The council was the first to consider the project of Yuri Gnedovsky: the development of a site bounded by the Okruzhnaya railway and the streets of Nizhegorodskaya and Novokhokhlovskaya. In terms of the plan, this site is a large wedge, to which a residential area adjoins from the north, and the Technopark industrial zone from the south. The project provides for the development of the existing green zone with the restoration of the Novokhokhlovsky brook channel, and the associated construction of a multifunctional complex, the developer of which is ENKA. The complex consists of several office blocks, the height of which will increase towards the widening of the wedge. The lower buildings are designed double and resemble open "books", and they are dominated by two towers installed on a common four-storey stylobate, which houses the shopping center. The authors of the project, after calculating the possible transport load, reduced the total area from 500 thousand square meters to 280 thousand. Presenting this project to the council, the chief architect of Moscow, Alexander Kuzmin, asked the experts to take into account the proposed volumes in order to lay them down in the PZZ. The Council, considering the chosen scale to be successful, did not object to the project, noting only the need to maintain the balance of green areas as a prerequisite for its implementation.
But about the next project, a serious discussion unfolded at the meeting. The project of the hotel by Andrey Meerson was presented to the Council. The hotel should be located at the very beginning of the 1st Tverskaya-Yamskaya street, directly opposite the building of the Moscow City Architecture Committee. Now in this place there is a ground pavilion and an underground vestibule of the Mayakovskaya metro station. The site has very modest dimensions - only 120 by 40 meters, which actually obliged the architects to design a very long main facade and solve the difficult task of including it in the existing red line.
The surrounding buildings, formed by four generations of architects, from Georgy Golts and Andrei Burov to Maxim Bylinkin and Mikhail Posokhin, present a truly metropolitan scale, and Andrei Meerson decided not to leave it. In total, five variants of the building were developed, but not in all of them the authors took into account the restrictions on the permissible load on the metro station (the future hotel should not be higher than 9 floors), so the council considered only two of them. In both projects, the volume of the hotel is lapidary and reproduces the proportions of neighboring houses, but in one the main accent becomes a powerful Palladian portico, made in marble and complemented by a glass "cap" of a panoramic restaurant, and in the second - semicircular loggias on the facade characteristic of the Stalinist Empire style and ending in the form gazebo-belvedere. The hotel's interiors are grouped around an extended 9-storey atrium that cuts the building along and opens onto the roof with a skylight.
Andrey Meerson's project was immediately approved by Yuri Platonov, Alexander Kudryavtsev and many other members of the council. The head of the Moscow Heritage Committee Valery Shevchuk made a comment on exceeding the permissible height, but the council considered this remark insignificant, referring to the landscape-visual analysis performed by the CIGI, which showed that the new hotel would not exceed the building of the Moscow Committee for Architecture. The council considered the main direction for finalizing the current project to be the arrangement of an open arcade in the lower level, necessary for pedestrians. With this condition, the project was eventually approved.
Following the hotel at the Mayakovskaya station, the council considered an even more historically important site - Borovitskaya Square, which is partially located in the security zone No. 1 adjacent to the Kremlin. As you know, this area arose as a result of the implementation of the general plan of 1935 and the construction of the Bolshoi Kamenny Bridge, when a significant part of the historical buildings were demolished. And since then, what kind of ensembles have not been proposed for its "filling" - from steles to pompous palaces! Today, the square is formed by the silhouettes of two Kremlin towers, the Pashkov House, the new building of the Shilov Gallery and the chapel next to it, and in the future they are going to build the building of the depository and restoration complex of the Kremlin museums, which will be located on the site of a large lawn opposite the Stone Bridge, between the Pashkov House and Borovitskaya tower of the Kremlin (the project of M. Posokhin and V. Kolosnitsyn was considered at the public council in July 2008). A new project for all the same Kremlin museums, shown to the council, was also made by Mosproekt-2 (A. Kuzmin and M. Posokhin are the leaders of the team). It involves the rebuilding of an entire block north of Lebyazhy Lane. The authors presented two versions of a multifunctional complex to the council: in the first case, it is made in the form of one volume, in the second - in the form of two with a covered passage in the middle. The fundamental difference between these proposals is not in the number of square meters, as one might think, but in the fact that the first option provides for the demolition of the historic two-story mansion on Lebyazhy Lane, property 4/3, and the second provides for the possibility of its preservation. The authors of the project also proposed to move the federal monument “Zotov's House” by several tens of meters in order to free up space for a road junction and to resolve the issue of organizing the entrance from the Kremlin embankment to Kamenny Most.
Let's say right away that this project was severely criticized and eventually rejected. The main reason for the experts' comments was the complete absence of the research part, despite the fact that it affects the most important protection zone No. 1 and, as it turned out, threatens some historical monuments. CIGI director Boris Pasternak noted among them a house decorated with majolica panels according to Vrubel's sketches, as well as the building of an old cinema, from which, however, one wall has already remained. However, it still survived, and because of it there is nowhere to move the "House of Zotov", moreover, such a move will deprive it of its main value - the preserved vaulted cellars. Alexander Kuzmin, for his part, added that further work on the project will be carried out in two directions at once - on the one hand, the architects will continue to search for a solution to a complex urban planning problem, and on the other, they will clarify all issues related to protected zones. The latter will be done with the participation of the Moscow Heritage Committee, which should develop regimes and regulations for this territory, as well as ECOS, RAASN and the Union of Architects.
The next on the agenda was the project of a building with a bakery at the intersection of Bolshaya Serpukhovskaya and Valovaya streets, already well known to the Public Council. Recall that the existing site at Valovaya Street, vl. 37 / 1-6 bakery no. 1 is demolished, and in its place a hybrid of an apart-hotel and a bakery with the functions of serving the population appears. For the current meeting, the team of Vladimir Plotkin had to develop new facade solutions, and as a result, three options for the composition of the facades were presented to the council's attention - one in the historical spirit with inserts of carved stone and two modern, alternating panels of stone and glass. Here the discussion turned out to be very brief: the chairman of the meeting, first deputy of Vladimir Resin, Petr Biryukov, asked which of the options the chief architect of Moscow preferred. Alexander Kuzmin pointed to the modern one, which was approved by the council.
Another hotel is to be built next to the recently reconstructed Kursk railway station, opposite the Atrium shopping and entertainment complex. This project was developed by A. Asadov's Architectural Workshop and provides that the hotel will be built into the front line of the Garden Ring between the 7-storey residential building of 1955 and the two-storey building built in 1915. The cubic volume of the hotel with a large atrium inside is equal in height to a Stalinist house. The authors propose to decorate the facades with lace reliefs, unambiguously referring to the famous "Openwork House" by Andrey Burov. In general, the project was approved, but the facades were sent for revision and will be further considered by the council separately.
And, finally, another project for the historical part of the city was the proposals considered by the council for the regeneration of the territory between Verkhnyaya Krasnoselskaya Street and the Third Transport Ring, which belongs to the Novoalekseevsky Monastery. From the former monastery in Krasnoe Selo at the moment, only the newly identified monument has survived - the building of the so-called. Geyer's almshouses by architect Lev Kekushev with the house church of All Saints. The project provides for the restoration of this object with the return of historical proportions (in particular, two built-up floors and annexes will be dismantled) and investment construction outside the territory of the monument, along Verkhnyaya Krasnoselskaya, vl. 15. A Soviet-built house is located at this address, which will be demolished, and in its place, in approximately the same dimensions, but two floors higher, an office center is being built. The council was not satisfied mainly with the facades of this second building - its modern mirrored glazing against the background of the historic building of the almshouse, according to experts, looks too contrasting. The height of the office complex has also been reduced by one floor, which will also improve the visual perception of the heritage site. With these amendments, the Public Council approved the project.
The last council considered the geographically most distant project from the center - a municipal housing complex in Maryina Roshcha, at the intersection of Fonvizin and Dobrolyubov streets (authors of TsNIIEP of residential and public buildings). In place of the three five-story buildings to be demolished, three high-rise residential buildings (24, 29 and 34 floors), included in the New Ring of Moscow program, will be built here, as well as a 3-5-storey public building adjacent to them and a 4-level underground parking lot. Since the site is sandwiched between two highways and it is physically impossible to design a courtyard and even more so a park on it, the authors of the project have found an interesting alternative - they propose to place green recreational zones inside residential buildings, at the level of the second floor. The members of the council easily agreed to such an experiment, but they imperatively set a condition to ensure that no apartments appeared in the recreation area at the very last moment.
