On October 4, Andrei Bokov, President of the Union of Architects of Russia, initiated a new competition for the design of the building of the depository of the Moscow Kremlin museums. He noted that such a competition should be open and national and, first of all, will become "a kind of public examination of the current difficult urban planning situation." “An international competition is a troublesome and expensive business,” says Andrei Bokov, who has already agreed on the idea of holding a new competition with the chief architect of Moscow, Alexander Kuzmin. "I think we have accumulated enough energy to get a productive and intelligible result." The Union of Architects of Russia promises that the competition will be held as publicly as possible, and its results will be presented at a separate exhibition. By the way, it is planned to bring them up by December 25 of this year.
Recall that the expansion of the living space of the State Museum-Reserve "Moscow Kremlin" began about two weeks ago, when construction equipment suddenly appeared on Borovitsky Hill. Last week, the museum's management held a press conference, at which they admitted that the project of a new depository, developed back in 1997 by architects E. Rozanov and V. Kolosnitsyn in a pseudo-classical style, does not cause much delight in them, but they will resist the decision to build. can not. The museum workers referred to the 94th Federal Law, which did not allow customers to revise the results of the architectural competition, and complained that even the resignation of the mayor of Moscow (and it happened exactly on the same day, September 28) could not cancel the controversial and at the same time so necessary for the reserve construction. “The facades of the project are far from satisfying us, they need to be changed, we have talked about this many times. It is another matter that we are completely satisfied with the designed internal filling of the future complex and, of course, with its location,”Elena Gagarina, director of the Moscow Kremlin museums, explained to journalists her position.
However, just a day later, it turned out that the provisions of the law were by no means so immutable. The very next day after the resignation of Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, his former deputy, and now acting Mayor Vladimir Resin ordered to suspend the permit for the construction of the restoration and depository complex of the Kremlin museums on Borovitskaya Square. On Thursday, September 30, construction was completely stopped, and workers were disbanded, although, strictly speaking, such issues are not within the competence of the Moscow government, because the object is under federal jurisdiction. The point in this story, necessary from a legal point of view, was raised yesterday by the Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation Alexander Avdeev, who signed a "federal" order to suspend work. “I don't like the depository project,” Alexander Avdeev admitted in an interview with reporters. "But it is important that the discussion about the quality of the project does not overshadow the problem itself - the Kremlin museums are literally suffocating from the lack of premises." The new architectural competition for the solution of Borovitskaya Square in general and the depository building in particular is intended to give this discussion an official status and direct it into a constructive channel.
