At a meeting with journalists on March 2, the head of the Moscow Heritage Committee Alexander Kibovsky announced that within a year the committee intends to introduce the status of a "landmark" for the territory within the Garden Ring. Such "sights" will clearly define all the requirements for the preservation of cultural heritage, describe what an investor can do, what he wants to see the city, explains Gazeta.ru. However, not all experts believe that such a change in protection status will lead to an increase in the level of control over new construction in the city center. “While the restriction on construction in protected zones is of a legislative nature, for“places of interest”it is determined by the Moscow Heritage Committee, but the decisions of the committee do not have the force of law,” Konstantin Mikhailov, coordinator of the “Arkhnadzor” comments the situation to Gazeta. "As a result, we will get a manually regulated situation with the permission or prohibition of new construction".
Alexander Kibovsky also told reporters that by the end of the first quarter of 2010, the approval of the territories of cultural heritage sites will be completed (209 out of about 1400 remained). This work will not only make Moscow the first Russian city to have such a list, but will also make it possible to move on to the next planned stage - the zoning of monuments. The security zones, explains Gazeta.ru, already exist in Moscow, but they were "drawn" back in 1997 and, as Alexander Kibovsky put it, "not brought to the point" due to the high density of buildings in the city center. An interview with the head of the Moscow Heritage Committee also appeared in Moskovsky Komsomolets, where Alexander Kibovsky, in particular, spoke very specifically about the privatization of monuments. According to the official, the legacy cannot survive without private capital, but the best way to maintain it with dignity was and remains a lease: in this case, the city retains the right to terminate the contract and withdraw the monument from the destroyer, while the owner can only do this through court.
The last statement is especially important in light of the newly intensified division of Moscow monuments between the federation and the capital. According to Kommersant, Rosimushchestvo and the Moscow Department of Property will have to divide about 3,000 more objects, and Sergei Sobyanin (unlike his predecessor) is apparently ready to give most of it to the federals. Interesting is also the data from the report of the Control and Accounts Chamber of Moscow for February, cited by Kommersant, from which it follows that the city register does not contain information about the owners of 43 percent of the monuments, which means that up to 0.5 billion rubles can pass by the treasury annually.
In general, it should be noted that over the past two weeks the Moscow Heritage Committee has been mentioned in the press more than once. So, on February 21, in favor of the committee, the trial ended in relation to the owner of the apartment in the regional monument - the so-called. The house of polar explorers on Nikitsky Boulevard, which has built an attic over its housing. The history of squatter construction is described in detail on the Arhnadzor website, since it was his volunteers who were the first to notice the “iron trough” on the roof of the house a couple of years ago. The joint appeal of activists and the Moscow Heritage Committee to the prosecutor's office on the fact of the restructuring of another monument - the Podmoskovnaya railway station, the last wooden station of the early 20th century in the Art Nouveau style on the territory of Moscow - was also successful, as the website of the movement also reports.
And last week the Moscow Heritage Committee received two new applications for violations on the monuments: The Public Coalition in Defense of Moscow reported that the builders of the notorious Nikita Mikhalkov's hotel in Maly Kozikhinsky Lane destroyed an archaeological layer with unique 17th century artifacts during work. Gazeta tells about this in detail. The second application came from the owners of the famous Sandunovsky Baths, whose building is suffering from the construction in the neighborhood, according to the same publication. The committee reacted very quickly: the first application from tireless opponents of the hotel was denied by the Moscow Heritage Committee (which had approved the construction), noting that the layer had been damaged much earlier during the laying of communications. As for the Sanduns, the committee confirmed that the ensemble needs emergency work, but the construction site in the neighborhood will not be stopped, since the building that is being built is very much needed by the Moscow Architectural Institute.
The St. Petersburg authorities are also concerned about the historical appearance of the city. So, the details of the new "Architectural and Artistic Regulations" of Nevsky Prospekt, approved in December, became known, writes "Nevskoe Vremya". The regulations are somewhat reminiscent of “proposals for the withdrawal of advertising structures from the center of Moscow” - bulky advertising should also disappear from Nevsky, and new signs, trash cans, bus stops and stalls will be united by a common artistic idea. The catch is that the new regulation, as Kommersant found out, has not been agreed upon either with Rosokhrankultura (which is required by the status of a historical settlement) or with the Press Committee that oversees the advertising market. The St. Petersburg Committee for State Control, Use and Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments (KGIOP), in turn, initiated the initiation of a criminal case into the destruction of the architectural monument - Propper's apartment building at 40 Galernaya Street. the monument to the hotel was completely demolished through the fault of the owner. Kommersant and Gazeta.ru talk about this in more detail.
Regnum news agency, meanwhile, announced the results of a recent re-examination of another famous St. Petersburg monument - the Gauswald dacha. As KGIOP specialists found out, the wooden structures of the dacha were badly rotted and actually lost their bearing capacity. So far, nothing is known about the future fate of the monument, for which there is a restoration project contested by city defenders with the adaptation of the architect Rafael Dayanov.
The topic of legacy, which this time almost all of our review is devoted to, has turned out to be relevant in the regions over the past two weeks. For example, the Irkutsk authorities last week reviewed a project for the reconstruction of wooden houses in the city center, prepared by the mayor's office together with the regional service for the protection of heritage sites. Its implementation is planned to be carried out exclusively with private money - for this, historical objects will be leased for three years or under a concession agreement. In Irkutsk, four maps of priority restoration zones will be created - the first will be the 130th quarter, the local portal Babr.ru writes. And in Yekaterinburg on February 28, for the first time in the past two years, the town-planning council gathered for a meeting. The subject of discussion was the project for the development of the tourist and recreational zone "Spiritual Center of the Urals" in the city of Verkhoturye.
A UNESCO commission has recently visited Kizhi to check the scandalous restoration of the Transfiguration Church. It is curious that the assessments of independent experts are conveyed by different media in their own way. IA Regnum, which has repeatedly published statements by opponents of the ongoing restoration on the monument, the opinion of UNESCO was actually omitted. But the regional portal "Karel Inform" wrote that the experts really liked the current work.
The largest urban planning news of the past two weeks is associated with businessman Roman Abramovich. Millhouse, which won the November 2010 tender for the reconstruction of New Holland, recently announced bidders for the conceptual design of the island's master plan. And the newspaper "Vedomosti" at the same time announced the intention of the businessman to undertake the renovation of Gorky Park in Moscow.
An interesting analytical article on the revision of capital investment contracts was published by the RBC portal. As the newspaper writes, the audit initiated by the mayor Sergei Sobyanin in seven months can annul more than a third of the previously agreed projects (which is about 500 construction projects). First of all, as the authors analyzed, developers who have missed the deadline for implementation are at risk. However, the projects of complex reconstruction can, in turn, be abandoned by the investors themselves, who have grabbed the sites, where construction, as it turned out later, is hindered by the presence of a nature protection zone and other "pitfalls".
Another important architectural news of the last week was the announcement of the results of the competition for the creation of a master plan for the innovation city in Skolkovo. The winner was the French architectural bureau AREP. In addition to the Architectural News Agency, this event was covered in detail by Kommersant and the Lenta-Real Estate portal.
