Rumors of the liquidation of Rosokhrankultura reached the press after the Minister of Culture Avdeev addressed Prime Minister Putin with a letter in which he proposed to transfer the functions of this agency, created to protect the heritage relatively recently, directly to the Ministry of Culture. The prime minister agreed and gave an order to prepare a draft of the corresponding decree, according to Kommersant and Vedomosti. These publications, as well as their foreign colleagues from Eurasia Review, say that the likely reason for the abolition of Rosokhrankultura is its resistance to the construction of the Okhta Center. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, however, considers the copyright problem raised by Rosokhrankultura to be more acute.
Be that as it may, the liquidation or reform of the system of protection of monuments will disorganize it even more, the newspaper Novye Izvestia quotes the head of Arkhnadzor Konstantin Mikhailov.
A new blow to the defenders of historical Moscow was the closure for reconstruction with the construction of an underground parking lot at Triumfalnaya Square. It is possible that it will become the third long-term construction project within the framework of the Bolshaya Leningradka project after Pushkinskaya Square and Belorussky Railway Station Square. Kommersant and Vedomosti consider parking only a pretext for combating non-systemic opposition - having put up a fence the other day, the mayor's office has already stopped accepting applications for holding rallies on Triumfalnaya. Apparently, no one is going to hurry with the construction, especially since there seems to be no reconstruction project - as Vremya Novostey writes, it is first planned to conduct archaeological excavations on the square.
Continuing the legacy theme, one can note Rustam Rakhmatullin's long interview with the Private Correspondent, in which the well-known urban activist, recalling the recent demolition of the estate on Bakhrushin Street, explains how valuable buildings are being destroyed under the pretext of regenerating the historical environment in the city center.
All these sad events did not distract the attention of the architectural workshop from the main event of the year - the Venice Biennale. Before the opening of the festival, the media discussed mainly the concept of the exposition of the Russian pavilion. On the opening day of the pavilion, one of the curators of this exposition, Grigory Revzin, published an article in Kommersant with a detailed description of the exhibition. Another article appeared in Vedomosti.
Despite the holiday season, the exhibition activity in August was quite active. So, "Kommersant" wrote about two significant expositions - a retrospective of El Lissitzky in the Dutch museum Van Aabbemuseum, which contains an extensive collection of his drawings by the famous avant-garde artist, and an exhibition dedicated to the 250th anniversary of the St. Petersburg classic Andrei Voronikhin in the Stroganov Palace.
Several news at once came over the past two weeks from the restoration front, and the main one is the resumption of the comprehensive scientific restoration of the notorious commune house on Novinsky Boulevard, which we mentioned in the previous review. This was announced by the investment group "Copernicus", which owns most of the house. The Vremya novostei newspaper posted an interview between Sergei Khachaturov and the author of the restoration project, Alexei Ginzburg. People continue to live in several apartments of the house, which has been in disrepair for a long time; some other apartments are rented by artists. Foreign media, however, were rather skeptical about the intention to save the famous monument, accustomed to seeing the opposite in Moscow. This conclusion can be drawn from an article published recently in The Guardian.
The restoration of another well-known ensemble - the Ostankino estate - has moved off the ground. The mayor promised to finish it by September 2011, for which more than 20 thousand exhibits that have been exhibited there for 200 years will be transferred from the museum to the newly built storage facility, Novye Izvestia and Rossiyskaya Gazeta write. Meanwhile, the governor Valentina Matvienko, having visited the restorers of Oranienbaum, was unhappy with the protracted work, but promised to add to the budget, Fontantka reported.
The work that has begun at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, about which the website of the "Arhnadzor" movement writes with sarcasm, can also be called restoration in quotation marks. 10 years after the construction, the sculptor Tsereteli continues to decorate the facades of the building with bronze bas-reliefs, "improving" the creations of Ton, Klodt and Surikov with his own additions. The author is not embarrassed by the fact that traditional Moscow churches generally do not use bronze sculptures on their facades, or that genuine white stone high reliefs have survived.
Finally, let us note three more interesting articles on various topics that have appeared over the past two weeks. One of them was written by the architect Nikita Tokarev for Vedomosti and is devoted to the consequences of the recently ended fire fighting. We are talking about housing for fire victims, which the authorities promise to rebuild as soon as possible. Since it is absurd to restore huts with amenities in the courtyard, the question arises what the new houses will be like …
The event for the St. Petersburg architects was the arrival of the world celebrity Erik van Egeraat, who personally presented at the local City Council his new project of an elite residential building opposite New Holland, on the site of the Graffiti hostel that appeared there in 2009. Egeraat recently won a tender for the reconstruction of the Moscow stadium Dynamo, and St. Petersburg colleagues, wanting to keep up, approved the project, ZAKS.ru reports.
The topic of foreigners in Russia is continued by an article by Grigory Revzin in Kommersant about the fate of the innovation city in Skolkovo. The reason was that the other day the deadline for submitting applications for participation in the competition for the design of the city, where only foreign companies participated, has expired. However, upon closer examination, the competition seemed to the author nothing more than a convention.
