Three months after the end of the first round of the competition, the jury consisting of representatives of the Skolkovo Foundation, including two architects and curators of the Technopark district, Jean Pistra and Mohsen Mustafavi, President of the SAR Andrei Bokov and Grigory Revzin, one of the initiators of the active involvement of Russian architects in design development of the innovation city, came together again to consider 30 finalist projects and select 10 solutions from them that will be implemented. The number of winners corresponds to the number of round blocks (with a diameter of 150 to 230 meters) included in the layout of the Technopark district and the picturesque groups surrounding its functional and semantic center - a huge block of public buildings (~ 250 thousand sq. M).
During the first round, the jury was faced with a difficult task to choose from hundreds of submitted works only 30 projects that best meet the ideology and principles of the innovation center. An additional complication was the need to provide a sufficient number of concepts for each of the three typologies: apartment buildings, townhouses and cottages. Eventually
30 projects were selected, which were distributed among the available quarters so that each of them had at least 2 competitive concepts. The authors of the selected projects, in turn, received an additional portion of the requirements that their proposals must satisfy after a more detailed study (more on this here).
Three months later, the difficulties facing the jury not only did not decrease, but even increased, moving from a quantitative category to a qualitative one. It's one thing to choose 30 out of 300 projects, and quite another - only 10 out of 30, and those that will be implemented. In general, the experts did not make any concessions and discounts on creative conceptuality or emotionality of presentation - all projects had to be not only relevant and environmentally friendly, but also meet a number of technical and economic requirements (in particular, the cost of construction without finishing should not exceed 28 thousand rubles per square meter). To monitor compliance with all the criteria, the Foundation involved its employees for the examination, as well as outside specialists, in particular, members of the Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences. The expert evaluation took a little less than a month (the work was submitted on February 17, the jury's decision was on March 12), but it allowed the jury members in their decisions to operate with the entire set of parameters of the presented projects, not limited solely to the assessment of architectural and planning solutions.
The jury members, very inspired after the first round by the level of competition entries, expected that after a fairly serious and thorough reworking process, the quality and thoughtfulness of the proposals would increase many times over. Moreover, the chairman of the jury, Jean Pistre, made individual recommendations for each finalist project, in which he noted those aspects to which the authors should have paid additional attention. However, to the surprise and outright disappointment of the jury, not all revised and detailed projects have changed for the better. In some cases, the authors revised the town planning scheme for the location of houses on the site, abandoning the composition, which was precisely the strong point of the original proposal, in others, in the process of finishing work, the originality and freshness of the idea was lost. In a number of works, the desire of the authors to improve the project as much as possible led to overcomplicated solutions overloaded with insignificant details and elements.
As a result, the jury's decision can be called the result of a deliberate compromise, which takes into account both the initial potential of the projects and their prospects in terms of implementation, and the need to provide proposals for all quarters (in some cases, for this it was necessary to revise the localization of the competition project). Most of the 10 selected projects were unanimously recognized by experts as successful and even brilliant, and the smaller part was recommended to the authors to slightly adjust in order to regain the merits lost in the process of improvement.
The winners of the competition were: "Architectural group DNA", a team of authors led by Dmitry Bush, "Architectural and artistic workshops of architects Velichkin and Golovanov", "AB studio", LLC "BRT-Rus", Agence d'Architecture Anthony Bechu, UNK -project, architectural bureau "Atrium", Alexey Yablokov and Evgeniy Kitselev and LLC "Portner".
All of these teams will sign contracts with the Skolkovo Foundation. And those who were close to victory, but were not included in this list, as well as teams that are still thinking about the opportunity to join the struggle for the right to become an architect of the Skolkovo innovation center, can take part in the next competition, which will be announced in soon.
