The historic decision to expand Moscow's territory remains the central topic of discussion in the press. Alexei Mitrofanov in Izvestia compares it with the plans of Nikolai Ladovsky, who in 1932 proposed expanding the city in a northern direction and, in the future, close it to Leningrad. The new "parabola" was turned to the south - that makes all the difference, the critic believes. "Butovo will become the geometrical center of Moscow," predicts Mitrofanov, "but Butov's official status is unlikely to increase." Elite microdistricts will appear somewhere in Krasnaya Pakhra, they will continue the road, evict summer residents, on which the Sobyaninsky master plan will end, sink into oblivion, like Ladovsky's parabola, because “in the entire history of Moscow's existence, not a single master plan of development has been fully implemented”, and the latter lasted one year at all, the critic concludes.
Officials are much more enthusiastic about the Big Moscow project. For example, the president of the NOP, the head of Mosproekt-2 and the first deputy chief architect of Moscow, Mikhail Posokhin, in an interview with RIA Novosti, says that the new general plan "partially contributes to the solution of transport problems." Moreover, it will help to abandon the disastrous housing policy led by the ex-mayor, and move from countless panels to the construction of infrastructure. Posokhin proposes to develop it mostly underground: in Switzerland, for example, there is a car park under Lake Geneva, and in Moscow you can dig a parking lot, for example, under the Vodootvodny Canal. The architect has long cherished dreams of an underground highway under Novy Arbat.
However, so far, underground construction is proceeding with difficulty in the capital. So, recently the Deputy Mayor of Moscow Vladimir Resin said that trade has been forever expelled from the project under the Paveletsky station square - there will only be parking there. The company Colliers International, which acts as a consultant for the project, in turn, announced that it is planned to build a multifunctional complex here, and wonders who will interfere with the shopping mall at the station. This position is shared by the architect Alexander Asadov, who believes that “any decent European railway station is practically a shopping center without expensive shops,” and this is what turns the stations into full-fledged public spaces.
It is also difficult for Moscow with the development of spaces under architectural monuments. The story of the reconstruction of the Bolshoi Theater, which at one time literally hovered over a giant pit, proved this in full. And yet today, on the eve of the long-awaited opening of theater number one, its general director Anatoly Iksanov is sure that the monument suffered for a reason. Now under it is a concert and rehearsal hall and a huge underground space of the stage, where the scenery has moved from the courtyard near Khomyakov's house. The depth of the orchestra pit is such that the entire set can be mounted below and raised during the performance. According to Iksanov, UNESCO experts are delighted, and two thousand restorers who have been employed for several years are also satisfied. And as for overspending - the director believes that the BDT came out no more expensive than the Norwegian opera - only the Norwegians spent their 500 million euros on a new building, and we have an unprecedented restoration.
A project of a similar scale is planned in St. Petersburg, where in the middle of summer there was held another competition for the project for the reconstruction of New Holland, and now its results are being actively discussed. Critic Mikhail Zolotonosov published a critical article on the portal ZAKS.ru, dedicated to the construction activities of Roman Abramovich in Russia in general and in "New Holland" in particular. “The exhibition and these“concepts”- all this was nothing more than a mockery of us, a demonstrative hack, designed for laymen,” from which, among other things, the city authorities, KGA and KGIOP have completely withdrawn themselves, concludes Zolotonosov. On the Gorod 812 portal, the denial of campaign spokesman John Mann, who caught Zolotonosov “in vain attempts to create a scandal from scratch,” was not slow to appear. -Petersburg ". The critic did not calm down and responded to this with one more material, in which he called the competition an imitation covering the sawing off of the money offered by the oligarch to the city authorities. His position is unchanged: everything that is happening now on the island is fiction, because it is impossible by law to build up or reconstruct the ensemble.
Practicing architects also spoke about the competition projects: their survey was arranged by the same “City 812”. Rafael Dayanov, for example, believes that “each of the submitted projects violates the legislation on the protection of monuments,” and therefore “I don’t want to discuss the projects, especially some American design gadgets - balls, cubes”. According to Anton Glikin, “of all the proposals submitted to the second competition, the most successful project is Studio 44, which proposes the inclusion of the ensemble in the pedestrian circulation of the city by means of additional bridges in combination with the reconstruction of the architectural and landscape front along the perimeter”. Alexander Kitsula said that the restoration of the perimeter building of the island, proposed in the projects, is justified, but "no one was able to offer a more or less interesting solution to the gap between the buildings along the Kryukov Canal."
Another conflict related to the development of state-protected territories has erupted in Arkhangelsk near Moscow, which has been fighting off the developers of its lands for the past ten years with varying success. As reported by "Vedomosti", on August 16, the Ministry of Defense sold at an auction 20 hectares of its land, located within the boundaries of the museum-reserve. The Minister of Culture Alexander Avdeev came to the defense of the museum: the two ministries decided to conduct disputes with the involvement of the prosecutor's office, RIA Novosti reports. However, the Moscow Arbitration Court eventually did not prohibit the Ministry of Defense from concluding an agreement with the winner of the auction: the delighted officials immediately announced that only retail and office buildings and no cottages were going to be built in the reserve, and they were even ready to build new exhibition halls for the museum.
The intervention of the Ministry of Culture in the story of the restoration of the wooden church of Elijah the Prophet in Belozersk, about which Novye Izvestia writes, has become more effective. The rare multi-tiered church of the 17th century with interior painting on logs was dismantled to the ground in 2010 by restorers in 2010 in order to be subsequently sorted out and restored. However, the competition for the assembly was won by another firm, unknown to the experts, who promised to complete the job in record time. The culprit turned out to be the notorious Federal Law 94, which chooses from the contestants not the one who knows, but the one who works quickly and cheaply. However, in this case, victims will most likely be avoided, since the ministry canceled a suspicious contract.
But the recently burnt down pavilion "Veterinary Medicine" of the former All-Union Agricultural Exhibition will not be able to return: the unrecognized monument of the mid-1930s with fragments of original interiors fell victim to either competitors (there was a warehouse in the building), or negligence, which, as Arhnadzor believes, very much into the hands of the future reenactors of the ensemble. The most impressive thing in this story is the silence of the Moscow Heritage Committee. This scares the city defenders in earnest, since there are dozens of such “non-monuments” on the territory of the current All-Russian Exhibition Center.
And at the end of the review - the most interesting historical material of the writer Gleb Shulpyakov, published in the Ogonyok magazine and dedicated to the development of the first and last “western” village in Siberia, which was carried out by the Dutch functionalist architect Johannes van Lochem in the 1920s. In today's dilapidated barracks of Kemerovo, it is difficult to recognize experimental cottages and Russia's first "blocked housing". Sometimes the residents themselves did not know this, from whom the presence of a foreign architect was carefully hidden. Nevertheless, a functionalist settlement in a Soviet mine is a fact that once again confirms the democratic nature of the architecture of the 1920s with its broad international ties, which today's Russian architecture can only envy.
