The student competition "Moscow the Day After Tomorrow" was initiated by the public movement for the preservation of the architectural heritage "Arhnadzor". As you know, the Moscow construction boom swept away many historical buildings and architectural monuments on its way, which the public could not protect against the "omnipotence" of developers. With new construction projects, the appearance of the historic city is changing, and as a result, a logical question arises of what this appearance will be in the future - tomorrow, the day after tomorrow. The organizers of the competition offered to answer it to the students of three Moscow universities - the Moscow Architectural Institute, the Surikov Art School and the Russian State University for the Humanities. Participants of the competition had to use the example of the central squares of Moscow: Borovitskaya, Pushkinskaya, Trubnaya, Tverskaya Zastava to tell about their vision of the future of the city - conceptually, artistically or literally. The competition will be held in three stages, for each university at a separate time. We started with the Moscow Architectural Institute, the works of third-year students of the Architectural Institute made up the first stage of the competition. These works were shown to teachers, organizers and journalists on April 15.
On Wednesday, the works of the participants of the competition were spread out in different auditoriums of the institute - so those who came to see the results had to run back and forth through the intricate labyrinths of the Moscow Architectural Institute. Teachers, representatives of "Arkhnadzor", the press moved from one audience to another, asking the authors of the works about their concepts and vision of the future of Moscow. This future turned out to be so out of touch with reality and bewitching that it aroused the admiration of everyone without exception. After reviewing the works by the teachers and giving marks, the tablets were transferred from the classrooms to the White Hall, where, at last, a single picture of the future of Moscow was formed from the mosaic - the way the architecture students now imagine it.
For third-year students who still think categorically in a youthful way, but, on the other hand, truly conceptually, “the day after tomorrow” turned out to be a different time. For some, it became a real day after tomorrow, and for others - around 2150. Accordingly, the tasks that were solved for different times were different.
Supporters of the near future tried to solve the painful problems of Moscow - the preservation of the historical environment, the organization of transport and pedestrian routes, the greening of the city space, etc. Among the proposals was the construction of an archaeological mini-museum on Pushkin Square: the foundations of the Strastnoy Monastery would be shown in it behind glass windows, right on the street. To solve the transport problem, it was proposed to start a tunnel underground, build light pedestrian bridges connecting different corners of the square, or (most often) build on the second tier of road and pedestrian junctions, thereby freeing up the square and returning it to its historical appearance. Almost a hundred years ago, the Italian futurist Antonio Sant'Elia in his New City project drew the same two-story city of the future, it turns out that all this time the New City has been living in the minds of architects, only now it is closer to reality than to fantasy.
Many student projects are devoted to the improvement of squares: there were proposals for the breaking of additional lawns and the construction of new fountains, even the idea arose to turn the main facade of the Pushkinskiy cinema into a huge cascade fountain. This is the near future of Moscow according to the students of the Moscow Architectural Institute.
The futuristic projects of the distant future of the capital turned out to be the most creative and exciting. Each of them is a full-fledged world, embodying a bold, sometimes ironic or shocking fantasy of a young architect.
"Hello: I am no more" - says one of the projects of Moscow in 2080, chaotically built up with glass skyscrapers and a rugged air metro system. In another project, the impending environmental catastrophe leaves humanity no choice but to place architectural ensembles of "antiquity" under a glass dome with a special microclimate for their preservation, that is, in the distant future, the city will become a museum where excursions in oxygen masks will be conducted. In addition to an ecological catastrophe, a nuclear one is also expected, followed by a nuclear winter and the revival of mankind on the basis of Chinese civilization. The architecture after the nuclear winter should, according to the author of the project, consist of glass skyscrapers in the form of Chinese pagodas. In another opinion, there will be no ecological catastrophe, no nuclear winter, but a global flood that will flood all the highways of the city and turn Moscow into the second (third?) Venice.
Another scenario is that the city will grow so much that people will leave the historic center of Moscow alone and it will gradually overgrow with greenery and turn into a jungle over which airships will fly - a new type of public transport in favor of which city residents will abandon private cars. The manifesto for the next futuristic project reads: “Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created an eternal omnipresent speed. The presence in the city of this ever-present omnipresent speed is indicated by the spiral junctions for new vehicles hovering in the air over the existing urban development and squares. The most nihilistic, but, unfortunately, quite real project suggests that the city will simply cease to exist, because people will live in virtual cyberspace. To get, for example, to Pushkinskaya Square, you just need to click the mouse on Google and it will be displayed on the screen with full excursion information. It is interesting that google already really exists such a program in which you can virtually walk along the streets of New York, Paris, London. All futuristic works presented in the competition, for the most part, move away from a specific place in the city - the square - and refer to the future development of the city as a whole. The concreteness of the city of Moscow often disappears, and projects turn into abstract reflections on the theme of the city of the future in general. As it turned out, this future could be completely different.
Unlike other competitions, the “Moscow the Day After Tomorrow” was originally conceived by the initiators as a process, not a result. According to Inna Krylova, a member of the coordinating council of the Arkhnadzor movement, in this competition it was important to understand in what direction future architects and urban planners think, how they see the near and distant future of Moscow, because they are the ones who have to create this future. As it turned out when viewing the works, they think very creatively and sometimes even utopian, but with due respect for the historical environment and architectural monuments, as well as what is left of them. For the Arkhnadzor movement, this was probably the highest award for all the efforts put into organizing the competition.
Of course, not the day after tomorrow, but in the near future, after discussing all the works, the winners of the competition will be announced, and the most interesting works will take part in the exhibition "Moscow the Day After Tomorrow", the site of which is now being specified. Also, in the near future, the second and third stages of the competition will take place, respectively, at the Surikov Art School and the Russian State Humanitarian University, whose students will have to use visual and linguistic means to tell about their vision of Moscow the day after tomorrow. It is pleasant to realize that the younger generation of creative professions in the capital thinks outside the box, sometimes even "loosely", but still, in reality, I would not want one of the above catastrophes to happen to humanity. I want to live happily ever after.
