All materials are provided by IRP Group - the operator of the strategic session
The jury's decision was made and announced at a conference held on March 2-3 by the organizer of the competition, the consulting company IRP Group, which works with the territory of ZIL in the status of an executor to develop a master plan (the same company organized the competition). The discussion lasted two days, the first of which was occupied by the authors' stories about the projects, and during the second day the expert council, dividing into five (!) Thematic groups, formulated wishes for the finalization of the winning projects.
The jury included, among others, Markus Appenzeller from the KCAP bureau (one of the authors of the master plan for the city of Perm), the famous Russian urbanist Alexander Vysokovsky, the Japanese Hiroki Matsuura (Maxwan architects + urbanists), the Dutchman Evert Verhagen (the REUSE bureau).
The conditions of the competition are pleasing with their progressiveness. The goals set are read as a mission that goes far beyond the reconstruction of the local industrial zone (albeit one of the largest in the world, as a member of the competition jury Evert Verhagen recently tweeted; the ZIL area is more than 300 hectares). The goals, for example, are as follows: to solve the problems "hindering the constructive development of the Moscow agglomeration." And even - to overcome the exclusively "developer", investment and commercial nature of the development of industrial zones in Moscow. Consequently, the participants in the competition had to combine in their projects two seemingly opposite things: social significance and investment attractiveness; value for citizens - and benefits for investors. The jury decided that the Russian Meganom and the German Uberbau succeeded best of all.
The architects of the Project Meganom bureau were very responsive to the task and looked at the city on a large scale. They strung their "ZIL peninsula" on two natural axes of Moscow at once: on the existing thread of the Moskva River and on (for now) an imaginary row of squares between Losiny Island in the northeast and southwestern Bitsevsky Park. The architects imagined the greenery around the Nishchenka River, which had grown a little and proposed to get the Kotlovka River out of the ground, creating a second water-park "axis" from two tributaries of the Moskva River. In the place of its intersection with the main river of the city, the "City of Opportunities" was located, outlined by "Meganom" on the site of ZIL.
The architects propose to radically rebuild the western part of the peninsula, giving it to low-rise residential buildings (about 1 million square meters of housing). They keep the outlines of the eastern half almost the same - industrial (400 thousand sq. M. Of new construction), where innovative production facilities are located in large hangars, and between them there are “windmills” of the renewed environmentally friendly power plant. Meganom (as well as all the other participants) preserves the existing boulevard, which now passes in the middle of the ZIL and dividing it into two halves. They build stadiums, exhibition halls and educational institutions (800,000 sq. M.) Along the boulevard, ending their line with a university building on a spit near the river. It looks like a giant hedgehog or "wells" that children collect from pencils - because it is assembled from long rectangular beams, placed in five tiers on top of each other at different angles. The architects carefully calculated the stages of the gradual development of the territory, the closure of some buildings and their temporary transformation into cultural centers, wave demolition and simultaneous compensatory construction. The imagery at the first stage is very laconic, and it is based on a combination of white bars with bent rusty sheets of modernist sculptures. And the dull industrial isthmus connecting the ZIL Peninsula with the Nagatinsky Park, the architects suggested turning it into a series of green islands, a kind of eco-Venice.
[cm. author's presentation of the project by the Bureau "Meganom"]
The Uberbau GBR bureau invited urbanist Mikhail Blinkin as co-authors, as well as several Russian and German colleagues. They analyzed in great detail, drawing on many foreign analogies, the problems of pollution (including the cost of cleaning it). Inspired by the examples of Seoul and Barcelona, the authors proposed many ideas for interacting with the river, including even a specific way to purify water by passing it through sedimentation creeks. A part of the coast is cut by canals and a mini-water park is obtained; in this project, the jury especially noted the careful work of the authors with the river.
After examining old photographs, the architects proposed to restore a pine park that was in the western part of the peninsula before the construction of the plant. Closer to the track of the Third Ring of Uberbau, the ZIL museum was placed (however, none of the contestants left the topic of the history of the car factory). The composition of functions in the project of the German bureau is as diverse as that of Meganom: the construction of housing, offices, shops and even a theater is planned. The total area of new construction is almost 4 million square meters. meters, while Meganom has less than 3 million. When viewed from above, the projects also overlap - visually: according to Uberbau, the western part is also fragmented by relatively low new construction, the eastern part is given to factory hangars, and the river "facade" acquires a slight accent in the form of a shiny flattened egg.
[cm. author's presentation of the Uberbau bureau project]
The projects that did not qualify for the next round are also curious.
Valode & Pistre proposed to create on the territory of ZIL a business district similar to Moscow City, with a total area of 4.5 million square meters. meters. The International Financial Center (it alone occupies 3 million square meters in this project) and congress centers are located on the sides of the already mentioned ZIL Boulevard, building along it a series of towers with the main four-hundred-meter skyscraper in the form of a pointed pyramid. The rest of the territory was given by French architects to residential areas, and the embankments to parks and other entertainments. The green courtyards of the residential areas are widening in wedges towards the river. Of the innovative industries, Valode & Pistre preferred the “park of biomedical technologies”.
[cm. the author's presentation of the Valode & Pistre project]
The Dutch bureau Mecanoo called its project “City of Craftsmen” and chose the innovative Skolkovo as the closest analogy. Unlike other projects, this concept does not involve the construction of housing; the entire territory is occupied by innovation, energy and production campuses, as well as museums and cultural institutions. The campuses are planned to be surrounded by theme parks.
Mecanoo keep ZIL Boulevard, but supplement it with a new transverse axis - another boulevard running exactly from west to east, to Nagatinsky Park on the neighboring island. At the intersection of boulevards, not far from the station of the ring railway, a "ZIL square" is planned, surrounded by several large artificial ponds. The architects supplemented the road network with a light metro, running it along two boulevards. The authors also thought over the ecological component of the project: "green" roofs; screens that reflect sunlight; rainwater collectors. This new construction project has the least - 2 million sq. meters.
[cm. the author's presentation of the Mecanoo project]
Recall that plans for the reconstruction of the ZIL territory have been discussed since the late 1990s. In 2000, the Moscow government issued a decree on the construction of panel housing for the relocation of the surrounding five-story buildings until 2005, but these plans did not materialize. On the territory of ZIL it was also proposed to place offices, a research center, campuses of the Higher School of Economics, as well as a conveyor for the assembly of Yo-mobiles. The last competition was launched in the spring of 2011, at the beginning, in the portfolio competition, out of 17 submitted applications, four workshops were selected to participate in the first stage. The results of the second, final stage of the competition are planned to be announced in April this year.
