All speeches boiled down to two main topics: the participants paid tribute to the great engineer Shukhov and once again voiced the need to attract public attention to the deplorable state of one of his main brainchildren, which rightfully claims to be included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
In this context, quite predictably, the Eiffel Tower was mentioned, to which Shukhovskaya is in no way inferior in beauty and strength of engineering and which does not know a lack of funding. Shukhovskaya, unlike her Parisian "sister", today is surrounded not by crowds of tourists, but by barbed wire: the masterpiece is in disrepair, crevice corrosion of its structures has reached critical limits. President of the Shukhov Tower Foundation Vladimir Shukhov (the great-grandson of the author of the structure) even repeated in his hearts several times that the existence of the tower in its current form is unforgivable and simply offensive. “What stands in the center of Moscow is a rusty structure, disfigured by subsequent generations. If the government does not want to put it in order, then it is better to make a decision to demolish this tower, so that it would not be a disgrace for my ancestors or for our country,”V. F. Shukhov. Marina Khrustaleva, MAPS Chair and Arkhnadzor coordinator, in turn, explained that demolition, of course, is out of the question, because the tower is a cultural heritage site of regional significance and is included in the register of the Moscow Heritage Committee and the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, which, however, it is also somewhat offensive for a structure that deserves the status of a monument of a much higher level.
A part of the press conference was devoted to a history excursion. Marina Khrustaleva spoke about the construction of the tower, erected without the use of any construction equipment, and Nikolai Andreev, the director of the Mathematical Etudes Foundation, presented a film dedicated to this process. Tatyana Vinogradova, the official representative of the Shukhov Tower Foundation in the Nizhny Novgorod Region, made a report on the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition of 1896 in Nizhny Novgorod, where Shukhov presented eight giant pavilions with the world's first overlapping in the form of mesh shells and the world's first openwork mesh tower. shell. All three types of mesh bearing shells (hanging, convex and shell towers) were patented by him. Tatyana Vinogradova also spoke about the positive experience of carrying out restoration work on the Shukhov Tower on the Oka River, which structurally repeats the tower on Shabolovka.
Architectural historian Igor Kazus, using specific examples, analyzed how widely ideas are used in world architecture, the founder of which was Shukhov, who did not consider himself an architect. GNIMA them. Shchuseva, back in 1989, together with German colleagues, began to study the surviving works of the engineer, in the same year the question of transferring the tower to the balance of the museum was raised. Alas, then big politics intervened in the solution of this issue: although they had received approvals from the Moscow Heritage Committee and Ostankino, there was no one to present them - the government had changed. In 2003, in honor of the 150th anniversary of the birth of the great scientist, the State Duma adopted a resolution on the creative heritage of V. G. Shukhov, however, in the past 9 years, in fact, nothing has been done.
In part, the restoration work complicates the status of the object - as a federal property, the tower is on the balance sheet of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise RTRS. Access to its territory is possible only with passes, which enterprises practically do not issue to anyone, making no exceptions even for foreign specialists who come specifically to carry out inspections of the tower. The Shukhov Tower Foundation even sued the Federal State Unitary Enterprise RTRS, demanding to provide free access to the monument and proper care for it - the court was won, but the situation has not changed. Vladimir Shukhov gave an eloquent example: recently, at the expense of Swiss and German institutes, a special radio-controlled helicopter was assembled, which must fly around and scan all tower structures millimeter by millimeter, and permission for this operation was obtained only bypassing the Federal State Unitary Enterprise RTRS and only after the Russian Academy of Sciences was involved in solving the problem.
Another challenge is the location of the tower. The fact is that its closest neighbor is a 14-storey complex, the construction of which was started in 1991 by order of the USSR Ministry of Defense for the military space forces and then abandoned. The giant unfinished building (and the height of each of the floors is 5 meters) in 1996 was transferred to the state television company RTR-SIGNAL (an affiliated structure of the All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company), but in fact it has not been used for 20 years. The Shukhov Tower Foundation is convinced that this building could accommodate all the organizations that now occupy the territories adjacent to the monument, and their release, in turn, would create a full-fledged recreational infrastructure around the facility. Specific proposals on how this can be done were presented at the press conference in the form of models and stands. True, these projects were developed by students of the Moscow Architectural Institute on a voluntary basis, since the measures to save the tower, as already mentioned, have not yet been funded in any way.
Vladimir Shukhov does not hide the fact that the reconstruction of both the tower itself and the adjacent territory will require significant costs: for example, it took $ 1.5-2 million to restore the TV tower on the Oka, but the Shukhov tower is in a much worse condition due to the many welded on it structures and a base poured with concrete. According to experts, about 10 million are needed to restore the openwork beauty on Shabolovka, but, according to representatives of the Foundation, the structure has such a powerful tourism potential that all funds invested in its reconstruction will pay off handsomely.
