Since Sergei Sobyanin took over at the helm of the Moscow administration, events in the urban development sphere have come down to cancellations, bans and suspensions of construction projects. Architectural life gradually froze against this background, and, according to Grigory Revzin, there will be no work for designers in Moscow for a long time to come. “As it turned out, Yuri Mikhailovich has already signed contracts with developers for the construction of 40 million square meters. m, and if only these already concluded contracts are fulfilled, then the city will grow by another quarter, and it already has the highest density in Europe. So the main task of Sergei Semenovich is to break these contracts, and he will definitely not conclude new ones. This means that the architects will have nothing else to do in Moscow. Their services are no longer needed,”Revzin writes. And it makes the profession more than a harsh verdict: that today officials prefer to cooperate with foreign rather than Russian architects, it is the latter who are to blame - they have soiled themselves with conformist cooperation with the authorities. “There were kind of decent talented people, but there was something left of them that was unpleasant for everyone, and for them in the first place.”
An article by an architecture critic, published in Citizen K magazine, drew a strong reaction from the professional community. The Russian Union of Architects reacted most sharply, posting a response to Grigory Revzin on its website. True, having decided on an emotional statement called "Memorial service for the living", the SAR did not dare to sign it - both on the Union's website and on its Facebook page, the replica was published anonymously.
The architect Kirill Ass is more loyal to his colleagues. For him, the reason for speaking in the press was the statement of the head of the Moscow Heritage Committee, Alexander Kibovsky, that "in terms of high-tech, the center of Moscow is full, high-tech has become an annoying factor." Kibovsky lamented that architects are bad at reproducing historical styles, but, nevertheless, if you are going to build, then it is better to adhere to them. Ass believes that in this way the Moscow government, like under Yuri Luzhkov, "again wishes to command architectural styles." The critic notes that, firstly, there has never been a high-tech in Moscow, but mostly of a low quality of imitation. And secondly, the construction of buildings in "historical styles" is almost a greater evil, which, according to Ass, "does not preserve the urban environment at all, but only infects it with an inexpressible bad taste." Ass proposes to build in the center only good modern architecture for the "background", since the emergence of new influential architects capable of building "in style", in his opinion, is not expected in the near future.
In the meantime, the Moskovskiye Novosti newspaper has published another report on the city planning policy of the new mayor. Its author Olga Vendina considers Sobyanin's actions to be very decisive, but not well thought out. Moscow does not meet the requirements of the time, the author writes, but on the issue of its further development, there are still two mutually exclusive positions: " in Moscow and it is possible to live, there is everything you need for modern life and self-realization. " According to Vendina, the mayor has not yet managed to overcome the contradiction between them, so his main enterprises - the fight against traffic jams and stalls - have not yielded results.
No less active in the press is discussing the initiative of the new mayor to create large, modern public spaces that could become city attractions. In particular, we are talking about iconic and indecently neglected sites - the Central Park of Culture and Leisure. Gorky and the All-Russian Exhibition Center, which Moscow intends to reconstruct in the coming years. The new director Sergei Kapkov told Gazeta.ru about what Gorky Park should be like. According to Grigory Revzin, it is now impossible to return to the park the pathos of Stalin's time, when people rested here from their communal apartments; therefore, the Central Park of Culture and Leisure should be turned into a kind of central parks in large European capitals, where they are a "public luxury". Another well-known expert, Vyacheslav Glazychev, believes that the most correct option would be to transform the Central Park of Culture and Leisure into a continuation of the Park of Arts: "The concept of the park should shift towards a site where spontaneous artistic activity is possible."
By the way, Sergei Kapkov himself promised in an interview to Moscow Perspective that the park would not be turned into a Disneyland for sure - also because it is not able to withstand too much traffic load. "We will restore the entrance group … We will restore the historical layout - the parterre, the Pionerskaya alley, lawns, paths, fountains, we will clean the ponds," Kapkov outlined the nearest plans. In the meantime, the concept is under development, the amusement rides have already begun to be dismantled in the park: according to Kommersant, many of them existed in the park illegally.
At the All-Russian Exhibition Center, in the meantime, everything has been decided with the concept of reconstruction - it was recently published on the official website of the exhibition complex. As Moscow Perspective recalls, the city authorities have approached this territory more than once: the previous development plan was developed in 2008, and with a pre-crisis scale - it involved the construction of more than 1 million square meters. m. of commercial real estate and $ 2.5 billion in investments. Then the director was replaced, then the mayor. The current concept, on which the Research and Development Institute of the General Plan and the Dutch company TCN have been working for two years, is more restrained in this regard, however, it cannot be called modest either: 4 areas of development of the territory (which we wrote about in detail) involve the construction of 700-750 thousand sq. m. of new areas. Particular activity will be observed, according to Izvestia, to the left of the central alley, where offices, hotels and other infrastructure will be built under the general name Center for the Quality of Life. Construction is planned, by the way, in the historical part: as a dominant, they promise to build a pavilion of the Russian Federation. The global restructuring will be completed in 2034 and will cost about 120 billion rubles.
The Moscow authorities intend to actively attract investments at a more local level - to save the dying monuments, as Alexander Kibovsky recently said. As an example of "competent, correct restoration of an object with extrabudgetary funds," the head of the committee recently noted the estate (house number 18a) on Malaya Dmitrovka, known for the fact that one of the organizers of the Northern Society of Decembrists Mikhail Mitkov lived there. According to Rossiyskaya Gazeta, a private investor had to invest more than $ 10,000 per sq. M. In the restoration. meter.
To this we can add another example - the recently completed restoration of the Muravyov-Apostol estate (house number 23) on Staraya Basmannaya street in Moscow, which was financed by a descendant of a famous family - Christopher Muravyov-Apostol. According to the MAPS website, not only the volume, but also the interiors were restored here. The house will combine museum and residential functions, so the restorers made some technological innovations. For example, tiled stoves will not be used for their intended purpose, but will be turned into air ducts for natural ventilation of the premises.
And, finally, another restoration recently brought life back to the monument - this time in the Nizhny Novgorod region, where the world's only hyperboloid multisection power transmission tower, created by Vladimir Shukhov, was saved from destruction, Izvestia reports. This tower is seven years younger than Shabolovskaya, but it is recognized as an even more perfect design. Of the six towers through which the power transmission line was stretched over the Oka, only one, 128 meters high, has survived, the rest were cut into scrap metal. Funds for its restoration - 140 billion rubles - were allocated by the regional power engineers. Now the tower is guarded from barbarians by a watchman, and over time it is planned to be included in the tourist route.
However, all these successes in the field of restoration of monuments did not save Moscow from new scandals related to heritage sites. On April 9, the demolition of a remarkable engineering building of the 1890s began in the capital - the Fan Locomotive Depot at the Leningradsky Railway Station. The depot, however, is not a monument, it is only declared for protection, so the Moscow Heritage Committee, raised by the alarm of Arkhnadzor, could not stop the work. To stop the demolition, activists put on duty at the construction site. Fortunately for the facility, Russian Railways, as reported by Gazeta, did not have documents permitting the demolition, and any building within the boundaries of the Kamer-Kollezhsky Shafts is obliged to pass a tolerable commission. Arkhnadzor has already issued a protest statement and a letter addressed to the director of Russian Railways with a request to stop the destruction of the depot. However, already on April 13, Russian Railways resumed work, referring to the fact that the object is located on federal land and the question of demolition is being decided by the asset holder.
This conflict, in particular, revealed that the Moscow Heritage Committee in emergency cases is simply not able to stop the destruction of monuments, since, as noted by the adviser to the head Nikolai Pereslegin, 294FZ prohibits unscheduled inspections of any construction projects, as a result of which the committee can operate only through the prosecutor's office. The committee intends to initiate amendments to the law for more operational work. And it may soon arise again: on the Oktyabrskaya (former Nikolaevskaya) railway, several more buildings are under threat - Arhnadzor names the stations at the Spirovo and Klin stations, round locomotive buildings at the Okulovka, Malaya Vishera, etc.
Another major scandal related to the destruction of the monument unfolded in the Moscow region - residents of the Shchelkovo district demand from the administration to stop the development of the protected zone of the famous Grebnevo estate, a monument of federal significance. Gazeta tells in detail about the machinations of the local administration with the sale of plots for the construction of summer cottages in the immediate vicinity of the ensemble.
At the end of the review, we will mention another high-profile event related to the architectural heritage - the transfer of the house of the architect Melnikov to the balance of the state. Senator Sergei Gordeev donated the famous monument, or rather, half of the monument to the Museum of Architecture. Since we covered this story in detail, now we will only mention the article by Grigory Revzin in Kommersant. According to the critic, the fact that Gordeev abandoned attempts to create a Melnikov museum should be rather upset: the person had a significant financial resource and was a real “Melnikov fanatic”, but whether the “physically falling apart Museum of Architecture” and “the Ministry of Culture, on which hundreds of such collapsing museums,”Revzin strongly doubts. “All operating state museums today are trying to create a board of trustees and attract some oligarch to help the museum develop. Here, in order to create a museum, it was necessary to get rid of the oligarch,”the critic shrugs.
