Yevgeny Ass, who recently opened a new architecture school MARSH, spoke about the problems of modern architectural education in Russia to the Afisha magazine this week. According to Evgeny Assa, today's set of topics for design, which is complicated from course to course, does not fully justify itself. It is much more important to increase not the actual complexity, but the involvement of students, their penetration into the essence of the problem, the famous teacher is sure. Education at the Moscow Architectural Institute takes place within one group, headed by a leader-master, who leads the students for four years. This leads to one-sided thinking of students who get used to their mentor and his philosophy.
Sergei Tchoban writes in the Izvestia newspaper about how a “city for officials” might look like, citing as an example of such an official settlement … the Moscow House on the embankment. In order to ease the load on traffic flows and create a 24-hour cycle of urban life, at least part of the workers must live in this city. And for this, the city needs to be filled with a whole range of public services - theaters, museums, exhibition halls, sports and entertainment complexes. The problem of the new capital Brasilia is precisely that the city has not become comfortable for life, has not acquired a human scale, the architect believes. In this sense, the decision of the Berlin city planning administration to build government buildings between the park space and new residential and office quarters turned out to be more correct. This made it possible to integrate them into the living tissue of the city. Sergei Tchoban notes that it is not enough to arrange buildings and create infrastructure: he calls the creation of durable and well-aging architecture as a separate major problem.
German Gref, President of Sberbank of Russia, wrote in the Vedomosti newspaper about how to make Russian cities more attractive and comfortable for life. He suggested looking at the state of Russian cities through the prism of 12 terms of modern urbanism, such as urbanization, metropolisation, deindustrialization and others. German Gref emphasizes the need to develop public spaces, industrial zones and airports. At the same time, urban transformations should be carried out not only by the efforts of officials and at the expense of the state budget, but also by urban development corporations, as is the case all over the world. These corporations unite the interests of both the state and private investors and citizens, providing administrative and financial support to projects.
The 48th Congress of the International Community of Urban and Regional Planners (ISOCARP), which will be held in Perm from 10 to 13 September, is also dedicated to solving urban problems. On the eve of this event, ISOCARP Vice President Petr Lawrence told UrbanUrban that the congress will focus on the problem of population decline, transformation of industrial zones, development of the service sector in cities and other current trends. Perm is just in line with the stated topics. It is an industrial city, which is now actively developing and acts as a laboratory for modern urban planning, largely thanks to its new Master Plan.
The Moscow News newspaper and the P-Arch agency have resumed the joint project “The Club of Architectural Criticism”, within the framework of which several times a year experts evaluate the most striking Moscow architectural events. In the first edition of the club-2012, we mainly talked about Zaryadye, the expansion of Moscow, the reconstruction of the Detsky Mir department store and the Dynamo stadium. Critics were unanimously positive about the creation of the new Moscow School of Architecture (MARSH) under the leadership of Evgeny Ass.
A small scandal happened this week in connection with the planned construction in the Moscow Kremlin. The RBC daily newspaper reported at the beginning of the working week that within three years officials intend to renovate the 14th building of the Kremlin, which houses the bulk of the presidential administration, as well as the Federal Security Service. It is planned to add more than 20 thousand square meters to it. m of office and utility-warehouse premises, which will have two ground and one underground floors. The cost of this project is 8.4 billion rubles. Later, the press secretary of the presidential administration, Viktor Khrekov, denied this information, saying that there was no new construction in the Kremlin, and the 14th building had been being repaired for more than six months. The increase in the area will be obtained "due to the internal layout of the building." In addition, Khrekov added that the project is estimated at 4.8 billion rubles.
Natalya Samover, coordinator of the Arkhnadzor public movement, told the Bolshoi Gorod magazine about the quality of the renovation of the recently opened Moscow metro station "Park Kultury" of the circular line. According to her, this station was more fortunate than Oktyabrskaya, but even here it is far from real restoration. The main problem is that the escalator, which had to be replaced, connected the upper and lower vestibules of the station, which are architectural monuments. As a result, it turned out that now there is a sectional vault instead of a single space, metal balustrades instead of wooden balustrades, and new ones instead of historical lamps. The bas-reliefs, depicting the life of Soviet youth, also "got it". They were cleaned, while painting the bronze frame with gold paint.
The City Planning Council under the government of St. Petersburg approved the concept of a residential complex on Smolny Prospekt, developed by the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill's bureau in partnership with NPF "Retro". The complex will be located in a block bounded by Smolny Prospekt, Sinopskaya Embankment and Tula Street, next to the ensemble of buildings of the Smolny Institute and Smolny Cathedral. It will include not only business-class housing, elite and luxury, but also a two-story kindergarten intended for all residents of the quarter, as well as a two-level underground parking. The architects made a number of changes to the original concept. So, now it is proposed to preserve the historical buildings of the late 19th - early 20th centuries on Smolny Prospekt. Major repairs will be carried out in these houses. The main facade of the residential complex is now aligned in height, along the line of the cornice, and along the line of the existing development. As a result, it was moved inside the block both from the embankment and from the highway.
Novosibirsk monuments of architecture and history will become more protected. By the end of 2013, they will acquire protection zones that prohibit any construction and excavation work, according to the State TV and Radio Company "Kultura". And the Ministry of Culture will now take an active part in the restoration of architectural and cultural monuments owned by the Russian Orthodox Church. This point is enshrined in the agreement on cooperation between the Church and the Ministry of Culture. In addition, this week it became known that QR codes will appear at Moscow cultural heritage sites, allowing you to receive text and graphic information about them using mobile devices. QR codes have already been placed on 14 buildings on Tverskaya Street; in the future, it is planned to increase their number to two hundred.
"Vesti" tells about the project "Lost Ossetia", which is an interactive map with villages marked on it (both alive and on the verge of extinction), as well as monuments of culture, architecture and archeology. Today on the map you can see 520 cultural monuments and 218 villages. Most of the monuments of Ossetia do not belong to anyone, no one is responsible for their preservation. Now project activists are helping people get their family objects under control, for example, family towers. In the future, it is planned to create a new layer of the project - a mobile application "electronic guide to Ossetia", as well as to open a Foundation dealing with the maintenance and restoration of monuments.
The RBC daily newspaper writes about the Canal Grande exhibition, dedicated to the main waterway of Venice. It features dozens of black-and-white and several color hand-painted photographs from the second half of the 19th century. The exhibition is being held at the Moscow Museum of Architecture.
