Marina Tsislitskaya, Luiza Zarabyan, Marina Nunuparova and Artem Reva in their project paid special attention to the problem of fragmentation of the central part of the city - numerous stations and railways themselves absorb significant spaces and turn the city into several islands virtually isolated from each other. The architects offered their way out of this situation: their project provides for the relocation of station complexes closer to the Third Transport Ring and the unification of individual nodes (Rizhsky Station with Savelovsky, Yaroslavsky with Leningradsky, etc.). In their opinion, such a solution, among other things, provides new opportunities for the use of industrial areas around the Third Transport Ring - obviously, a certain set of infrastructure facilities (hotels, catering places) tied to transport hubs will be required. The new station network is planned to be integrated with an improved metro system, which will provide convenient transportation throughout the center, as well as create stations for transferring passengers from long-distance rail transport to urban public transport closer to the city outskirts. Thus, it is possible to get new interesting public spaces in the center of Moscow in railway station buildings following the example of the Parisian Museum d'Orsay, the tropical garden and the famous nightclub in Madrid's Atocha, and turn the paths themselves into shady promenade alleys.
Many of the children participating in the competition dream of transforming the city into a more natural and close to nature habitat. Elena Zaikova, Irina Ursol, Anna Karpenko, Yulia Gorepenina, Evgeny Talyanin, Elina Gribkova and Nadezhda Dmitrieva believe that "green" architecture, which means energy efficiency, environmental friendliness of materials and reduced environmental impact, will accelerate the movement towards the ideal. That is why in the project of this team there were so many buildings decorated with greenery: plants appeared on the walls, roofs, terraces, and floors of internal premises. Participants emphasize that for the successful implementation of such technologies in Russia, it is necessary to develop its own standards as soon as possible, since European LEED or BREEAM do not take into account our harsh climatic conditions and other features.
Alexey Kochurkin in his project put forward the idea that parks are not just recreational zones, but “lifts” for the development of the territory. So, the architect turned the royal Versailles vegetable garden in France into an exhibition and walking space with singing vegetables, and the wine park near Anapa is interesting for a variety of landscapes and ways of spending leisure time. Such decisions, in his opinion, will be effective in Moscow as well.
Dmitry Fomichev, Nina Fidrya, Andrey Belichenko, Elena Sarukhanova, Maria Oleinik, Fedor Shemyakin, Ksenia Santova, Anna Shestova, Irina Smirnova, Daniil Darkov, Maxim Tarasov focused on the problems of renovating former industrial zones. They conducted a study together with pupils of the Start architecture school and proposed to turn these unfavorable, including from the point of view of ecology, spaces into complex eco-technology systems - parks where futuristic buildings and waste processing plants will be located, functioning thanks to autonomous "green" energy sources, etc. The guys have already prepared the projects of these structures themselves.
Maxim Oshkin, Alexandra Savenkova and Alevtina Tomilova studied the cultural and historical heritage of the lands annexed to Moscow. Many picturesque estates located here are planned to be included in recreational complexes. They will be closed in a "green ring", from which easy access to the sights of the neighboring territories of the Moscow region will be organized.
Alexandra Ushakova researched the structural problems of agglomeration in the context of the city's transport framework. She came up with the "snail principle": the historic center of the city is the "shell", where cultural functions are of the greatest importance, and the "body", which will take on the role of a business center and the future world financial capital, will develop along highways like Roman aqueducts: meridional St. Petersburg - Krasnodar and latitudinal, which will connect our country with Europe parallel to the Transsib. The growth of the snail's body, according to Alexandra, is a much more balanced way of developing the city than the official project of Greater Moscow: urbanization will proceed in different directions, capturing settlements and territories that naturally gravitate towards this framework.
Pavel Chartilady, Yulia Stepushina, Marina Suchkova, Larisa Ivanova took a different path, having developed a program for the development of the annexed territory within the official borders. Its largest city in terms of population, Troitsk, will become the center of a new part of the agglomeration. The science city has all the conditions for the placement of innovative industries. According to the developers of the concept, it is only necessary to increase the prestige of the scientific sphere among young people and improve the infrastructure of the city. Transport arteries are also an important structural link in the development of the agglomeration. The administrative and business complex, where 100 thousand people will be able to live and work, is planned at the intersection of the Kievskoe highway and the highway connecting it with the Varshavskoe highway, not far from Krasnaya Pakhra. Of course, this gigantic structure should be a "friendly" habitat - the already mentioned lush vegetation will cover horizontal surfaces inside and outside the building, its walls, and green theaters will be organized on the roof. Also, decentralization in the understanding of the authors of the Green Skirt of Moscow project includes the conservation of existing small towns and villages in which it is planned to develop the hotel infrastructure, the construction of high-rise buildings along the highways, which will become a reliable anti-noise shield for low-rise buildings in the form of high-tech yurts and transforming houses for them.
Urban concepts presented at the forum, touching upon the philosophical aspects of urban problems, turned out to be very interesting as well. Valeria Butorina, Olga Maltseva, Alisa Zarzhevskaya presented a deep and beautiful idea, defining the main pain point as the attitude of society to the world around it, giving rise not only to environmental problems, but also to a general unfavorable emotional state. Therefore, a person's consciousness should change in the direction of a radical change in the way of life and thinking and, in particular, rejection of total consumption in the broadest sense of the word. Of course, you cannot force the townspeople to accept these ideas, but you can give them the opportunity to try alternative ways of existence in specialized gaming laboratories, where cities appear as autonomous formations with an internal currency and a democratic structure, where social life is rich in interesting events, and the planning is characterized by the absence of rigidly set standards and restrictions. Young architects propose to remove automobile transport from cities, not to spend money on road construction (in their opinion, it is much cheaper to use aircraft), and the success of a territory should not be measured by GDP.and the level of happiness of the population: "Designers should think not only in meters and rubles."
Mikhail Priemyshev, Denis Pritchin, Natalia Chernysheva, Margarita Ivanova, Nadezhda Snigireva, Nadezhda Kiseleva, Lev Anisimov, Tatyana Belova at this stage of developing the concept of a big city decided to figure out what its pros and cons are. Their concept is codenamed “VS”. The team plans to further maximize the obvious "pros" and, having calculated all the "cons" in advance, to eradicate them. Here are just some of the oppositions that the guys considered: Moscow and Greater Moscow - how to combine the old and the new in such a way that not only comfortable living and working conditions would be available on the part of the city to be annexed, but it would ensure the development of the entire city; design and self-organization - very often the design of a city “from above” is not addressless, therefore a flexible and efficient structure of the city is not created; as an alternative, the team proposes to design parks and use them as a means of self-organization of a flexible urban environment; consumption and creation - in today's world, architecture is often a tool for obtaining super-profits and other material benefits, so it is necessary to shift priorities to the production of knowledge and cultural values.
Ilya Kopychin, Irina Shipuk, Daria Sharygina have fears that the ratio "city - person" is becoming more and more like a pair "mechanism - gear". In order to return to the human scale of the environment, according to architects, it is necessary to bring elements of creativity into the urban space. The team proposes to rely on the basic five senses when designing - sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste: perhaps these will be sound parks and "havens of silence", aromatic design of urban objects, etc.
Arthur Skizhali-Weis, Alexey Katseval, Anna Burakova, Anastasia Osadchenko paid great attention to robots and other technical innovations in their development project of the annexed territory “Technoversal”. They position their developments as a project of the future, which will be fully implemented after 2050. The team believes that by this time there will be another leap in technical progress, and everything will change so much that today's problems will no longer be relevant. Therefore, they came up with a wonderful green space of the city-park, equipped with the most modern innovations. The basic components of such a city are silent high-speed public transport systems of local importance and long-distance hovercraft, flying cars as personal transport, and residential and office buildings will be equipped with technology parks for the repair and renovation of numerous robotics.
Some teams, on the contrary, did not take the path of finding solutions to overarching urban problems, but proposed ideas for solving particular but important problems that are components of the whole. Anastasia Prutova and Svetlana Petrina, for example, have developed a project for an eco-school lined with innovative metal panels. They will give the interior and exterior of buildings a more aesthetic and modern look, help to create ideal heat and sound insulation, and most importantly, they will serve as a universal anti-vandal and fire retardant coating.
Daria Efimova and Ivan Starykh figured out how to stabilize transport problems in the city to one degree or another: in Moscow, pedestrians must be completely eliminated from the dangerous roadway to the connecting side of the streets with garden crossings, which can become the same recognizable feature of the city as, for example, St. Petersburg bridges. Large intersections need to be treated with "pills" - this is the form of the transition complex above them that the author suggests. The author plans to saturate such "hinged" ones above the carriageway with various functions: parking lots, trade and exhibition facilities, decent public toilets lacking in Moscow, and place observation platforms on top.
Natalya Brailovskaya, Aleksey Nevzorov and Vladimir Yuzbashev believe that the urban environment should become more habitable, and they implement the formula “yard = apartment”, zoning yard spaces according to functional and age purposes, placing art objects there, outdoor furniture and using environmentally friendly materials … The team has already developed standard designs for such ergonomic "little things".
The experts of the competition (vice-president of MCA Andrey Taranov, head of the international cooperation program of the MCA Alexander Chugunov, chief architect of Mosgrazhdanproekt in Serpukhov city Sergey Rubinshtein, teacher of the department of landscape architecture at Moscow Architectural Institute Ekaterina Ozhegova) generally approved the projects presented, but emphasized that many of them are unlikely can be realized for such mundane reasons as lack of funding, limited use of space, etc. However, who, if not the younger generation, should ignore the existing restrictions and not postpone life in the city of dreams indefinitely?
