A law has been introduced to the State Duma that exempts foreign projects of "reuse" from going through a full cycle of state examination. It will make it possible to replicate in Russia a building once built abroad, adapting them to a new site according to a simplified scheme. As the magazine "Expert" writes, this innovation is capable of completely abolishing the profession of an architect. However, the author of the article in "Expert" Ilya Stupin also mentions some bonuses of the new scheme. Firstly, it will significantly reduce the approval time (and therefore the investors are a mountain behind it), and secondly, it will make it possible to import the best of the "typical" foreign projects, such as American medical centers, since we ourselves have not yet learned how to design something like.
The Union of Architects of Russia wrote a letter of protest against the new bill to First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov. The president of the union, Andrei Bokov, shared the details in an interview with Kommersant correspondent Alexei Tarkhanov. According to Bokov, the situation is absolutely unacceptable: “By replacing one link, we will not get a new product at the end. We want to build according to Lord Foster's drawings, but with the hands of peasants from Central Asia."
On the other hand, what is bad if, with the Eurocodes in force in the country, Dominique Perrault could build the Mariinsky Theater or, say, Foster completed at least one of the projects started? - asks Alexey Tarkhanov. Bokov is extremely critical of the foreign presence in Russia: "With Foster and his entourage, many bosses and the construction lobby find it easier to work, because the process is more important for them than the result." Russian architects, in order to be on a par with foreigners, can only “change their surnames, citizenship, open companies in the Virgin Islands, London, Tel Aviv, and from there start a reconquest,” concluded Bokov.
This week, Izvestia and Vedomosti published articles on the results of the presentation of the Luzhniki sports complex reconstruction project. To host the 2018 FIFA World Cup, the Luzhniki territory has already been cleared of the long-standing clothing market. Well, in the next 7 years, Colliers International plans to radically transform the existing green area into a kind of Olympic park: an international sports zone will be created around the Grand Sports Arena, and on the other part - a Moscow fitness center with arenas for figure skating and athletics.
Architect Sergei Tkachenko is sure that with such a reconstruction “it is unrealistic to save everything for today's Luzhniki” - the green zone and, apparently, some of the existing buildings will go under the knife. In addition, the announced cost of the project raises doubts: in order to reconstruct the Big Arena, increasing its capacity from 76 to 85 thousand spectators, the declared 22 billion is not enough, Tkachenko claims, referring to world experience.
Meanwhile, another place where the talents of foreign architects, Skolkovo, were used, reported on the completion of work on the master plan. His presentation was held this week at the French embassy. According to the AREP-Ville project, the innograd resembles the letter W with four large zones and five clusters located between the Setun river valley and the Minsk highway, Gazeta.ru writes. Separate areas within it are developed by curators from among the members of the Skolkovo City Planning Council. It is not known when their final appearance will be approved, but the sketches already exist. Finally, according to the tactic from general to specific, the last will be an architectural competition for the design of individual buildings. The results of this entire complex process are promised to be presented already in 2014, when a university, a technopark and several residential quarters will appear in Skolkovo.
At the end of our review, we will mention a review of an interesting book published in the latest supplement of the Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Ex libris, an album collected by French photographer Frederic Chaubin and dedicated to the architecture of the decline of the Soviet empire. Chaubin even came up with a new decoding of the abbreviation of the USSR - "Communist space structures in photographs." The author collected pre-perestroika architectural "monsters" of the 1970s – 1980s throughout the Soviet republics for seven years. By the way, "monsters", as the author of the review, Daria Kurdyukova, writes, are not from hostility, but rather "curiosity about myths, more precisely, utopias, born in a stagnant empire that is trying to shake itself up after the restructuring of a decrepit empire." Chaubin, however, does not overburden himself with theory, so the texts in the book are just his "intuitive" research.
