The most important event in the second half of June for the professional community, of course, was the news that the Union of Architects of Russia joined the All-Russian Popular Front. The first to report this was Yevgeny Ass, who published an open letter of the same content both in the Agency for Architectural News and on the Grani.ru portal. In it, the professor of the Moscow Architectural Institute very clearly outlined his position in relation to such "political liberties": "I believe it is unacceptable that I join any political movement without my knowledge and consent, I consider in principle unacceptable the participation of a creative professional organization in political activity, since the members of this organization can adhere to a wide variety of political views and convictions and have no political obligations to the Union. " In conclusion, Yevgeny Ass said that he would be forced to leave the SAR if the Union deems it necessary to remain a member of this political organization. The letter caused not only a stormy reaction from the professional community, but an avalanche of discussions and sharp statements. On Facebook alone, Ass's letter was cited more than 620 times, and no fewer reposts were made for a publication in Kommersant dedicated to him. Naturally, the SAR, even if it wanted to, could hardly stay on the sidelines. Therefore, at first, the official website of the Union published a commentary by its President Andrei Bokov, in which he, in particular, writes: “We agreed that it is necessary to understand the goals and objectives of this organization, to determine to what extent they coincide with the goals and objectives of the Union, to find out the attitude of the founders of the Popular Front to the topic of national culture, the preservation and enhancement of its values, to the problems of settlements, that is, to what we, professionals, are directly engaged in. It was decided at the bureau that all this should be the subject of further discussion at the next CAP Plenum”. Then an open letter was published to the leadership of the Union of Architects of Russia and the collection of signatures against the entry of the SAR into the ONF was started, and a large-scale discussion on this topic took place on Radio Liberty. On June 27, the Plenum of the SAR Board decided not to join the ONF. Gazeta.ru was the first to respond to this decision, writing: “The Union of Architects of Russia became the first organization that collectively, and not through individual riots, decided not to join the All-Russian Popular Front (ONF). It is unlikely that the union will get anything for it. It is unlikely that architects will be excommunicated from work - their customer is not always the state. But they will not experience a painful feeling of awkwardness for participating in the carnival of mass cowardice and sycophancy. " A publication on this “hot” topic also appeared in Vedomosti and Moskovskiye Novosti.
Another widely discussed urban planning news of the last two weeks was the possible transfer of state structures outside the historic center of Moscow. Izvestia reports that on June 17, the mayor of the capital, Sergei Sobyanin, announced the need to build a new city and withdraw all federal government institutions to it. Earlier on the same day, at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, President Medvedev expressed his intention to expand the borders of Moscow, create a metropolitan federal district and withdraw some of the state institutions outside the Moscow Ring Road. The press immediately began active discussions about where exactly the so-called city of officials would be located. "Vesti-Moscow" even reported that three sites have already been selected, one of the most likely candidates - Zvenigorod. Kommersant, Moskovskaya Perspektiva and RBC spoke in more detail about this story. True, many experts believe that the artificial center of business activity will not take root in the Moscow region. “However, in all likelihood, there is no talk of a full-fledged withdrawal of the capital's functions from Moscow. Most likely, on the outskirts of the metropolis there will be an area of skyscrapers, reminiscent of the Parisian Defense, "agrees the Kommersant Dengi magazine.
The issues of urban planning were actively discussed in St. Petersburg during these two weeks. There Gazprom and its future headquarters again became topic number one for publications. On June 24, public hearings on the height of the Lakhta Center were held at the Primorsky District Administration. On the eve of the historic meeting, Novaya Gazeta SPb published an eloquent cartoon in which the skyscraper is depicted in the form of a proudly raised middle finger, crowned with a portrait of Alexei Miller. “Looking at the documents displayed at the exposition in the administration building, one does not leave the feeling of déjà vu: all this has already happened - with the Okhta Center,” the newspaper notes. More constructively the project of the new skyscraper is being analyzed by Delovoy Petersburg. The tower remains the same, but the stylobate has completely changed - now it symbolizes not the five-pointed star of Nyenskans, but resembles the Thunder-stone found just in the vicinity of Lakhta. By the way, almost all the journalists who attended the meeting wrote about the effect of déjà vu at the meeting itself. “The effect of déjà vu at the public hearings held on June 24 was destroyed only by the general atmosphere of easy fun that prevailed in the hall and the calmness of the investor's representatives, who this time decided to take the development of events philosophically,” Fontanka.ru reports. “The arguments of both supporters and opponents of the skyscraper have essentially remained the same. By and large, few people are fundamentally opposed to a new business center on the outskirts of the "sleeping" area. But why there must necessarily be a tower in the middle of it, moreover, of a cyclopean size (now not 400 meters, as in the Okhta Center, but up to 500 meters), city defenders cannot understand in any way. There is no doubt that the managers of Gazprom knew very well and could calculate such a reaction, nevertheless, they demonstrated that the dislike of some of the townspeople for the skyscraper as such does not frighten them,”adds Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti. As always, the Kommersant newspaper also published a very lively and witty report from the event.
Another "hot" topic for St. Petersburg is the reconstruction of the famous Summer Garden. At the very end of June, issues of the progress of work on its restoration and reconstruction were discussed at a meeting of the visiting committee with the participation of a representative of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, more about this - "Novaya Gazeta SPb". The intermediate results of the work carried out and possible mistakes made are analyzed by the Kultura newspaper. The newspaper "Nevskoe Vremya" dedicated a separate publication to what the renovated gates of the garden will be like. Fontanka.ru published an interview with archaeologist Viktor Korentsvit, who is commonly called "the ideologist of the Summer Garden restoration project." And on the portal "Gorod 812" there was an official response from the management of the Russian Museum to all critics of the work carried out: a detailed commentary is given on each of the charges.
Last week, the urban planning concept of Skolkovo was also presented to the architectural community of St. Petersburg: Muscovites invited their colleagues to take part in the design of the future innovation city. “Ours are interested,” concludes Delovoy Petersburg. New Holland has also become the heroine of publications: the city is eagerly awaiting the results of a new competition for a project to reconstruct the famous island, but its organizer (Millhouse) has postponed the opening of the exhibition for the third time. The island has not yet become open to the public, although it was planned to do so at the end of June. The reasons are analyzed by the portal "City 812".
The first summer month did not go without new demolitions of historical buildings. So, "Lenta-Real Estate" reports that on the night of June 18-19 in Moscow, two historic buildings were once again demolished. This time, it was the last surviving wing of the Glebov-Streshnev-Shakhovsky estate on Bolshaya Nikitskaya and the house of the merchants Feoktistovs on Bolshaya Ordynka. IA REX tells in more detail about the second loss. The Izvestia newspaper published a "firing list" - forty resettled houses in the center of Moscow, which will soon be considered by the urban planning land commission. Officials emphasize that there are no valuable architectural structures among these objects, however, city defenders have a completely different opinion on this matter. So, Konstantin Mikhailov, having studied the list, found four valuable historical houses and one architectural monument in it. Moscow Heritage Committee, however, is in no hurry to sound the alarm: his employee Nikolai Pereslegin, on the contrary, told Forbes Russia that the committee "made a revolution", as a result of which "it was possible to stop demolition of more than a hundred houses."
Grigory Revzin reflects on why the slogan “Save all that remains” is so popular today in the “Kommersant Dengi” magazine. In his article “Moscow has already built up,” the critic writes: “The slogan won not because people were horrified by the demolition of a house on Strastnoye, where Sukhovo-Kobylin himself stabbed his mistress Louise, but because they decided to play along with their greedy hatred of Baturina. Otherwise, it cannot be explained, because a person for whom “our everything” was concentrated in a squalid, ramshackle barrack full of historical memory (after all, a well-known writer once went into a binge here) is a marginal person. It is impossible to captivate the city with such a program. This means that it is not forever. And what is the point of accepting the ideology of preserving Moscow not forever? Why might this be beneficial? There are different ways to reshape the market. We have adopted radical ones. You just need to clean up all those who were there before you, and start over from scratch. And then again it turns out that the place is bare, and you can build whatever you want."
Alarming news came at the end of June and from the regions. In Rostov-on-Don, the only ensemble of the period of constructivism may be destroyed, and the territory, unique from the point of view of the historical landscape, near Veliky Novgorod - the area of Yuryevskoye Highway, where a settlement existed in the 11th-12th centuries - has already been illegally allotted by the authorities for cottage development.
In conclusion of the review, we note two more regional publications on the architectural theme. The vip74 portal has published an interesting overview of the most successful and most unsuccessful buildings in modern Chelyabinsk. This rating includes both historical buildings and buildings of the Soviet period, as well as rare examples of architecture in recent years. And the Kommersant newspaper said that the author of the general plan for Perm, the KCAP architectural bureau from the Netherlands, is now developing a project for a new mansion for the largest oil trader in the region, OOO LUKOIL-Permnefteprodukt, which will be located in the historic center of the city.
