On Friday, December 16, in the DNA hall of the Central House of Artists, the jury of the first stage of the first competition, organized by the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, was held on behalf of the Skolkovo Foundation. Among the hundreds of projects submitted for the competition from different cities of Russia, as well as from several foreign countries, the jury members, which included representatives of the Skolkovo Foundation, the City Planning Council at the Foundation, as well as the Union of Russian Architects, had to select only 30. To qualify for the second round of the competition, projects had to combine novelty and realism, non-standard approach and environmental humanism, cost-effectiveness and environmental friendliness. Contrary to pessimistic expectations, there were overwhelming majority of the submitted works. Consequently, the jury had a difficult task. After 6 hours of work, the members of the jury, speaking in front of the media, did not hide their satisfaction with the results of the competition.
Foreign architects - curators of the Technopark district, Jean Pistre (Valod & Pistre bureau) and Mohsen Mostafavi noted the high professional level of the presented works and their creativity. Many solutions even surprised them - the authors of the idea of residential quarters inscribed in giant circles (the so-called "islands"). Architect Alexei Bavykin and architectural critic, member of the Skolkovo City Council Grigory Revzin agreed with this assessment. According to Revzin, it is interesting, on the one hand, that the works sent to the competition by architects from the regions are practically not inferior in quality to projects from Moscow or St. Petersburg, and some of them turned out to be even more interesting than those in the capital. (The exposition of the Zodchestvo festival, the critic remarked, every year convinces us of the catastrophic difference in the level of metropolitan and regional architecture; but the Skolkovo competition proved the opposite). On the other hand, - continued Grigory Revzin, among the finalists there are many of the leading Russian architects, who thus confirmed that they won their status for a reason. Mikhail Khazanov and Mikhail Belov, Sergey Skuratov and Dmitry Bush, Anton Nadtochy and Vera Butko, Dmitry Velichkin and Nikolay Golovanov, TOTEMENT / PAPER and UNK-project, as well as dozens of other teams have demonstrated their readiness to get involved in the work on the Skolkovo development, ingeniously and stylishly responding to non-standard competitive conditions.
Recall that the subject of the competition was the development of three residential quarters of the Technopark (D2) district, each of which was intended to accommodate one of three types of houses: apartment buildings on an “island” with a diameter of 220 meters, townhouses on an “island” with a diameter of 166 m and houses for one family (cottages) on the largest "island" with a diameter of 236 meters. These houses will house employees of resident companies, scientists, innovators and their families. More about the conditions of the first open architectural competition for the Skolkovo innovation city
read here. For each of the "islands", on the basis of preliminary planning concepts and calculations, detailed technical and economic indicators were set, the parameters of development, areas and similar limits were determined. Moreover, sufficiently detailed schemes of quarters were attached to the competition task, in which residential buildings, within the circular boundaries of the plots, were lined up in the simplest parallel rows or, as in the case of cottages, in rigid orthogonal grids. It would seem what kind of imagination and ingenuity can be talked about in such a limited framework. However, the participants of the competition moved away from the given clichés, to a greater extent following the principles underlying the Innovation Center in general and these residential areas in particular. The main thing is the harmony of the environment, sustainability and friendliness of architecture, which, perhaps, are capable of forming new standards of residential development in our country. As a result, the jury selected 30 stunning urban planning and architectural solutions for the final collection that deserve a separate and most detailed analysis. By the way: the projects submitted for the Skolkovo competition revealed the topic of residential construction much better than the House of the XXI Century competition held by the Federal Fund for the Promotion of Housing Development (RHD).
Such a successful completion of the first stage of the competition for residential development in the Technopark district must be recognized as a very important event in our architectural life. For several reasons. First of all, until the last moment the position of Russian architects regarding this competition was not clear. Will they participate, if they do, then who, how many professionals from the first cohort will dare to submit their proposals, whether these proposals turn out to be too fantastic or, on the contrary, too mundane (as it was in the competition "House of the XXI century"). It can even be said that the future of the Skolkovo innovation town for 20 thousand inhabitants and 15 thousand visitors, which is planned to be built very quickly, by 2015, depended on the answers to these questions. Having started working with Western architectural "stars", the organizers set a very high standard of quality, which had to be maintained not only at iconic objects, which will make up about 30% of the development, but also at other infrastructure facilities: residential buildings, social and cultural facilities, office and shopping centers, etc. Only the active participation of leading Russian architects could guarantee a high level of creativity and a large volume of high-quality design documentation in the coming years. But the attitude of Russian architects towards Skolkovo can hardly be called entirely positive. It became "talk of the town" immediately after the competition for the urban planning concept, in which Russians were not allowed to participate. In this regard, even the initiative to hold a series of open competitions, which, at the insistence of Grigory Revzin, were focused primarily on domestic professionals, did not arouse wide enthusiasm. Moreover, at a round table specially held during the Zodchestvo-2011 festival, designed to introduce the conditions of the first competition to the widest possible circle of its potential participants, the organizers were forced to fend off rather harsh and unfounded accusations. There was no constructive dialogue then. The discussion in a more systematic form was moved to the competition page on the Foundation's website, in the format of an interactive “questions and answers” tape. But this approach did not suit everyone.
A week before the jury meeting of the first round, the website of the Union of Architects of Russia published a letter from Novosibirsk architects addressed to the President of the SAR Andrei Bokov (https://www.uar.ru/news/95/1237) - the architects publicly refused to participate in the competition for residential quarters of Technopark, motivating the refusal with numerous violations of the Russian regulatory framework in the competition task. The text of the letter is recommended for everyone to read. Especially - in parallel with viewing the finalist projects of the competition. The letter, leaving out the subjective factors, clearly demonstrates the depth of information misunderstanding between, probably, a wide range of Russian designers and the ideologists of the Skolkovo project. As a result, Andrey Bokov could not take part in the work of the jury of the competition.
The conflict could have raised serious concerns if not for the results of the first round. First of all, the numbers. About 700 applications were submitted for the competition. True, there were significantly fewer competitive projects - about 300. But this is predictable. Still, doing a project is not the same as filling out a questionnaire. 30 projects were selected for the final, and the jury members said that the most difficult selection was at the finish line, after about 200 projects were screened out. That is, more than 100 teams are potentially already able to connect to work. All subsequent tenders, and there are a lot of them planned, fortunately, almost 900 thousand square meters are planned on the territory of Skolkovo. m. of housing, more than 650 thousand square meters. m. of offices, 150 thousand sq. m. social facilities and much more that an innovative city will need, obviously, will attract the attention of new participants who are ready to confirm their professional qualifications and get involved in work. The fund and district curators, together with companies that develop project documentation, systematically, step by step, quarter by quarter, as planning decisions are clarified, will be able to hold competitions for individual building elements, involving a wide range of architectural teams in the design process, and at the same time not lowering the initially set quality bar.
The teams that reached the final of the very first competition will prepare revised versions of their projects for the second round. In mid-February, the jury will select 9 winners from among them (5 projects of apartment buildings, 3 projects of a townhouse and 1 project of a cottage).
Congratulations to the finalists!
