In the center of Yekaterinburg, on the Night of Museums, a cemetery of demolished houses was opened, including the Passage department store destroyed in early March this year. So far, the money raised has been enough to install 48 tombstones. In the future, the author of the idea, the architect and editor-in-chief of the TATLIN publishing house, Eduard Kubensky, plans to create a "second stage" of the cemetery, perpetuating all the monuments demolished over the past two decades, and there are almost 100 of them. Already now, you can see and remember all demolished houses on the site "Yekaterinburg in memory" … Leonid Volkov, deputy of the Yekaterinburg City Duma, having visited the opening of the art object, shares his impressions: “It turned out to be an excellent exhibition - in fact, a cemetery. I hope this cultural site will last a long time and become one of the attractions of Yekaterinburg. " The chairman of the Sverdlovsk regional branch of VOOPiK, Oleg Bukin, writes in his blog that the creation of a cemetery of monuments is like a sacred ritual that helps to realize the loss and heal psychological wounds.
And in Moscow, the public movement "Arhnadzor" and the project "Moscow, which does not exist" on the International Day of Museums conducted excursions around Volkhonka, attracting the attention of the townspeople to the issue of reconstruction of the Pushkin Museum. In parallel with the excursions, representatives of "Arkhnadzor" collected signatures under an appeal to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev with a request to transfer the Pushkin Museum to them. Pushkin's Shchukin's mansion in Bolshoy Znamenskoye, 8, which now houses the reception of the Minister of Defense, and earlier it housed the famous collection of French painting of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. Representatives of "Arkhnadzor" insist on revising the project for the development of the Pushkin Museum, on the search for compromise ways to increase museum space without destruction and new construction. Natalya Samover, the coordinator of the social movement, concludes: “So that the project for the development of the beautiful and very young in its hundred years Pushkin Museum does not result in the evisceration of a 600-year-old urban area … there is no need to build a museum town. The museum is the child of Volkhonka, it is her creation and her decoration. He must remain her organic part, her friend, not her enemy."
Sochi architects and city defenders demand to stop the transfer of public green areas for development. Thus, a member of the Union of Architects of Russia, professor of the International Academy of Architecture Hovhannes Zadikyan wrote an appeal to the head of the city Anatoly Pakhomov. In it, he asks the mayor to understand the current situation, when the Land Use and Development Rules, permitting construction, turned out to be, in fact, more important than the Master Plan. The architect writes that PZZ were supposed to stop haphazard development, in practice, with their introduction, the role of the Town Planning Council was reduced to the consideration of individual projects, while the Rules are not checked for compliance with the General Plan. Hovhannes Zadikyan gives an example: on the general plan the territory can be designated as a zone of public green spaces, and in the PZZ it can already be listed as a building zone. In the blog "Hello, Sochi" specific figures are given: in the Lower Primorsky Park, together with the square at the Winter Theater and the square on the street. Sokolov, more than 19 thousand sq. m of public green areas. The blogger demands to cancel the adopted PZZ, to annul the lease agreements concluded in violation of the Legislation, and otherwise - to begin the process of revoking the powers of the head of the city and the dissolution of the Sochi City Assembly.
greedyspeedy in his blog talks about the unrealized competition project of the architect Konstantin Melnikov. The building of the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry (Narkomtyazhprom) was to be located on Red Square in Moscow. The architect designed a monumental structure, symbolizing, in his words, "the basis of socialism - heavy industry." The building in the plan represents two connected Roman fives (V), facing towards Red Square with their tops and located along the axis of the mausoleum. In the central part, between the fives, there is a 16-storey diamond-shaped underground part, to which long staircases lead. The above-ground part of the building is 41 floors. "Five" ends with cantilever ledges with giant sculptures. The avant-garde building of the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry was never built, in the mid-1930s the time of neoclassicism came, and the authorities "switched" to the monumental project of the Palace of Soviets.
The blog "Walks in Moscow" talks about the area of the Olympic Village. It was built for the 1980 Olympics for foreign athletes, and after such a significant event, Muscovites settled in it. Therefore, on the one hand, the Olympic Village has become a typical area, and on the other, an exemplary area, where the urban environment was thought out much better than in other residential areas of Moscow. And the blog "Cities and Vesti of Russia" writes about the St. Petersburg area of Savushkina Street, as well as about the monasteries: Nikitsky in Pereslavl-Zalessky, Kirillo-Belozersky, Ferapontov and Goritsky Voskresensky in the Vologda region.
