For almost a month of Sergei Sobyanin's work as mayor of the capital, Muscovites, and especially Moscow officials, managed to become convinced of the originality and uncompromising nature of the new mayor's policy. The fanfare of critics and the opposition, at first inspired by the demonstrative rejection of the decisions of the previous government, subsided, and instead of them the main question on the agenda was: what will such radical methods lead to?
For example, Nikolai Malinin, in his article "For Transparency", published in "Vedomosti", notes the growing skepticism among Muscovites, and explains Sobyanin's first steps "an underlying desire to free up space." The famous architectural critic considers the decision to replace concrete fences with transparent ones as the culmination of the first month of the new mayor's "reign". For the architect Yevgeny Ass, such changes, in which the expert opinion is again ignored, cause only irritation - in an interview with the Salt magazine, the architect spoke about the “history of the disease of Moscow” and the prospects for the “Sobyanin style”. Grigory Revzin harshly criticized the initiative of the mayor to combat traffic jams on the pages of the Vlast magazine. Having studied the document published on the website of the mayor's office, Revzin came to the conclusion that this program is “the fruit of departmental creativity, or rather, the fruit of the creativity of industry lobbyists,” and things will definitely not get off the ground. But Vyacheslav Glazychev, on the contrary, approves of the actions of the mayor, "who did not disdain to look into the" backyard "of the metropolis." Probably, the expert's optimism is explained, among other things, by the outlined rapprochement between the governments of Moscow and the Moscow Region, which, as Vremya Novostey writes, decided to develop the main sectors of the economy, including urban planning, in a unified manner.
Rossiyskaya Gazeta reminds of other initiatives of Sergei Sobyanin. Among the latter is the expropriation of a plot of land from Elena Baturina for the construction of the Setun Hills multifunctional complex and, accordingly, the cancellation of the implementation of this project - more about this in the Gazeta. Interests of Inteko, meanwhile, are shifting to … Venezuela. After the April meeting of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Glavstroy and Inteko were ordered to build more than 300 thousand square meters in Caracas. housing for migrants from dilapidated houses, writes Kommersant. Recently, the scandalous project for the reconstruction of Pushkinskaya Square was revised, from which now, apparently, finally, commercial trade was expelled, leaving only grocery stores. Izvestia tells about this in more detail.
However, the “thaw” on the front of the protection of the architectural heritage, with which the activists hurried to congratulate each other, as it turned out, did not become a defense against new destruction. So, on November 15, on Leninskaya Sloboda Street, the demolition of the remains of the complex of the mechanical plant of engineer Baria began, including the house built by the famous engineer Vladimir Shukhov. A report from the scene was published by IA Regnum.
"Arhnadzor", meanwhile, reminds the authorities of the objects included in the "risk group", which due to the accident rate may not survive the winter. Izvestia publishes ten of the most valuable and most critical historical buildings in Moscow, including the Zhurgaz printing house, the House of the Bykov merchant, the Guriev's Chambers and other significant monuments. The recently appointed head of the Moscow Heritage Committee, Alexander Kibovsky, in turn, has already promised to establish control over the situation with the monuments by increasing the degree of responsibility for violations of heritage sites and the transition "from pre-emptive to punitive measures." Gazeta.ru and Vremya novostei tell more about Kibovsky's initiative.
St. Petersburg hastened to follow the example of the commonwealth of Moscow officials and city rights activists: recently there were meetings of local activists with the governor and vice-governor, at which the parties agreed on the emergence of a joint working group. This association, according to Fontanka.ru and Gazeta, will offer a "package of solutions" for each individual object. The first successes were not long in coming: activists, together with officials, inspected two of the most high-profile historical sites under threat - the houses of Yurgens and Rogov.
However, the main architectural event for the residents of St. Petersburg this week was the victory of Roman Abramovich's company in the tender for the reconstruction of New Holland. Now experts are most worried about what will be built on the island, since there is no clear concept of the project - the investor planned to start developing it only after the victory. More details about the tender - in the articles in "Gazeta", Gazeta.ru and on the portal "City 812".
An unexpected turn in the long-term construction of the second stage of the Mariinsky Theater took place with the appointment of a new head of the North-West Directorate for Construction, Reconstruction and Restoration, which is the customer of all works. It was the official of the Ministry of Culture Andrei Ermakov. The project of the Canadian bureau Diamond & Schmitt Architects, despite the fact that it was already implemented almost under the roof, was rejected by Glavgosexpertiza and will be radically revised again. According to Kommersant, two new competitions worth 170 million rubles have been announced.
On November 19, the State Duma of the Russian Federation put an end to the dispute between representatives of the church and the museum community by adopting in the second reading a bill on the transfer of religious property. As the same Kommersant explains, museum workers have less and less chance of preventing the law from coming into force. However, one has to console oneself with the rather solid concessions that the legislators made in favor of museums: for example, they banned the transfer of World Heritage sites to UNESCO and especially valuable heritage sites, such as the Vladimir-Suzdal or Rostov-Yaroslavl museums-reserves.
And to conclude the review, we will mention the main event in the architectural and artistic life of this month. A festival organized by the Moscow Architectural Institute is dedicated to the 90th anniversary of VKHUTEMAS. “Seven respectable exhibitions, a very representative conference and many chamber events are quite a natural consequence of too long oblivion and the enormous but somehow elusive glory of the“great Russian school of European modernism,”writes the Kommersant-Weekend magazine about the festival. A separate article in Kommersant is devoted to the exhibition in the VKHUTEMAS gallery on Rozhdestvenka, which presents educational materials of the legendary university from the collection of the Moscow Architectural Institute. Detailed reports on the festival's expositions can also be found on Archi.ru, Vedomosti and Gazeta.
