This week, a presentation of the urban planning concept of the Skolkovo innovation city took place - its authors, the French bureau AREP, revealed some details of the master plan with which they won the international competition in March 2011. The presentation did not go unnoticed by the blogosphere - photographer and popular blogger Ilya Varlamov published a post with a detailed analysis of the concepts of the main participants in the Skolkovo competition - the latter even suggests whether this text was ordered or written by someone else. Such materials are rather typical for the skolkovo_ru blog, which, by the way, also informs about the presentation. However, in Varlamov's publication, the comments are interesting, first of all - there are more than five hundred of them. Many online authors praise Skolkovo out of political convictions, without delving into the project itself, the rest, if they undertake to talk about architecture, they write only about the AREP project and its rival in the final - OMA, in the concept of which Novy Arbat is happily recognized.
Commented by rotten_k: “The OMA project was awesome; but, of course, they chose a dull scoop of the 1970s model, which most of all resembles the project of Svetlanovsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg. " Sestra_etc disagrees: "To be honest, he scared me - that's how I imagined the city under the hood in Zamyatin's" We "." Lewizz expresses the majority opinion: “I think the winner deservedly took his first prize. The rest is abstraction. " Moskov_it, on the contrary, thinks: “It turns out to be a dull town. It reminded Ostozhenka. I wish I could bring Moscow glass pieces there somehow! " “Glasses are commonplace. And the town is just perfect for work,”says biblison. And bu33er doubts the "science intensity" of the work itself: on the pictures presented by AREP it turns out that "all" science "has degenerated in them into poking a finger into an iPod, and sitting on pebbles with a laptop. And do these projects generally provide space for experimental installations, for at least a pilot production? Any real Soviet-era closed city-science city is, first of all, testing grounds, experimental installations, some kind of workshops, bu33er is surprised. - Fields, nurseries would not be in the way … But there is nothing like that! Only shiny boxes are residential and "public".
Not only bu33er seemed "unscientific" for the AREP project; we read from votiak: "The resort of the future, perhaps a picture for a feast for the eyes, will turn out gorgeous if all this is brought into reality" or from spulers: "It reminded Belyaevskie stories about victorious communism and spaceports in the Himalayas." Some bloggers are sure that the project will not stand the test of the Russian climate, others are perplexed why it was even necessary to build it from scratch when there are already proven ones. Here is what, for example, dervishv writes: “But what about the science cities in central Russia - Dubna, Zelenograd, Korolev, why did they not fit? There was no need to import and build anything there. " “The contestants intend to make our Skolkovo some kind of super-city of the future. Personally, it seemed to me so - to shove the whole future to us. We are not against, on the contrary. But too much of the future is not pleasing to the eye,”says idika_nah.
Ilya Varlamov also covered other important urban planning events in recent weeks in his blog. In particular, he published a photo report from the reconstructed Gorky Park - this topic also collected a couple of hundred comments. Varlamov begins with historical information and wonderful archival photographs of the park with the famous parachute tower, couples walking and boating, and even an exhibition of captured military equipment in 1943, and ends with a recent report on how workers destroy rusty stalls and attractions. Surprisingly, this time the audience of commentators was divided more radically - the park in the style of the 1990s had many fans who did not want to return to its historical appearance of the 1930-50s. Writes vivjen_smitsmit: “Why restore something that has died and does not meet the spirit of the times? Another time, other tasks! Now no one needs to be imbued with any propaganda. For me, Gorky Park is the 90s, this is Wind of Change, why not preserve the best moments of this place? Bring back the first cooperative kebabs and the like? This will be cool if done correctly. Eleeiin expressed the opinion of many dissatisfied with the dismantling of the old carousels: “It seems that your reportage is generally ordered. Everything in the park has always been well-groomed and beautiful … Previously, the park was visited mainly by the middle class, but now there will be a level for richer people … They are removing attractions, which have no analogue in Russia yet”.
Among the visitors to Ilya Varlamov's blog, there were no supporters of the reconstruction of the park in the spirit of Stalin's pomp, but of course they are on the open spaces of the network. For example, blogger dubrovsky2009 collected material about those who stood in the park in the 1930s. copies of antique statues and sculptural variations on this theme by Ivan Shadr, Matvey Manizer, and others. “It's a pity that they were mostly made of plaster and stood (as they say) for ten years at most,” laments the author. "And the very atmosphere of the 30s with the parades of athletes (which inspired thoughts of the Greek cult of sports, beauty and strength) is also gone." dma100 believes that it was not without the influence of totalitarian Germany. But dubrovsky2009 disagrees: “It was created independently and even BEFORE the appearance of Nazi sculpture and aesthetics, before Brecker. Just like the Soviet parades of Komsomol athletes (similar to the one shown at the 1936 Olympics by Lenny Riefenstahl) were back in the 1920s."
By the way, the topic of the use of totalitarian symbols by Nazi Germany suddenly surfaced in online discussions and thanks to the Openspace.ru portal, which recently published a scandalous material analyzing the style of advertising posters of the Sochi "Gorki-Gorod" published the day before. The journalist Gleb Napreyenko, we recall, found in these posters a lot of German art from the 1930s and 1940s and revealed a new style that emerged during the Sochi campaign - “the Putin style”. The author calls the poster image and architecture of "Gorki-Gorod" colonial - that is, the current "aristocrats" come to Sochi and create a resort for themselves, absolutely alien to the local culture. The article came out strange, but loud - bloggers unanimously dubbed it compromising.
The connoisseurs of contemporary art who joined the discussion, meanwhile, felt that much was far-fetched in this text. Prussak writes: “What's wrong with colonization, that is, the development and cultivation of your own territory? For some reason, you do not like the fact that everyone on the rollers is white-skinned, and the fact that Circassian women do not dance there with tambourines? The attempt, through Filippov and illustrators, to come to the "Putin style" is grandiose. Apparently, you do not know that Filippov is no longer a St. Petersburg architect, and that neo-traditionalism, you apostrophied only as a synonym for fascism, is most widespread, say, in the USA or Great Britain. " Vitaliy Kalashnik notes: “The analogies are appropriate here and this is obvious, but rather with the Soviet post-war agit-realism, and not with the Nazi visual aesthetics. There is also much more antiquity in this than Leni Riefenstahl … "The architect Efim Freidin is also perplexed:" Does it really matter what kind of realism they are guided by when ordering a promotional company for "professional designers", even with "neo-academic convictions"? Freidin is convinced that “classics are as international as rationalism. The opposition may be national styles, which, probably at this stage of globalization, are almost absent in Sochi. How did you get the fascist context out there - I don’t understand.” Meanwhile, Marat Gelman, whom the authors of the posters asked to protect from the "run over" of the editor-in-chief of Openspace.ru Ekaterina Degot "for fascism", remained neutral: "In general, there are so few big styles, and it seems to me that when time passes, the designer can use them without bother about its former meaning”. Gelman was supported by the majority, writes landsknecht83: “Normal nice pictures. And fascisms and other totalitarianisms are now being sucked out of the finger everywhere. This is the fashion nowadays."
Perm, as always, pleases with new network discussions: however, this time bloggers continued to argue already offline, namely in court. The day before, the Kommersant newspaper published an article about the trial between the Perm human rights activist Denis Galitsky and the local authorities: the activist demands that Marat Gelman remove the graffiti with which the PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art painted the retaining walls near the regional legislature six months ago. Galitsky has supporters, this is what he writes in the comments on his blog andrei_mex: “Graffiti is a weak weapon in the struggle for the beauty of urban space. A lot of weak leaders, a curtain to cover up problems, imitation. andrei_mex adds: “The authorities are filling the vacuum of the real policy of transforming the city. It makes no sense to design the image of the city or theorize about how to give it a pleasant and orderly look, without understanding its inherent internal, functional order. " Denis Galitsky himself admits that not all wall art is as ugly as the Khokhloma painting near the House of Soviets, it is just that the latter “rather whips up teenagers, clearly demonstrates that there are no forbidden places”. As an example of appropriate wall art, the activist cites graffiti on the wall of the Diaghilev gymnasium - "away from the" red line ", visible from one of the main streets of Perm (Sibirskaya street)". The drawing, reminiscent of antique images, also matches the pre-revolutionary building in style.
Finally - an overview of the state of Moscow squares, published in the blog of the already mentioned Ilya Varlamov. The post is preceded by a historical excursion, the pathos of which is rather anti-historical: "the fire contributed a lot to her decoration," the author quotes Griboyedov. Varlamov writes about pre-fire Moscow as "an openly trashy city", which even prompted a remark from the well-known city activist Alexander Mozhaev: "You know, even Soviet guidebooks did not allow themselves such a tone." However, Varlamov's post is not valuable for historical accuracy, but for very expressive photographs that tell how the capital under Yuri Luzhkov lost several important squares - Manezhnaya, Kursk railway station, Paveletsky, etc. It is curious that those who read and comment on the blogger, in the majority support the author's anti-historical challenge: “The city must develop! New beautiful houses must be built, and dilapidated and unnecessary to be demolished, Moscow in general has always revived after fires, political conflicts and other troubles."
