According to RIA Novosti, the President of the Skolkovo Foundation, Viktor Vekselberg, officially announced the victory of AREP on the evening of February 25. As Stanislav Naumov, Vice President of the Skolkovo Innovation Center Development Fund, told us today, the final choice in favor of the AREP concept was made not behind the scenes, but through “wide-format discussions with a variety of experts”. The project, called Urban villages and consisting of five towns (according to the number of Skolkovo activities), strung on a common highway, was recognized as the best not only in terms of urban planning, but also in terms of economics. “In particular, we are extremely impressed by the fact that the AREP project allows us to gradually develop new territory and introduce new technologies,” Stanislav Naumov said in an interview with Archi.ru.
The well-known architectural critic Grigory Revzin also considers the final choice of the Skolkovo Foundation reasonable and correct: “Unlike OMA, AREP offers the most flexible and free planning structure for the future innovation city, which, moreover, can be built in stages. This seems to me extremely important, since not all the proposed areas of Skolkovo's activities are equally obvious today. For example, a campus for IT companies can already be built, because they are on the market and their needs are more or less clear, but what the cluster of biomedical technologies should be is still a big question. From the point of view of understanding the function, of course, it is much more convenient to first build one town, and then, based on the results of its work, decide what the next one should be. " According to Grigory Revzin, the AREP project compares favorably with the OMA proposal in a number of other characteristics. In particular, unlike the Dutch, the French have envisaged many public spaces and infrastructure facilities as part of the innovation city, while OMA "drew a city with a rigid grid, in which there are only places for work and sleep." “This does not mean that the AREP project seems to me ideal - there are very specific complaints about its most developed areas,” underlines Grigory Revzin. “However, in general, it is this project that is the most adequate and tolerant in relation to the real situation.”
Today, February 28, an expanded meeting of the Council of the Skolkovo Innovation Center Development Fund began in Paris, the main topic of which was the discussion of the winning project. As Stanislav Naumov explained to us, a number of leading architects and urbanists of Europe have been invited to this meeting, who will express their comments on the AREP project. The contract with the winner of the urban planning competition will be signed on March 2, and one of its mandatory conditions will be the need to take into account the amendments received from the expert community. The Skolkovo Foundation plans to receive the final version of the master plan for the future innovation city by June of this year.
As a reminder, a total of 27 applications were submitted for participation in the Skolkovo urban planning concept competition announced in the summer of 2010. By the beginning of November, a short list of participants was formed, of which 6 foreign bureaus entered the second round. On December 20, 2010, at a meeting of the foundation's town planning council, two finalists of the competition were selected - AREP (France) and OMA (Netherlands).
