For three days, the CDA hosted congress meetings in the form of reports and panel discussions dedicated to these issues, and in the evenings, lectures and master classes by famous architects were held there, which, without exaggeration, gathered crowds of listeners. The themes that formed the program of the festival provoked heated discussions throughout all the days of its work. And this is not surprising - they exposed the weakest aspects of the domestic architectural process and, in particular, urban planning. According to the scientific director of the Research Institute of Transport and Roads, Mikhail Blinkin, this is a consequence of a global "systemic error": throughout Europe, urbanism separated from the actual design of buildings about a hundred years ago, and in Moscow the general plan is still drawn, not calculated.
The festival highlighted one of the key differences between Western and Russian architects. In Europe and the United States, architects strive for the narrowest and deepest possible specialization - Adrian Geyse, head of West 8, for example, deals exclusively with "urban design", i.e. urban planning, but Alejandro Zaera-Polo (FOA) prefers to develop projects not even of buildings, but only of their shells, that is, facades. In Russia, as a rule, one and the same architect is engaged in both, without having a special opportunity to delve into the nuances of both the first and the second … Perhaps, in the modern world overloaded with information, this can hardly be considered a cute feature of the national architectural school - rather, it is a serious flaw in our existing system of architectural education, which we also discussed during the festival.
One could learn about what "urban design" is from the speech of the already mentioned Adrian Geyse, as well as the reports of Charles Ledward, Managing Partner of EDAW AECOM, and Roger Bailey, Founder and Director of Merrick Architecture, dedicated to the projects of post-Lipian development in London and Vancouver. Using the example of completely different projects, they talked about the same thing - the investments provided must be used as much as possible for the long-term development of the territory, and the master plan should be drawn up in such a way that it contains all the elements necessary for this. In particular, the Olympic Games have become for London and Vancouver only a convenient excuse to upgrade their residential and social infrastructure. So, in the capital of Great Britain, the depressed East End area thanks to the Games is acquiring a new road network, a city park and 6 comfortable residential and office blocks. And in Vancouver, a "sustainable" master plan for an environmentally friendly and energy efficient neighborhood for 16 thousand people is being developed. Interesting in this context is the idea of Thomas Leeser (Leeser Architecture), who participated in the competition for the best design of the New York Olympic Village, but did not become the winner. Lieser opposed the traditional interpretation of a residential complex for athletes as a heap of multi-storey buildings with a fundamentally different layout of the village - he moved residential skyscrapers to the edge of the site, and gave the rest of the territory to the city beach, on which parts of the sports facilities were located.
It was not possible to continue the conversation about Sochi in this vein. Today it is no longer a secret for anyone that construction in the Imereti Valley is actually being carried out in the absence of a general plan, and the issues of "post-Olympic" operation of facilities, by and large, are of little concern to anyone. As Yuri Volchok, professor at Moscow Institute of Architecture, noted sadly at one of the discussions, one gets the impression that we continue to live in the same closed totalitarian system that prepared projects for the 1980 games. And then there were an order of magnitude more publications in the professional press! UAR President Andrei Bokov also stressed that he did not know anything about the Sochi Olympic Village project, and that the recently presented version of the central stadium, made by the Populous bureau, simply refused to comment.
Returning to the project of the Vancouver Olympic Village, we note that its authors were able to solve at once a number of problems related to infrastructure, transport and affordable housing. The project, for example, stipulates that a quarter of the total housing stock that will be created will be low-cost, in order to later turn it into social housing. Will Sochi be able to replicate this experience? Alas, the question is rather rhetorical … As noted by Vyacheslav Glazychev, a member of the Public Chamber under the President of the Russian Federation, today the national project "Affordable Housing" and the architectural workshop are infinitely far from each other, and this isolation is likely to lead to the fact that the state will do without designers at all. Having set a course for the earliest possible solution to the problem of affordable housing, Russia actually again found itself in the situation of 1962, that is, on the threshold of a new era of industrial large-panel housing construction …
At the festival, foreign architects presented several alternatives to typical panel houses. Firstly, affordable housing can be built from wood, from glued beams, secondly, from industrial reinforced concrete, thirdly, from brick or metal, however, the last two materials are used much less frequently. Beda Faessler, partner of Riken Yamamoto & Beda Faessler Architects, spoke about how popular and in demand wooden residential complexes are today in Canada and Switzerland. The theme was developed by the Englishman Paul Thompson (Rogers Stirk Harbor and Partners), who presented at the festival the series of houses he designed by him, Oxley woods. With a distinctly modern architectural appearance, they also boast an active use of energy-efficient technologies, such as the use of rainwater and solar energy. In addition, such houses are made in just 5 days and are erected without scaffolding, and every fourth object is built from the waste of the previous three.
Representatives of the developers' workshop also announced their readiness to participate in solving the problem of social housing in Russia at the festival. In particular, the director of the Krost company said that he can build high-quality and aesthetically attractive housing at the state-declared price of 30 thousand rubles per square meter, however, provided that it, in turn, will undertake the laying of all external networks. connection to highways and provision of land for preferential terms. The organizers of the festival are convinced of the need to launch mass production of high-quality architectural solutions. That is why, during the days of the congress, Rusresorts presented the Star village international architectural competition. Fifteen leading architectural firms, including Hopkins Architects, Wilkinson Eyre Architects, Foreign Office Architects, Leeser Architecture, Sergey Skuratov Architects, AM Totana Kuzembaeva and others, proposed to design one or two houses for a small tourist village near Pereslavl-Zalessky (for its general plan meets West 8). The budget of each house for a family of 4 should not exceed 120 thousand US dollars. A year later, the most successful projects will be selected, and special production facilities will be developed for them.
Another acute problem, which caused numerous discussions within the framework of the festival, is transport. And although the design of convenient roads and spacious parking lots has not yet received the status of a national project, in this area it is already right to sound the alarm. In the Central House of the Architect, three main reasons for the monstrous traffic jams that "clog" the roads of Russian megacities were identified. Firstly, these are the mistakes of general planning, which Mikhail Blinkin spoke about in his speech. For example, the Moscow street network makes up only 8.7% of the capital's territory, which is less than in Hong Kong and Seoul, not to mention European cities. In addition, the new master plan lacks such an important concept as a two-circuit road network, i.e. dividing it into streets - with priority for pedestrians, and highways intended exclusively for cars. The second problem is the lack of political interest - Viktor Pokhmelkin (the Union of Motorists of Russia) is convinced that as long as the representatives of the authorities themselves are not stuck in traffic jams, they will not disappear. And the third is the priority of personal transport over public transport, imposed by advertising and by the Russian mentality itself, and if it is possible to somehow fight against this, then only with the help of a qualitative improvement of the latter.
Foreign colleagues shared their methods of improving the transport system. University of Pennsylvania professor Vukan Vuchik, for example, calls one of the most promising ways out of the situation the development of innovative forms of public transport, such as high-speed trams and light rail. And Vladimir Depolo, a leading expert on transport infrastructure of the Belgrade Construction Agency, considers the introduction of entry fees to the city center and a sharp rise in the cost of parking services to be the most effective measure.
It is difficult to say how popular the ideas of leading Western architects presented at the Building festival will ultimately be. But at least now none of the domestic urban planners and officials will be able to say that he does not know how to deal with traffic jams, obsolete standard buildings and a dull living environment. There is knowledge - now it's a matter of the desire to apply it.
