Despite all the political upheavals of recent times, the Public Council has hardly changed: with the exception of a few new persons from the mayor's administration, its composition has remained the same. The post of chairman was retained by Vladimir Resin, and the agenda was presented by another political "long-liver" - the chief architect of Moscow, Alexander Kuzmin. It should be noted that Vladimir Resin, who over the past month has shown himself to be a resolute defender of Moscow's urban planning interests, has brought the most pressing issues to the current meeting of the Public Council - the dominance of advertising in the city center and the project of an apart-hotel that Nikita Mikhalkov's company is building on Patriarch's Ponds.
Only on Tuesday, November 23, at a meeting of the Moscow Government, officials headed by Sergei Sobyanin discussed what to do with the advertising that turned the city center into a kind of Shanghai. The mayor eventually sent the concept for the placement of advertising structures for revision, and Alexander Kuzmin said that until the document was adopted, a moratorium on new billboards would be introduced in the city. At the Public Council, Kuzmin re-presented the concept of advertising and information design within the Garden Ring, considered a year ago, but still not adopted. This project, developed by Mosproekt-3, envisages the complete removal of advertising from eight important places in the historical center, including the Kremlin and Teatralnaya Square. by 30 percent. However, some particularly “defiant” genres, such as banners or large advertising structures (as well as building nets covering the facades of buildings for several years) are supposed to be abolished altogether, the rest will be forced to decrease in size and will be commensurate with the buildings next to which they are located. Advertising is also removed from the facades themselves - they are transferred to stops, pedestals and other elements of the so-called. urban furniture, variants of which "Mosproekt-3" has developed in three styles.
The council members considered that it is necessary to exempt from advertising not only monuments and those buildings that fall within the zones of their visual perception, but also other important town-planning points that form the appearance of historical streets and squares. Yuri Platonov, for example, suggested focusing on developing sweeps of specific streets in order to free architecture not only from ugly billboards, but also plastic porches and other unauthorized tenants, as well as lurid night lighting. Moscow City Duma deputy Mikhail Moskvin-Tarkhanov recalled that all these problems will be helped by the introduction of passports for the complex improvement of buildings, which will make it possible to hold owners accountable not only for unauthorized advertising, but also for the condition of walls, coverings, roofs.
Interestingly, during the discussion it turned out that the Moskomarkhitektura itself is indirectly to blame for the abundance of advertising in the city center: in order for the Advertising Committee to be able to remove the most flashy structures, the architecture committee must withdraw the approvals it had given. Otherwise, as the representative of the committee said at a meeting of the council, his actions would be arbitrariness and require payment of compensation from the city budget. Vladimir Resin, supporting this speech, unexpectedly attacked the officials of the Moscow Committee for Architecture and Construction and called the chief artist of Moscow Igor Voskresensky guilty of advertising chaos, in particular. Equally unexpectedly, the chairman supported the speech of Alexei Klimenko, who scolded the Moscow Committee for Culture and the Art Council, which deal with the appearance of the city without having professional art critics in their staff. Resin agreed with Klimenko that it is necessary to involve "artists and universities" in these bodies. As a result, the advertising design concept was again postponed. With the words "Let's fight for Moscow!" Resin ended the discussion by promising to return to this topic at the end of the first half of 2011.
Next, the chairman of the council resolved another major urban planning scandal of recent weeks, which flared up around the construction of an apart-hotel at M. Kozikhinsiy Lane, 11. Residents of Patriarch's Ponds, who already have experience in combating attempts at another seal, this time did not stop even in front of the famous director Nikita Mikhalkov, concurrently heading the Trite construction company, which in August this year demolished the old 4-storey building and began construction of a 6-storey hotel with two underground levels in its place. Last week, residents once again blocked access to construction equipment, for which some of them, including the famous actress Tatyana Dogileva, were taken to the police.
According to Alexander Kuzmin, the first thing that needs to be done in this situation is to meet the requirements of residents and monitor the condition of the foundations of neighboring houses. With the hotel project itself, according to the chief architect of Moscow, everything is in order. Back in 2004, this hotel was designed by Alexei Vorontsov in the neoclassical style, decorating the main facade with a large Palladian arch. The residents and the majority of the council members didn’t really have any questions about the project, especially since in 2008 it received all the necessary approvals, including from the Moscow City Architecture Committee. True, Alexander Kudryavtsev and Yuri Grigoriev tried to urge the architect to make some adjustments to the architectural solution of this complex, but Alexei Vorontsov was adamant: the project was under construction, and now it was too late to change anything in it.
Residents are mainly concerned about the condition of the basements of their own houses, which are currently filled with water and cracks. According to the customer's representative, these fears are exaggerated - this was proved by the recent monitoring. The firm, in addition, went to meet the protesters and ordered an additional examination at the Research Center "Tunnels and Subways". These studies are still underway, but no one is going to interrupt the construction for their time. Vladimir Resin, for his part, agreed with this, noting that the construction, on the contrary, should be accelerated in order to finish quickly and not to irritate local residents. At the same time, he assured the residents of the area that he was ready to stop the project at any time if the developer did not fulfill his promises on the examination.
Resin also called the issue of reconsolidation of the Patriarch's Ponds area of principle, urging officials and specialists to gather in the very near future to discuss the further development strategy of the famous "Patriarchs". It is possible, the chairman of the Public Council believes, that a moratorium will be imposed on new construction in this area of Moscow.
