The wave of revolutionary decisions of the capital's authorities was provoked by the demolition of the Kolbe apartment building on Yakimanka, which we wrote about in our last review. It would seem that the situation for Moscow is quite common: the developer, Capital Group, ignored the pickets of activists along with the decision of the Heritage Department and completed the destruction of the monument, but, as they say, the patience of the Moscow Heritage Committee has run out. “There have been a variety of demolition stories in Moscow, but there has never been anything like that for a developer to openly ignore the position of an officially authorized state body,” Nikolai Pereslegin is sure. On April 26, Moskomnaslediya canceled all permits issued under the ex-mayor for construction work inside buildings of historical and cultural value: Kommersant and Rossiyskaya Gazeta tell about this in more detail. And in relation to Capital Group, the Department initiated the procedure for revoking the town-planning plan of the land plot.
But further - more: at the beginning of this week, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, apparently responding to the initiative of the department, announced the suspension of the implementation of all valid building permits in the historical center of the city. As Moskovskiye Novosti writes, we are talking about the territories not only of the monuments themselves, but also of environmental objects located within the protected zones. The mayor instructed the already existing permits to be revised and within a month to prepare a new procedure for their issuance. Mainly, this concerns the city plans of land plots, "the most muddy", according to Sobyanin, of all procedures. According to the chief architect of the capital, Alexander Kuzmin, who is quoted by Rossiyskaya Gazeta, now the decision will be made by the Town Planning and Land Commission, which is headed by the mayor himself. Kuzmin added that it will be possible to recreate the old buildings only in their original dimensions, the Vesti channel reports. "Arhnadzor", which played almost the main role in this whole story, actively welcomed the innovations. According to Natalya Samover, now manipulations with the law, when the demolition was “dragged in” by means of a banal replacement of it in the documents with the phrase “partial dismantling while preserving the front wall”, will not work.
However, the capital's developers are in no hurry to implement the mayor's decisions: construction on Yakimanka continues. It was recently added to the dismantling of the old wing in the Shakhovskys' estate on Bolshaya Nikitskaya and the wooden house of the merchants Feoktistovs on Bolshaya Ordynka, 42. Destructive work in both cases was suspended, but the monuments were damaged. The wing lost its teremkovy roof, interfloor ceilings and a patterned kokoshnik on the facade, according to IA Regnum and Gazeta. To dismantle the latter, the customer STD Developments (from which, according to Samover, the building permit was revoked the day before due to numerous violations) began, apparently, forcing the implementation of the protracted reconstruction project of Helikon-Opera. The house on Ordynka, on the site of which Redan-Style LLC plans to build a two-storey building with a restaurant, 4 times larger than the monument, has also partially lost its roof as a result of preparations for demolition, the Arhnadzor website reports.
Gazeta.ru is convinced that "the heroic act of the Moscow Heritage Committee, which decided to revise a huge amount of approvals and construction permits, will not make Moscow more livable." It is necessary to create a new system "which will not reproduce the known defects", otherwise the current reforms will only affect the rise in the cost of "approvals" and "permits". However, the first steps are about to be taken: for example, recently the Department of Cultural Heritage came up with an initiative to create several specialized JSCs. According to Kommersant, the mayor's office, as its contribution to their authorized capital, will contribute monuments belonging to the city, and investors - money that is planned to be used for restoration. However, while all these reforms are only being planned, the most effective means of protecting objects, according to Konstantin Mikhailov, could be a special unit of the "security police" in the capital's police department, which will inspect the historical center, Gazeta.ru activist quotes.
Petersburg city planners and activists, in turn, are now busy discussing the reconstruction project of Sennaya Square. The project is large-scale, expensive and responsible: it is necessary not only to restore the historical fabric, but also to correct the mistakes of its predecessors. The most discussed part of it is the possibility of restoring the Church of the Savior-on-Sennaya. The designers consider this to be impossible, since the cult building is "superimposed" on the metro lobby (in the previous project, the exit from the subway was built into the first floor of the shopping complex). However, as recently reported by Fontanka.ru, the Russian Orthodox Church has already managed to register the arrival of the non-existent Church of the Assumption as a legal entity and its rights to a site with preserved foundations. So now the lobbies of the Sennaya and Spasskaya metro stations will most likely have to be built into the walls of the restored church, Novaya Gazeta Spb writes.
At that time, the first stage of the largest of the existing branches of the National Center for Contemporary Art opened in Nizhny Novgorod - in the historical building of the Arsenal on the territory of the Kremlin. According to Kommersant, the architect Yevgeny Ass and restorer Alexander Epifanov, who supervised the adaptation of the monument to the needs, did not touch a single wall of the federal monument. Nezavisimaya Gazeta clarifies: “Outwardly, the building continues to work for the Kremlin ensemble, but the trick is how Ass packed the museum contents into the Empire shell. Contamination of the interior and exterior is when the interior is dominated by giant brick wall arches, just like on the fortifications on the street. The inner space stretches towards the outer, honoring the history of its location. But the outside also stretches to the inside - the fortress wall becomes the inner wall of the house, at the same time hinting that contemporary art holds and will withstand any defense. Now a third of the building has been mastered - 1700 sq. m out of 5,000, the rest is expected to be completed within three years. The Nizhny Novgorod Arsenal, recognized by critics as a worthy colleague of the famous Venetian exhibition hall, houses three tiers of exhibition areas, a media library, a cinema and concert hall, a library, a bookshop and a cafe.
Last week, a series of advertising posters were presented showing the corporate identity of the Sochi Olympic Games. For the author of the Openspace portal Gleb Napreyenko, this became an occasion to reflect on the ideology of the Games' design, which, of course, also affects architecture. On the posters, designed by the St. Petersburg art group Doping-Pong, idealized blond youth with a snowboard and a girl with skates are depicted against the background of white statues and arches of Gorki-Gorod, the project of which, as you know, architects Mikhail Filippov and Maxim Atayants worked on. The pictures reminded the journalist "Nazi posters for the 1936 Olympics, the official painting of the Third Reich, sculptures by Arno Brecker and stills from the films of Leni Riefenstahl …". However, despite the fact that the architecture of Gorki and resemble Stalinist ensembles, according to Gleb Napreeenko, they “simultaneously imitate an old European mountain town; it even reproduces historical layers at the joints of buildings. " The author comes to the conclusion that what turns out in Sochi is not at all Stalinist neoclassicism, but these are very similar dreams of “colonizing” our own territory. Only the local population dissolves somewhere in these pictures, and in its place there is an elite resort with its blond European characters …
Moscow also did not bypass ideological questions: this week the commission on monumental art under the Moscow City Duma seriously discussed the transfer of the monument to Gagarin from the square of the same name to the Lubyanka. According to Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the idea came from an ordinary Muscovite Vladimir Balakin, who a year ago already proposed to fill the empty space after Dzerzhinsky with a monument to Marshal Zhukov from Manezhnaya Square. Moskomnasledie and Moskomarkhitektura protested, noting that the monument to Yuri Gagarin, erected on Leninsky Prospekt in 1980, is an object of cultural heritage and is subject to state protection, Kommersant specifies. Experts believe that the transfer was purely speculative from the very beginning, and the authorities thus probed public opinion. Recall that the commission still cannot come to a consensus on which state should be actively immortalized in the center of Lubyanka Square - at one of the last meetings, the candidacy of Ivan III was discussed.
The saddest news of recent weeks for the entire architectural community was the death of Selim Omarovich Khan-Magomedov. “Thanks to him, Russian architecture in the context of the country's modern history is known to architects all over the world,” wrote Natalya Dushkina, professor of the Moscow Architectural Institute, about the famous researcher. Indeed, the list of his works is amazing: there are hundreds of scientific articles, about seven dozen monographs published in several languages, and most of them, in the words of Dushkina, are “pioneering”. As Grigory Revzin writes in his obituary, "He himself visited more than 150 families of those who once, in the 1920s, constituted the Russian architectural avant-garde, examined archives, recorded interviews and published almost a hundred books about them." Against the background of so many works, Khan-Magomedov was “incredibly calm,” recalls Revzin, a modest and far from publicity scientist, who fulfilled his overarching task of conveying the entire completeness of knowledge about the time he studied.
