The main Moscow news at the beginning of June was the opening of the planetarium after 17 years of scandalous reconstruction, as a result of which the famous building was raised by 6 meters and completely changed its filling. Experts sigh about the lost technological structure of the unique building built in 1928, and the management, not without pride, reports on the most modern equipment that has been used to fill the constructivist walls. Commenting on the news for Radio Liberty, a representative of the Museum of Architecture noted that the logic and clarity of the original, which was dominated by a dome and a cylinder with a minimum of additional extensions, disappeared from the renovated building: “proportional relationships, beautiful foreshortenings are lost”.
In addition to the main hall, the planetarium has a two-level museum, the Small Star Hall, a 4D cinema, and its current capacity is estimated at 1.5 million visitors a year - Moscow Perspective tells about the renovated complex in detail. Critics in general are rather lenient: after the existence of the monument was generally threatened as a result of the investor's bankruptcy, the current results cannot but please at least by the very fact of the end of the epic. As the architect-restorer Sergei Konev told Izvestia, “we have lost the planetarium as a primary source, but we have received a certain rebranding of the historical and public building”.
The restoration of the Annunciation Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin has recently ended much more successfully, as Kommersant wrote about in detail. By the way, it was not just a full-fledged restoration, but also a painstaking scientific work, as a result of which several important architectural discoveries were made. Most of them concern the existence of the temple during the period of Ivan the Terrible: restorers discovered the remains of the Treasury Chamber adjacent to the cathedral, in the thickness of the wall of which the apses that exist today were later cut down. As Andrei Batalov, deputy director general of the Kremlin Museums, noted in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, scientists have found that the cathedral actually “conceals several churches: one from the era of Dmitry Donskoy, another from his eldest son Vasily I, the third - the temple of Ivan III and, finally, the temple of Ivan IV”.
Meanwhile, following the planetarium, a new candidate appeared in the queue for rebranding - the famous Polytechnic Museum. The other day, its director Boris Saltykov announced the start of an architectural competition for the reconstruction of a historic building, Kommersant reports. Recall that a year ago the well-known British firm Event Communications won the competition for the best concept for the reconstruction of the museum - these developments will now form the basis of architectural design. The competition is open, but most of the candidates are cut off by a high qualification qualification: applications are accepted only from architects with experience in designing museum buildings with an area of at least 5 thousand square meters. m. (or cultural institutions with an area of at least 10 thousand sq. m.) and it is obligatory for the last five years. Of the Russians, only Nikita Yavein, Andrei Bokov, Mikhail Khazanov, Alexander Brodsky and Evgeny Ass are suitable for these requirements, analyzes the publication, although it is not yet clear whether any of them will participate in the competition.
The competition is held by the Strelka Institute, and the organizers, by the way, are seriously worried that foreign participants may be scared off by the strict conditions of the protection legislation, because the museum is a federal monument, which means that even if they win, they will have to work together with Russian restorers. Four winners of the first stage will be announced on July 6. Then they will be commissioned with competitive projects - to develop, based on the terms of reference, a conceptual solution for several museum zones. The museum itself, together with the administration, during the reconstruction is likely to move to the pavilions of the All-Russian Exhibition Center, which are still unknown. In addition to the modernized building on Lubyanka, the museum will receive one more - it is going to be built next to the fundamental library of Moscow State University. However, all this is a matter of the future: according to experts, the reconstruction will end no earlier than 2016, and it will take at least a couple of years to set up the exposition, RIA Novosti writes.
While this ambitious project is only swinging, it was decided to force the rebranding of another significant Moscow object - the Dynamo stadium. After the March demarche of the investor, VTB, which abandoned the concept of Erik van Egeraat and Mosproekt-2, the fate of the building is full of uncertainty. And in early June, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin announced that construction work at the stadium would begin in the near future, RIA Novosti reports. The question is - on which project? According to the mayor, a special project has been developed that will allow preserving the architecture and adapting the stadium for the World Cup: its capacity will increase to 45 thousand spectators, a new universal hall for 15 thousand and a sports and entertainment complex will appear nearby. But how it will all look is a mystery, since apart from the visualizations of the Posokhin-Egeraat project, nothing was published in the press.
However, the stadium is by no means insured against changing its concept more than once. In Russian practice, it is not the same: for example, recently it turned out that the large-scale project of the Palace of Arts with a congress center, which was planned to be created in St. Petersburg on the territory of the tram park on Vasilyevsky Island, simply cannot be implemented. According to Kommersant, the Ministry of Culture unexpectedly recognized the park as a federal monument on the basis of a state examination initiated by VOOPIiK. How it happened that the Hungarian investors in the project and the governor lobbying for it did not know about the existence of this status, one can only guess. As well as about what fate now awaits the project developed in the workshop of Mikhail Mamoshin worth 9.5 billion rubles. But the city defenders are celebrating the victory - for a year they have been trying to defend this unique engineering facility from demolition.
On the other hand, as you know, not for all St. Petersburg investors, protection legislation becomes an insurmountable obstacle to the implementation of the desired projects. The protagonist of such stories, Gazprom, having moved its tower to the Lakhta area, again encroached on the record with exceeding the permissible altitude parameters: this time, instead of the permitted 27 meters, the company applied for as much as 500 meters, the RBK portal reports. Why such a height is needed is completely unclear, especially considering that the Okhta-2 area will be only 330 thousand square meters. m. (remember, its predecessor was an area of 1 million square meters). But the company says that the height is an indicator of the status of the project and is "laid down for the future", i.e. the project may be lower. Gazprom is apparently reinsuring itself in advance - now it is not even clear who will finalize the project of the British bureau RMJM. However, VOOPiIK has already raised the alarm - the 500-meter high-rise will definitely wedge into the panorama between the Peter and Paul Cathedral and the Grand Duke's tomb, experts say.
About the Lakhta project, UNESCO also expressed its dissatisfaction, which at the end of May held an international forum in St. Petersburg on the problems of defining the boundaries of the city as a heritage site, writes Kommersant. For this forum, a special working group was supposed to present a full-fledged project to clarify the borders, but it did nothing, however, it is clear why: the governor herself, Valentina Matvienko, is in favor of reducing the urban areas protected by UNESCO by 4 times. However, international experts were especially outraged by the regimes of security zones operating in the city, endangering the historical center. As a result, they decided to postpone the issue of borders until next year and focus on adjusting Russian laws that contradict international norms, Fontanka.ru notes.
Perm is once again richer from other regions on news feeds: the famous Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, invited by the governor Oleg Chirkunov for consultations on the project of the Perm Art Gallery (together with the bureau of Boris Bernasconi), recently revealed his plans. Zumthor proposes to build a landscape and architectural complex with several pavilions "flying over the embankment" on a hillside near the bank of the Kama, the Perm newspaper Novy Kompanion reports. They will house several sections of the gallery. The architect recommends hiding the storage facility, administration and restoration workshops in a long building, buried on 3 sides into a hill, and on the fourth, glass, facing the river. According to Zumthor, the rather modest areas of the exhibition spaces of the pavilions can be expanded by continuing the complex along the embankment. The newspaper writes that the governor liked the project. If it is now ordered from the Swiss, then in two years it will be ready, another year will be needed for approvals and a couple of years for construction.
Kommersant, meanwhile, describes a rather curious story about how Russian Railways and the Perm authorities did not share the historic building of the Perm I railway station. Since 2004, Russian Railways has been unsuccessfully looking for an investor to renovate this oldest railway station in Perm, built at the end of the 19th century. Last year, the regional ministry of culture unexpectedly became interested in the federal monument, which looked after it to house the Museum of Perm Antiquities. However, none of the reconstruction options suited the parties, since each wanted to "bite off" a large area in the joint use of the old station. Now that the authorities have withdrawn themselves, Russian Railways has announced that it may arrange a museum of railway transport in the monument. Where the Museum of Perm Antiquities will move is not known for certain, but at one time it was rumored that they were going to place it in the new building of the gallery, which will be built by Peter Zumthor.
At the end of the review, we note the appearance of a new fascinating column in the magazine "Big City", which is led by the architectural critic Grigory Revzin. Its main theme is defined simply: "How to improve the architectural appearance of Moscow." Another guest of the famous critic was the no less famous architect Sergei Tchoban - together they ponder how to overcome the alienation of Muscovites from the city and its architecture. Grigory Revzin believes: “Gigantic highways, squares, large volumes of buildings - we have a skeleton of the city exposed for tank parades. The layer in which the individual lives is missing”. Sergei Tchoban agrees: “Everyone is uncomfortable here: both people and cars. But I think that it began not today, but more than 90 years ago, when a person began to endure his entrance, in which it stinks, the door is two meters high, and no one takes care of the stairs …”. Alienation has led to the fact that today Muscovites are more mile than any century-old house, no matter what quality, and it is better not to build a modern one at all, the architect concludes. Following exactly such sentiments, Mayor Sobyanin froze new construction, Revzin concludes, although this is not true. In Tchoban's opinion, this measure, on the contrary, may take place until the architects begin to do "something durable, to create architecture not temporary, not a pavilion, but one that will age well and eventually become part of the cultural layer." Something like this, according to Tchoban, may soon appear in the vicinity of the Dynamo stadium, where the SPEECH bureau and TPO Reserve are jointly developing a complex development project.
