A week ago, the Polit.ru portal held a discussion on the reconstruction of the city. The conversation consisted of a lecture by French architect Dominique Druenne and comments from three Russian experts: Alexander Kibovsky from the Moscow Heritage Committee, Natalya Dushkina from heritage defenders and Yuri Grigoryan from architects.
Dominique Druen, author of two books on the "rehabilitation of old housing" published in 1976, spoke about the National Urban Renewal Program in France (projet de rénovation urbaine, PRU). The National Urban Renewal Program was launched in 2003. In 2004-2008, 250 million euros were allocated for it, it is planned to invest even more, and a total of 300 thousand "housing units" will be built.
It is mainly about the reconstruction of the quarters built after the Second World War. Then France was experiencing an acute housing crisis: there were not enough 4 million housing units to provide for the population, while 50% of the population at that time lived in cities. By 1968, the total number of inhabitants of France increased by a quarter, amounting to about 50 million people, including at the expense of immigrants from Algeria. According to Druen, at that time 80% of housing in France did not have the necessary equipment in our understanding (for example, a warm toilet and shower). Before the war, home improvement in France was a private matter; after the war, the state joined in. From 1957 to 1983, it actively built mass housing, and built 198 blocks with two million apartments.
However, if in the first ten years after their construction, these residential areas were perceived as "neighborhoods of happiness", then they were settled by the poor and immigrants, and the situation changed. Now it is unsafe there, they sell drugs, and fire engines cannot drive up to the houses because they are pelted with stones. A home address in such a block can prevent a person from getting a job.
The Balzac quarter in the town of Vitry-sur-Seine, located four kilometers south of Paris, was built in 1964-1968 by architects Mario Capra, Louis Coeur, Jean Pierre Gilbert. It consists of gray 14-storey houses-plates on "legs" (there are similar houses in Moscow: one at VDNKh, the second at Begovaya, the third is a house-wall at Tulskaya), long 10-storey houses, simpler, and five-storey buildings. This is not customary for Moscow, but during the construction they all received "cultural" names: the house "Renoir", "Ravel", two plates - "Debussy", four five-story buildings - "Braque" (not what we thought, but Georges Braque). One of the largest plates with legs was called "Balzac" - on June 23, 2010 it was destroyed. This was done carefully: in the middle of the height of the house, all the walls were removed, the supports were loosened and the upper part of the house was dropped onto the lower one. Despite all the efforts, there was a lot of dust, and the residents of neighboring small houses were leaving during the demolition (there are many small houses around, the block of high-rise buildings is rather an exception, tearing apart the urban fabric, as Druen says).
Instead of the demolished 660 apartments, it is planned to build 1,300 "housing units" - also apartments, but in five-storey buildings with roof terraces. The old five-story buildings existing in the same place are preserved, insulated and revetted. It turns out, I confess, not that aesthetically pleasing, but practical. The French are funny people, they are already joking that the inhabitants of Vitry will now measure their lives by destroying the classics: before the fall of Renoir, after the demolition of Debussy …
Video about demolition, reconstruction and construction projects in Vitri-shion-Sen
A video dedicated to the residents of Vitry, the closest neighbors of the demolished house "Balzac"
Another similar (albeit simpler) house was broken on July 6, 2011 in the Parisian suburb of Asnieres-sur-Seine. It was also called beautifully - Gentianes (translated as gentian, it is such a blue garden flower).
Demolition of the Gentian house in Asnieres-sur-Seine
The area of Les Courtillières in Pantin is planned to be treated more kindly. In addition to the boxes that are planned to be demolished, there is a snake house built in 1954 by Emile Ayo and recognized as an architectural monument. They will not break it, on the contrary - it was decided to minimize the interference. The houses, undulating along the contour of the park, will be repaired from the inside, the first floors will be populated with trade, and the facades will be covered with a glass mass, which changes color depending on the lighting. The project was made by the RVA studio, it is planned to implement it by 2016.
Commenting on Druen's story, Alexander Kibovsky noted that in France, in such neighborhoods, the population is homogeneous, poor, and our population is motley. And then he smoothly moved on to a conversation about the Moscow historical center, complaining that the residents of the center are often unable to provide a good condition of the apartment buildings in which they live. The head of the Moscow Heritage Committee lamented that in the past 20 years the development of the center was carried out commercially - not as planned in Soviet times, and expressed the hope that New Moscow would be regulated by urban planning. In his opinion, "this is a chance to finally see a person, a citizen who needs a friendly urban environment."
Natalia Dushkina spoke about the heritage of the 20th century. She recalled the exhibition of Rem Koolhaas at the Architecture Biennale, the pathos of which was: "Stop destroying post-war buildings", including buildings of the 90s, because, first of all, there is nowhere to take it out. “Where were the tons of material left over from the five-story buildings or the Rossiya Hotel taken out? - It is good if for the construction of roads and landfills, but with our mismanagement it may well turn out that these heaps of construction remains lie in our forests. … we must stop destroying, we must adapt to modern conditions. In Germany, for example, the GDR's five-story buildings are not being destroyed - they are being renovated from Berlin to Dresden. Although they are not monuments."
Then Natalia Dushkina mentioned the workers' settlements of the 1920s - 1930s. She said that the Institute of the General Plan some time ago carried out expensive work on the study of these villages, after which they were put under protection "as newly discovered" monuments of the Russian avant-garde. “Then - all of a sudden, chaotically, they began to be removed from protection. And at this time we are looking at Berlin, where such structures are in perfect condition. The topic of small apartments in the city center is also very relevant. A modern person does not always need large meters, especially a lonely person. Small areas of apartments in the center are not only a tribute to fashion, they are a trend of the times. The result of the speech was the appeal: "Adaptation - not destruction!" and this was one of the main topics of the meeting, according to Dushkina.
Yuri Grigoryan commented on Dominik Druen's story as follows: it had two plots. One showed rectangular, not very pretty houses that caused problems and were demolished. In the second plot, houses of a more intricate configuration, more beautiful, and they have been preserved. Then - continued Grigoryan, we can say that in Moscow any house, the more decorated and adorned, the more it is a monument and the more we need to preserve it. A striking example is the building of the People's Commissariat for Finance: it is a shed built of reeds and plaster, so no one wants to restore and preserve it.
However, the situation described by Druen, according to Yuri Grigoryan, cannot have anything to do with Moscow. In Moscow, within the MKAD, there are 114,000 buildings, 39,000 residential buildings, of which only 5% were built according to non-standard projects. Typical microdistricts occupy 80% of the city - this is the city of Moscow, and the historical part is only 3.5% of the city. Why is everyone concerned about this 3.5 percent? According to Yuri Grigoryan, soon we will have 80% of the territories turned into ghettos.“Not only that, this is exactly the architecture that we think is bad and it is really bad, it gives rise to problems, but it is precisely this architecture that is being reproduced today in huge quantities by construction plants. We continue to generate this space at a tremendous speed. At the time of Luzhkov, about 3 million kV was built. meters of housing per year. Last year, 1.47 million were built. Despite the fact that "nothing is going to be built" in Moscow, because there is nowhere to go, a large number of plots for housing construction were signed anyway. This is exactly the kind of housing - panel, which should be demolished in an amicable way. But we continue to build, creating problems for ourselves and our descendants. From house-ships they turn into house-blocks and instead of 9-storey buildings into 25-storey ones … in France there is a law that prohibits the construction of identical buildings no more than a certain number. And this is not the case with us at all, we are not going to solve the problems of anonymous development, which is carried out according to some incomprehensible values. Maybe these are the values of house-building factories? " In Moscow, according to Grigoryan, the scale of the problem is somewhat different than in France.
There is a way out, and according to Yuri Grigoryan, it is this: we need to stop dealing with the center and deal with the periphery, the Moscow Ring Road, micro-districts (Strelka students under the leadership of Grigoryan counted 5037 buildings within the Garden Ring, of which 1048 were built in Soviet times, and 848 for last 20 years).
“Recently I suggested, let's get together and do something good for Kapotnya. Nobody wants to go there, the environment is bad, there are factories, people live there in some kind of incomprehensible houses. This is a real ghetto. But they misunderstood me and made fun of me, because all the architects want to go to the center. This is a mental problem. Realtors sell everything in Moscow that does not move, there are no valuables. This is difficult to deal with, but necessary. The architect suggested creating communities or cells in each district that will interact with the authorities and influence the decisions and the development process. After all, all of us, as Yuri Grigoryan is sure, can do something better out of the city.
