - Tokarev assured - 28 thousand rubles. 1 sq.m. This is where you start to think, maybe the root problem of the poor quality of the living environment is not even the money allocated for municipal construction, but false standards, as if there is nothing to invent for a “second class” housing and must be done as best we can ….
On this optimistic note, Yuri Grigoriev appeared at the department. He called on architects, instead of "showing off their individual designs", to solve global problems, as he himself solves the issue of the social housing program in Moscow. According to Yuri Grigoriev, Moscow is a big city, here each district is larger than a Central Russian city, which means, concluded the deputy chief architect of the capital, that it is impossible to treat each house individually. Yuri Grigoriev cited figures for the growth of housing construction: in 2008, the city received 3.3 million square meters. meters, and (as mentioned above) by the mayor's decree 50% of new construction is given to social needs. So, according to Yuri Grigoriev, the problems of social housing can only be solved by means of mass construction, "as they would have said a typical one before."
Looking at such obvious disagreements of the speakers, and especially comparing the opinions and positions of their speakers, it is easy to guess why changes in the approach to municipal housing do not come. Somewhere the plane got stuck for a long time.
On the whole, the emergence of this conference is curious right now. More than a year has passed since the Architecture Biennale, at which Bart Goldhorn called on Russian architects to think about the problems of affordable housing; and two years have passed since "Arch-Moscow", in which he also pointed out the squalor of the urban environment. And now - the conference of the Union of Architects. Has the period passed that Russian architects need to heed the voice of a foreigner and perceive his influence? No, it was like in the Middle Ages, and it seems that it was not one or two years, but all 10-12 …
Frankly speaking, there are two reasons for the sudden heightened attention of architects to problematic topics. The first is the arrival of the new president of the union, Andrei Bokov. One of the main points of his program is to make architects more visible in the life of the state. Make sure that the architects are listened to, and finally build our "unfinished country". And for this, it is necessary to make sure that architects turn away from what they have been staring at all this time, namely, from rich investors and expensive orders, and turn in the opposite direction - to cheap, economical orders, and send their creative and other reflections not on extracting super-profits for the customer, but on economy and various philanthropic (regardless of the status and wealth of "this person") things.
The task is noble, positive and simply wonderful. Nothing would come of it. If not for the crisis. Nobody turned away from investors - they simply “disappeared” in the majority, along with money and customers. We need to look for money elsewhere, namely, in the federal and regional budgets, which still have it. There are other tasks, one of them is social housing. So the topic looks, let's say, forcedly relevant. However, if suddenly this helps to save the architecture on the verge of collapse, it will be very good. And if you manage to implant in this business people with normal views on the work of an architect, who are ready not to shoot standard projects in squares until they build everything they know with what (the country may not be built, but the big question is how, what and for whom to build it up) !). So, if we manage to combine the survival of good architects with the use of their brains in a charitable way - that would be good, that would be great. Moreover, there are such architects, and they now need orders.
But there is little, oh, little hope for such an outcome of the case … Forgive me for the pessimism.
