Recall that the company "Masshtab" is implementing one of the largest urban development projects in the country: "A101" is 13 thousand hectares between Yuzhnoye Butovo and Kaluzhskoye shosse, which are supposed to be built up with housing and commercial real estate. Of course, new construction will not unfold as a solid carpet - individual compact cities will be neatly soldered between existing settlements and protected natural areas. The implementation of the first such project is already underway, and the launch of the second one, in fact, “City of Quarters”, is on its way, for the general plan of which the developer announced a closed tender this summer.
According to Mikhail Malikov, Chairman of the Board of Directors of OJSC “Masshtab”, he was prompted to organize the competition by his ambitions (he wanted to bring affordable housing of high-quality architecture to the market) and banal confusion: no one knew how to turn 154 hectares into a comfortable city. “In the domestic urban planning, the tradition of designing cities was interrupted in the 1970s, so we did not have much choice - we immediately understood that foreign bureaus should be invited to participate in the competition”. First, a portfolio competition was held, and out of 42 architectural companies, a jury headed by Hans Stimmann selected 4 teams: MVRDV and KCAP / Next Architects from the Netherlands, Hilmer Sattler Albrecht from Germany and EDDEA from Spain.
Bart Goldhoorn was the author of the terms of reference for the development of the general layout of the new city. It was he who proposed the concept of Block city - a settlement consisting of residential quarters of standardized sizes. According to the architect, it is such a structure that is capable of providing comfortable and safe living conditions - in contrast, say, to the micro-districts or individual houses with a fenced-in area that have been adopted so far in our country. Three years ago, Goldhoorn began developing a standard for neighborhoods - a kind of "size ruler" that could then be launched into mass (but by no means faceless!) Construction, as one of the curators of the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale. The held competition made it possible to translate this theory into practice.
On the one hand, the city planners were commissioned to design exactly the city, consisting of neighborhoods of the same size, but different in density. On the other hand, since the parameters of the "blocks" are known, in parallel with a closed competition, another one was held - for the best architecture of the quarters themselves. The second competition was also international, but already open for everyone - in total, 250 entries from different countries of the world were submitted to it, and the most interesting ones will be included in the catalog of development of territories.
At the exhibition in the Anfilade of the Museum of Architecture, the results of the two competitions are shown in parallel. In the space of the halls, urban planning concepts are placed - with layouts, the most detailed tablets and proposals for the architecture of individual quarters, and the opposite wall is occupied by the works of participants in an open competition. Since there were a lot of the latter, their projects are presented on narrow vertical strips of whatman paper: standing in front of them, you can read a short annotation and consider the visualizations, squatting down to study the drawings. For those who prefer visualization of detailed information, in the last room on a giant table all the models are exhibited (except for a few unfortunate people who did not survive the transportation). Completely different in plasticity, style and color, they form such a colorful “City of Quarters” that they rather resemble a toy store counter than a serious architectural exposition. However, the organizers were striving for just such an effect - to show how different architecture can be with a single set standard for a quarter.
Each of the four bureaus invited to the competition has vast experience in the development of urban planning projects. MVDRV, in particular, designed the satellite city of Almere and are participating in the Greater Paris project, Hilmer Sattler Albrecht developed the master plan for the Museum Island in Berlin, KCAP are widely known in Russia with the master plan for Perm, and the Spanish EDDEA was recently awarded the ASPRIMA prize for project for a new residential area in Seville. In working on the look of the "City of Quarters", each team used their own signature techniques. In particular, the Germans in the layout of the quarters demonstrated pedantry bordering on rigidity - residential buildings, divided into identical squares, are concentrated in the center of the site, and social facilities that, according to Russian standards, require a larger supply of the adjacent territory, are moved to the periphery. Both Dutch bureaus tried to use the space as efficiently as possible - MVDRV did this by carefully "fitting" the neighborhoods to each other, thanks to which their master plan subtly resembles a patchwork work, and KCAP introduced high-rise accents into the urban fabric. As for the winner of the competition, EDDEA bureau based the project on the idea of a fractal - a complex geometric figure made up of several parts, each of which is similar to a whole. In the EDDEA version, “City of Quarters” is a set of small, well-maintained clusters that have no shortage of parking and greenery. And just as the houses in a single block are grouped around an inner green courtyard, so several blocks are surrounded by a small garden with a school, and the city as a whole is located around three natural parks.
There were two nominations in the architectural design competition - a low-density quarter and a high-density quarter - and neither of them won first prizes. But two second out of three possible prizes went to Russian Alexander Sverdlov, who lives and works in Rotterdam. The project of his own bureau SVESMI received an honorable mention. Alexander came to the ceremony of announcing the results of the competition directly from the plane and, leading the excursions from one of his projects to another through the MuAra suite, carried a suitcase with him on wheels. In Sverdlov's projects, the jury won over not so much an elegant architectural solution (although in all three cases these are very well-worked volumes), as the adaptability of the planning structure - both of individual residential buildings and of quarters as a whole. The architect very keenly grasped the ideal rhythm of urban development: the alternation of high-rise accents, low-rise volumes and “pauses” in the perimeter, proposed by him, reads like an exemplary cardiogram. And what, if not an even steady pulse, will provide strength and longevity to the body called "City of Quarters"?
