In the summer, 27 applications were submitted for participation in the competition. By the beginning of November, eight participants remained, then two more were eliminated - Perkins Eastman Architects (USA) and RMJM (Great Britain), and six remained. Of these, two winners were selected a week ago. On Friday, December 24, one of the Skolkovo council members, Boris Bernasconi, spoke in Garage about all six projects that participated in the second round and the motivation for the jury's decision. According to him, the council chose two diametrically opposite and at the same time significant projects; relatively speaking, such that when looking from space (or rather from Google), according to the plan, it was immediately obvious that this is Skolkovo. The same projects were also equipped with the clearest and most detailed technical concepts, including in terms of innovation and environmental friendliness.
The OMA concept (in the creation of which, however, according to Boris Bernasconi, Ram Koolhaas himself did not take part) is very rational and modernist. As Grigory Revzin rightly noted, the future innovation city in it is similar to Kalininsky Prospekt, to the institutes of Leonid Pavlov of the 1970s and to a computer motherboard. From our own side, we add that it is also similar to the nearby state farm buildings, and in general, especially when viewed from above, to any industrial zones of the second half of the 20th century. It looks like a motherboard, more precisely, a warehouse of motherboards, which were hit several times with a hammer and they scattered, forming a little chaos around the main rectangles.
The authors motivate their idea as follows (I must say that their explanation is the most logical of all, and affects primarily the mind, not emotions). They began thinking about the concepts by studying the history of the issue (after all, it's not for nothing that Rem Koolhaas's organizations are famous for their scholarship), raised the press about the innovation city and found out that it was called, and often, the Russian analogue of Silicon Valley. Taking the comparison literally, the architects looked (and then showed everyone at the beginning of their presentation) what the real Silicon Valley looks like. It looks, admittedly, awful: basically it is entirely asphalted land, lined up in large squares, occupied by structures such as hangars and open parking lots in front of them. From above, it really looks like a computer board with plates soldered onto it, or a cluster of hangars and supermarkets. Having enjoyed this spectacle, the architects drew a rectangular bar - a diagram of the distribution of functions, housing and work there were divided approximately in half. Then the two halves were separated, and one of them was rotated at an angle of 90 degrees to fit into the allotted area. Then they broke them into rectangles, "revived" them a little, scattered them, and came up with a bunch of hiking routes around the neighborhood, including ski ones, so that future innovators would not sit in laboratories.
Gary Seldon would love it.
If you read the reviews, of which there are already many, it is obvious that the progressive public liked this project the most. According to Boris Bernasconi, he is “heroic” and suitable for “young innovators” with an open mind. It's true; Such projects usually address the young mind, however, the idea is not terribly new, it is already about ninety years old. Since then, about five generations of young innovators have grown up and cursed everything, and the boxes of their innovative nests have become overgrown with dust and generally deteriorated, at least in our country. This is such a well-forgotten new thing.
True, the foundation plans to distribute the design of individual buildings to various well-known architects, at least 10-15 foreign and as many Russians (so far, Russian architects have not been included in the town-planning competition, according to Mikhail Khazanov, the Kurortproekt's application was generally ignored in a strange way). to distribute these boxes to different architects, and even good ones, and even not to take the buildings from them during construction and not remodel them, in a word, if you do everything right, then this tough plan can become a very interesting space. It's all about the quality of the finish.
Another thing is that Silicon Valley, which OMA refers to, was created quite the opposite: the land was stripped there, and everything grew on it. In Skolkovo, as has been repeatedly noted, on an area of about 300 hectares, a city for 30 thousand people is being designed, and what kind of people they will be and what exactly they will do is not clear: journalists are wondering why the innovation city is needed, or to “cover up a show ", Or as a" pension ground "for the president of the country. This makes the projected city look like empty hives, which beekeepers put up in case an orphan swarm of bees flies into the apiary. That is, a swarm of ownerless innovators.
Therefore, it is not surprising that at the Friday presentation the conversation turned to how the presented master plans are suitable for quickly re-profiling a foreign town into a "normal" (only very good, of course) cottage community. The second project chosen by the council, proposed by the French bureau AREP Etienne Tricot, is much better suited for the transformation into an Anglomanian hobbit town than the OMA project. It is called Urbanvillages (the authors wanted to name the "five green Kremlin", but they were discouraged), and consists of five towns according to the number of areas of Skolkovo activity. The townships are strung along a common road, on the one hand offices and laboratories, on the other, housing, divided into low high-rise buildings and separate family houses located near the forest. According to Bernasconi, AREP specializes in transport solutions and is well versed in them, so the transport scheme is excellent in this project as well.
The four rejected projects can be ranked in descending order of the jury's liking. The joint project of the Dutch Royal Haskoning and Mecanoo was defended during the discussion by Aaron Betsky - for the fact that it created a public space for close communication of innovators, a kind of "cauldron" in which fresh ideas will brew, and scientists will intersect and communicate. So I met, let's say, a nuclear physician-cardiologist in a cafe … they are sitting in front of a large window on the entire wall, and there in the courtyard a system programmer runs on skis, he resembles an electron in a synchrophasotron to physics, and reminds a physician of some kind of red blood cell … idyll. True, our synchrophasotron in Dolgoprudny (it seems, it was almost the largest in the world) was stopped long ago, and all the high-quality copper from its coils was sold, a lot of high-quality steel remained, and now experts on scientific monuments are deciding whether to write it into monuments and leave it that way, or sell what's left. So the skier will be the best model for the electron. Well, yes we are distracted.
The project is very beautiful, although only the scientific part has been developed in it, and the housing is drawn in an ordinary quarter without subtleties and beauty. The exploration section, all five directions, is built around a large oval square, similar to an antique hippodrome. The square is surrounded by a transparent gallery, raised above the ground, as is the case in modern airports - the gallery is the very "boiler" of public space. The disadvantage of the project is that the entire scientific part in this case will have to be built simultaneously, without splitting into queues.
The other two projects, apparently, were in the eyes of the jury at about the same level. The British bureau ARUP has focused on the "green wedges" that cut into the town from the side of the Skolkovskoye highway. The town is filled mainly with small neighborhoods with perimeter buildings and is laced with a zigzag boulevard.
The project of the Swedish bureau SWECO is a very carefully drawn "Swedish" town. In it, if you look closely, you can find most of the urban planning solutions known in history; no houses are alike. The plot of this concept is “green”, that is, ecologically correct and “blue”, that is, water-oriented, city. In my opinion, this particular project is very good; it was rejected mainly because it is "commonplace" - you never know in the world of good little Swedish cities.
And, finally, the project of the Singaporean JURONG looked to a certain extent slipshod and the least detailed. What is his video, in which a middle-aged man eats breakfast with his family, then rides a bicycle and does something like that in the laboratory, and all this without taking off his starched shirt and tie - an oriental kind of disciplined innovator. The architects proposed to introduce a radial-circular layout in Skolkovo to make it more similar to Moscow (by the way, Mikhail Blinkin, the chief transport expert and also a member of the Skolkovo council, said in this regard that the radial-circular layout is a very convenient and progressive solution). JURONG drew a plan of the city in the form of a flower.
True, it turned out to be difficult to fit a round flower into a zigzag section, so two petals had to be removed, and the architects painted a couple more on land that did not belong to Skolkov. For violation of the terms of reference, the jury immediately put this project in last place.
It's easy to see that the projects have a lot in common: everyone except OMA, even Singaporeans, proposed a quiet European town. The projects are absolutely saturated with a variety of ecology: wind turbines, solar panels, water recycling and rainwater collection, trams, cars banning entry to the central part of the city, and so on and so forth. If all of this is launched, it will probably be a wonderful urban environment created by modern standards. The best minds are already discussing what kind of innovators will live in this wonderful greenhouse (at least several Nobel laureates promised). After all, this is very curious, 30 thousand people will live in an ecologically correct city a stone's throw from the Moscow Ring Road, and who they are is completely unknown. In the meantime, you need to choose one of the two winning projects. This choice will be made "in the Kremlin," or, according to Marat Gelman, "very big bosses" will choose. The gallery owner himself, having sat down in the council of the innovation city for the "physicists", announced that he would build another innovation city for the "lyricists", and not for 30, but for 50 thousand people. Prepare, as they say, membership cards.
Six competitive models of the innovation city will be exhibited at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture until January 10.
