Architect Sergei Tchoban considers "Greater Moscow" to be a natural stage in urban development, which has already been passed by many European cities, including Paris, Berlin, Hamburg. “Thus, the authorities of megalopolises relieve tension from problem areas and develop backward ones,” Choban writes in Izvestia, but he immediately stipulates that this idea could be ruined by the Russian habit of dividing new areas into separate plots, distributing them to developers, so that later built them up with either commercial or residential meters. “Big Moscow”, according to the architect, “is a major urban planning problem that can be solved only as a result of an international competition for a comprehensive master plan”. So Russian investors will have to learn to deal with multifunctional projects, Tchoban is sure, and in order for the necessary social balance to come between the old and the new territories, it makes sense to transfer significant cultural institutions to the lands annexed to the capital - “the new Tretyakov Gallery, the second stage of the Bolshoi theater, perhaps the Museum of Contemporary Art."
The head of the delegation of the World Council on High-Rise Buildings and Urban Environment (CTBUH) Professor Sang-Dae Kim, who recently visited Moscow, also adheres to the idea of moving the business district outside the historic center. In an interview with Gazeta.ru, he said that in Russian cities there is definitely a lack of skyscrapers, or rather special areas of high-rise buildings, "in which a certain subculture for business will begin to develop." It is not known whether the professor liked the Moscow City as a whole, but the "City of Capitals" impressed him greatly. By the way, Sang-Dae Kim turned out to be a supporter of the St. Petersburg Lakhta Center, as he believes that the construction of skyscrapers always increases the prestige of the city.
But Mayor Sergei Sobyanin sees the main task of Moscow's transition to polycentric development in streamlining the process of daily movement of the population from the suburbs to the center, for which it is necessary to create jobs on the periphery and build all the necessary social infrastructure facilities. As Sobyanin said in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, today in the capital, the business center literally layered on the government and financial, adding to this scientific and educational clusters. The current expansion of the borders, according to the mayor, will allow the development of each of the centers separately and "connect them all not through the Kremlin, but directly by new roads." At the same time, all transfers outside the Moscow Ring Road will be moderate and voluntary, the mayor assured. In the near future, he said, a competition will be announced for the development of the concept of the agglomeration, which will involve at least six teams.
In an interview, the mayor also touched upon another burning topic - the development of the former hotel "Russia": it turned out that now two projects are claiming this site - a parliamentary center and a complex of administrative, business and hotel buildings with an area of half a million square meters. The second, according to Sobyanin, is more appealing to architects and experts. But who and when will choose one of them is still unknown.
Rustam Rakhmatullin, a culturologist, gave an interesting description of the process of Moscow's growth in Itogi. Rakhmatullin considers polycentricity to be "intentional", more characteristic of St. Petersburg, while the "medieval" principle of equidirectional, concentric growth of the city while maintaining a single center seems natural. "If we make Moscow two-center, not to mention four centers, the logic of the city's development will be lost. It is completely unclear what will happen to the Kremlin's function if the city is deprived of the prime meridian. "An artificially drawn new city can become a repository of anti-Moscow ideology," warns the culturologist.
And in St. Petersburg this week the project of the second stage of the Mariinsky Theater was again discussed. The eight-year long-term construction, according to Kommersant, according to the results of the investment competition, should be completed by Metrostroy, which has already carried out construction work in the underground part of the theater. The winner promised to complete the construction of the theater by the fall of 2012 for 2.056 billion rubles, while offering a 30% reduction in the starting price. True, according to experts, such a reduction in price may lead to another disruption in the deadlines for delivery and additional budgetary infusions into the project.
In Moscow, however, the investment project of the "ethnographic complex" on the territory of the Kolomenskoye Museum-Reserve has unexpectedly returned to the agenda. This is what Novaya Gazeta tells about. The project is very "Luzhkovskiy" - in the favorite museum of the ex-mayor it is planned to build a hotel for 200 places and 12 "visiting huts", two taverns and "The baker's estate with a bakery." It is alarming for many reasons: firstly, all this is being built on the territory of the museum-reserve in the immediate vicinity of the monuments, secondly, the project was at first state-owned, and now it is being implemented on behalf of private companies, and finally, thirdly, it will be implemented the same investor who built the Kremlin in Izmailovo.
Finally, good news: two interesting exhibitions have opened in Moscow. The VKHUTEMAS Gallery shows "Unknown Objects" by the nominees for the current Kandinsky Prize Natalia Khlebtsevich and Grigory Kapelyan. "Kapelyan's painting resembles Buddhist mandalas, although it is apparently based on impressions of the architecture of the Russian avant-garde and American skyscrapers …", writes "Kommersant" and advises to go to the real sixties. And at the Museum of Architecture, curator Sergei Sitar shows the phenomenon of Soviet pop art - the visionary objects of the self-taught machinist Nikolai Lyovochkin. Journalists are impressed: the author of Kommersant, Maria Semendyaeva, for example, saw in them a frightening hoax: “This is the door to the inner world of a completely crazy person, where madness and logic, religion and historical materialism are so closely intertwined in the images of temples-palaces that one can be separated from another is impossible. " But the columnist for Gazeta.ru Velimir Moist found Levochkin as a completely harmless cosmist: “Presumably, we have a multipart model of the Universe - to the extent that the author could think of it and was able to implement it”.
