The first half of December can hardly be called fruitful in terms of architectural events: all festivals, awards and high-profile exhibitions ended with the fall. But in the field of urban planning and the protection of historical and cultural heritage, life during this period, on the contrary, was in full swing. The main passions flared up around the most discussed and, perhaps, the most controversial urban planning document of this year - the Updated General Plan for the Development of Moscow until 2025. The reasoned comments of experts and numerous protests from the public ultimately did not help to correct it - at the end of November, the capital's mayor decided not to listen to either one or the other, and signed a decree approving the General Plan. And on December 2, this document in the first reading was adopted by the Moscow City Duma, as reported by the Kommersant newspaper.
The public movement "Arkhnadzor" was not slow to react to this event. Its coordinating council published an open letter to the Prosecutor General of Russia, in which it directly pointed out that the new general plan violates the current law on monuments, and, in particular, the lack of coordination of the document with the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and VOOPIIK (All-Russian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments) … And in the newspaper "Izvestia" one of the activists of "Arkhnadzor", a well-known architectural expert Rustam Rakhmatullin wrote an article "The general plan went to demolition", in which he analyzed in detail the scheme of the so-called. zones of stabilization and reorganization in the Central Administrative District and came to the most disappointing conclusions that the most valuable historical sites - part of Pyatnitskaya Street, complexes of apartment buildings along Bolshaya Dmitrovka and Petrovka and many others - will be under attack in the very near future.
The scandalous topic of liquidation of monuments and iconic objects was continued by the order of the Government of the Russian Federation on the demolition of the building of the Central House of Artists on Krymsky Val. Recall that the conflict around the possible reconstruction of the Park of Arts and the construction of a new building of the Tretyakov Gallery reached its climax last fall, when Inteko unexpectedly presented a futuristic project of a multifunctional complex called Orange, developed by Norman Foster himself. At the very end of 2008, the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation specially discussed the “Central House of Artists issue”, and the chief architect of Moscow, Alexander Kuzmin, announced to the audience that the project, at the request of the residents, had lost its high-rise part and was significantly reduced in size. The defenders of the Central House of Artists, headed by its director Vasily Bychkov, decided that the question of the appearance of the "impudent fruit" on the Crimean shaft is exhausted - if not because of the authorities' attention to the opinion of the townspeople, then at least because of the economic crisis. And on December 5, Kommersant was ahead of everyone with the news that Vladimir Putin signed an order to demolish the House of Artists and transfer the territory to the Moscow government for new construction. Thus, the mayor's office received official permission to start looking for an investor, and, according to Grigory Revzin, it may well be the same Inteko company, and the project - Orange. It is no coincidence, Revzin writes, that on the day the order was signed, the mayor met with Lord Foster at a meeting on another ambitious project - the reconstruction of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Sergei Khachaturov in the newspaper "Vremya novostei" bitterly notes the complete disregard of the authorities for public opinion in this story.
Meanwhile, the mentioned project for the reconstruction of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, which the director of the museum Irina Antonova recalled with all determination at her November press conference, has not yet been presented to the public in either the final version or in any other way, although this has already been promised more than once. … Grigory Revzin has information that a closed meeting of the Council for the reconstruction of the Pushkin Museum with the participation of the mayor, Lord Foster and other interested parties took place on November 28, the results of which were not disclosed, although we are talking about a significant change in the project. A recent interview with the head of Mosproekt-5, Sergei Tkachenko, to the Interfax agency sheds some light on the project. Recall that the tandem of Mosproekt-5 and Foster + Partners won last year's tender for the reconstruction of the museum and, as Sergei Tkachenko now promises, the project of the first stage will be submitted for examination by April 2010.
Perhaps there will be no public discussion of the project at all. At least, this is exactly what happened with another scandalous project - the reconstruction of Pushkin Square, which in mid-November was secretly approved by the capital's mayor in an unknown version, bypassing hearings, public and expert councils. On December 6, at the monument to Griboyedov on Chistye Prudy, an outraged public rally took place in connection with this news, information about which was leaked only to Novaya Gazeta.
Sad news also came from St. Petersburg, where Rogov's house was excluded from the list of newly identified objects, around which at one time no fewer copies were broken. Thus, a tolerable verdict was signed for the house that had been brought to the level of accidents - Fontanka tells about it in detail.
In Moscow, meanwhile, the accident rate of a historic building on Petrovka, 26, p. 3 caused the death of a worker who died under the collapsed wall. Gazeta observer Konstantin Mikhailov does not exclude that this story, repeating the notorious collapse in Sadovniki in the summer of 2009, which entailed the demolition of an entire block, could also be beneficial to someone.
In the news block on architectural heritage, which, by tradition, are devoted to at least half of all publications on the topic of urban planning and architecture, this month there has been a certain balance between the losses and exploits of the defenders of antiquity. Thus, Konstantin Mikhailov writes in Gazeta about the presentation of the third MAPS report with a call to save the historical buildings of Samara. You can read about the Samara troubles through the eyes of foreign colleagues in The Guardian. And "Arhnadzor" spent an evening in honor of the opening of their club in the Library-Reading Room named after I. S. Turgenev and posted a short report on this event on his website.
The Moscow authorities were also pleased with the restoration: the famous sculptural group "Worker and Kolkhoz Woman" returned to its historical place - to the entrance to the All-Russian Exhibition Center, from where it was removed for repairs in 2003. Articles on this topic have appeared in many publications, for example, in Vremya Novostey. According to Gazeta, the reconstruction of the monument cost the city almost three billion rubles. It is also curious that the work was carried out by the subsidiary company CJSC Inteko. Not all developers, however, are doing well - MIRAX GROUP at the beginning of December announced its intention to literally cut costs: to cut 30 floors from the second tower of the Federation high-rise business complex, thus reducing it to 64. An article about this in Izvestia.
And yet one famous sculpture, which after 6 years of restoration has finally returned to the city in all its splendor, is clearly not enough to outweigh all the negative and disturbing news of early December. And if in the fate of the Central House of Artists and the Pushkin Museum. Pushkin, changes for the better are still possible, then there is no doubt that the new General Plan of Moscow, despite numerous shortcomings, will nevertheless be adopted in its current form. If this document does not come into force on January 1, 2010, any new construction in the city will automatically become illegal, and the Moscow construction complex is unlikely to allow such a disaster.
