A little more than a week is left before the winner of the competition for the best reconstruction project of the Polytechnic Museum is determined, but experts have serious questions about all four finalists, whose works can now be seen at the exhibition. First of all, they relate to the observance of the "rights" of the monument building, in which, in fact, nothing can be rebuilt. There are also doubts about the fundamental possibility of implementation. "This is an absolute puzzle: you need to drastically change the connection with the city, drastically change the appearance, but nothing can be changed," commented on the projects by member of the competition jury Grigory Revzin, quoted by the Architectural News Agency. Of the four, Revzin considers the decision of Japanese architects to be the "most traumatic" due to his experimentation, and the "most natural" project is the project of Thomas Lieser, RIA Novosti reports. Recall that the Japanese team (Naoko Kawamura & Junya Ishugami together with ARUP) proposed to expand the museum by adding an additional underground floor, while Thomas Lieser, whose Russian co-author was Mikhail Khazanov, on the contrary, added crystal structures to the building over each of the courtyards, Studio 44 proposed link the museum with a series of passages with the nearest metro stations, and the Russian-Dutch team Neutelings Riedijk Architecten and Project Meganom want to hang a glass torpedo over the Polytechnic. The final choice in favor of this or that concept will be made by the Board of Trustees headed by First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov.
The Polytechnic is by no means the first large object, the reconstruction of which rests on the protection legislation and, very likely, will undermine it. Moscow is still a "map of investment sites", and not a city with huge historical potential, lamented the coordinator of "Arkhnadzor" Konstantin Mikhailov. The reason for the destruction of monuments and landscapes, according to the city rights activist, is often a comprehensive oversaturation of the city with "investment, creative, administrative and other innovations." Mikhailov said this during a virtual press conference on the Lenta.ru portal. “Without an active position of the authorities, without political will to preserve and restore the old city, it is almost doomed,” the expert is sure. However, this very power, mainly in the person of the Moscow Committee on Heritage, increasingly finds itself at a broken trough: officials either do not have time to respond to the demolition, or do not want to revise previously issued dubious approvals, or cannot legally influence the developer. Recently, the department's advisor Nikolai Pereslegin announced a new initiative: now, when deciding to demolish a historic building, an assessment of the new project in its place will also be carried out, Izvestia writes. Committee so. decided to shift part of the responsibility for the ugly "remakes" onto the shoulders of the architects who design them. The latter, naturally, disagree. As ECOS member Alexei Klimenko told the newspaper, the architect works on the site proceeding from the circumstances: “Circumstances are created by officials, who in the vast majority work for money, under pressure from developers”.
Regions are also concerned with the issues of presentability of modern urban development. In early September, a promising precedent took place in Novosibirsk: bailiffs demolished an unauthorized store on Kominterna Street. For local architects, this became a signal for a broad discussion, and they immediately named houses and entire microdistricts, which, in their opinion, would also be better for Novosibirsk to get rid of. The poll was organized by the NGS News portal. Large shopping centers, and even the whole Plyushchinsky residential area, which the architectural critic Alexander Lozhkin called "tomorrow's ghetto of Novosibirsk", was also hit. Moreover, regarding the “face” of the private sector, Lozhkin is particularly skeptical: “When, according to the General Plan, 80% of the private sector is supposed to be demolished by 2030, this is a hoax. There are no resources for this, developers are afraid to touch the private sector. There will be not evolution, but slums."
In Chelyabinsk, they decided to fight for the architectural appearance of the city with administrative measures: the local administration of architecture and urban planning now does not allow building standard panel houses without architectural design, the Media Zavod portal writes. Governor Mikhail Yurevich became the initiator. Experts believe that such measures will not achieve a radical improvement in the urban planning environment: in Yekaterinburg, they do not skimp on inviting foreign architects to design residential quarters. But the heads of construction organizations are sure: economy-class panels must be built further, and the dullness can be disguised due to the "plaster decoration of the facade and external high-quality finishing." Multi-colored monolithic-frame houses have already begun to be built there.
At the end of the review, let's return to Moscow's urban planning innovations: the other day in the press there were reports about the transfer of the capital's zoo, which in its current state not only does no honor to the city, but most importantly, is absolutely inhuman towards its own inhabitants. So, in any case, says the head of the Korean-Swiss company "MaxMakers" Marcel Hutt, which the city authorities ordered the concept of the development of Moscow parks. The newspaper "Moskovsky Komsomolets" writes about this. However, as Deputy Mayor Andrei Sharonov said: “No decisions have been made. We're just discussing possible options. " Foreigners, meanwhile, proposed to move the zoo to the territory of Izmailovsky Park and create a kind of Disneyland there. In the zoo itself, little is believed in the move: in 2014 it will celebrate its 150th anniversary, and funds have already been allocated from the budget to improve the existing territory, Rossiyskaya Gazeta notes.
