As you know, the Moscow City business complex was one of the first to be criticized by the new city administration. Sergei Sobyanin, in particular, considered him one of the culprits of the transport collapse. At the same time, the complex was ordered to be completed as soon as possible. Now, when, with the expansion of Moscow, the Moscow authorities have plans to withdraw the centers of business and political activity outside the Moscow Ring Road, the brainchild of the ex mayor has ceased to inspire enthusiasm at all - in order to complete it as soon as possible, the authorities decided to reduce the area of the Moscow International Business Center by half a million square meters. This was reported by the Moscow News newspaper. In particular, the skyscraper, where the Moscow Wedding Palace and the MIBC Museum were going to be located, fell under the knife. In an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Vladimir Resin, who oversees the construction, added that the 79-storey building of the mayor's office will not be built according to the project by Mikhail Khazanov and Anton Nagovitsyn, which won an international competition. But since there, as it turned out, the entire underground part of six floors is already ready, the high-rise (albeit not such a large-scale one) will nevertheless be completed, however, at the expense not of the city, but of a private investor. The long-term construction project will be completed in four years, according to Resin's new forecast.
Another important urban planning event for Moscow was the final announcement of the results of the competition for the project of reconstruction of the Polytechnic Museum. The Board of Trustees confirmed their sympathy for the tandem of the Japanese Zunya Ishigami and the ARUP bureau, RIA Novosti reports. Recall that Ishigami plans to create a so-called. museum-park - to surround the building of the Polytechnic Garden in a specially dug underground floor. True, the technical questions to the project were never resolved: “I don’t really understand how this project is technically feasible - it involves the creation of an underground floor, and this is traditionally done poorly in our country,” an architectural critic shared her opinion with Gazeta.ru Anna Bronovitskaya. Grigory Revzin also fears a miracle film, which should tighten the courtyards of the museum. The same "RIA Novosti" cites the words of the critic that this new invention has never been tested in practice. The media, however, emphasize that the actual design will be carried out by a general designer who has not yet been selected.
Simultaneously with the Polytechnic, another important architectural competition ended - the best young architect of Russia was named within the framework of the Avangard Prize, established by the Foundation of the same name and the Project Russia magazine. It was Igor Chirkin, a graduate of the Moscow Architectural Institute. His project for the new MISIS campus, which the contestants, at the suggestion of the curator of the award Bart Goldhorn, developed in the block between the Profsoyuznaya and Novye Cheryomushki metro stations, was recognized as the most successful. Chirkin saved some of the Khrushchev houses from demolition and built them into the project as dormitories and houses for teachers. However, according to the jury, none of the four finalists, and even the winner, escaped serious mistakes, among which, as Maria Fadeeva writes in Gazeta.ru, “indifference to the urban environment, the perception of residential buildings as human sleep depots, the prevalence of formal compositional delights over the design of a way of life”.
Important urban planning changes took place this week in St. Petersburg. The head of the St. Petersburg Committee for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments Vera Dementyeva, the notorious protege of Valentina Matvienko and the culprit of numerous scandals in the sphere of heritage entrusted to her, was dismissed, Karpovka.net and Novaya Gazeta reported. Despite the obviousness of the violations, Dementieva, oddly enough, held out for several months after the change of the governor - the media believe that the reason is that the search for a new candidate for this responsible and profitable post was not easy. The new head of the KGIOP, by the decision of Georgy Poltavchenko, will be Alexander Makarov, an architect by education, by the way, who, like the new governor, noted his service in the FSB, Rosbalt reports.
The fact that the situation with the protection of monuments in St. Petersburg remains tense is evidenced by the recent creation of the Petersburg Action Coalition "Gradozashchita" - the opposition announced this at a press conference on October 17, writes ZAKS.ru. The coalition intends to resist the destruction of the city's historical appearance and the deterioration of living conditions for St. Petersburg residents, in particular, the housing renovation program, as a result of which about 150 thousand people may be evicted from their comfortable (and often historical!) Neighborhoods on the territory of socially disadvantaged outskirts. Read more about this in the article on the Sensus Novus portal. Among other areas of the coalition's activities is the fight against the construction of the Lakhta Center and the destruction of the archaeological monuments of the Okhtinsky cape, the demolition of the Apraksin yard, the development of Sennaya Square, etc.
By the way, the fighters for the preservation of heritage have added to the trouble in Moscow: the other day the newspaper "Moscow News" reported on the initiative of the capital's authorities to transfer the right to choose contractors for the repair of religious buildings to the rectors of churches. Until now, the city was the customer of the restoration work, however, as the Moscow Heritage Committee commented, the decision was made to avoid situations when “the abbots, for various reasons, did not bless the artists or builders to work”. Heritage defenders, in turn, are concerned that this could lead to violations in the restoration of monuments and the creation of outright props to speed up the process, in which some rectors have already been noticed.
At the end of the review, we mention two interesting reviews of recently published books - "Moscow through the eyes of an architect" by Vladimir Rezvin and "Soviet modernism 1955-1985" by Vladimir Belogolovsky and Felix Novikov. “Uncle Gilyai himself would be glad to have such a guidebook,” writes the Itogi magazine about Rezvin's book and urges the reader to visit the architectural sights described in it until their appearance is lost. And The Architect`s Newspaper newspaper publishes an essay about a book written by two famous contemporary architects and arch-critics about one of the most controversial and interesting periods of Soviet architecture - modernism. With this book, its authors once again draw attention to the artistic value of the buildings of the 1950s - 1980s, which had great expressiveness and pronounced originality, despite the strict system of restrictions of their time.
