This is a draft design, and not all the details in it are yet obvious and not all questions are answered, however, the general concept is clear enough. Pavel Andreev proposed to make in the renovated store an atrium of the same area and the same rectangular shape as in the lost old atrium of the architect Alexei Dushkin. The atrium, as previously assumed in the GALS projects, occupies the entire height of the building. As conceived by Pavel Andreev, its ceiling should not be glass-transparent, it should be a screen on which, depending on the circumstances, different pictures will appear. Bilibin's illustrations are taken as an example on the mock-ups, but, according to the architect, there could be anything that matches the theme of the holiday currently taking place in the atrium (an obvious analogy is spinning in the language - the idea of a changing ceiling seems to be borrowed from the banquet hall of Hogwarts school, where as you know, clouds swirled and stars shone).
But this is not the main thing. Pavel Andreev proposed to make the walls of the atrium a paraphrase of the main motive of Dushkin's facades, repeating its large arches, windows, light rusticum and even a frieze with medallions. The lower floor receives a fluted colonnade like that of Dushkin, the second one turns into a balcony with lamps, but above the arches begin.
The architect added two more small courtyards to the central atrium. Along the perimeter of the outer walls, in the walls between the windows, he placed many communication shafts, which at the same time act as pylons - stiffening ribs that reinforce the building (according to Pavel Andreev, “the building is sailing” and the wind loads on it are quite large). The openings and passages built up at a later time are cleared, and from the side of Rozhdestvenka Street, where goods were brought to the store in Soviet times on freight trolleybuses (a scene with these trolleybuses is in the film "Beware of the Car"). The total area of the future store has decreased from 75 to 70 thousand meters, and 2500 meters were vacated (taken from potential retail space) for the atrium - which GALS representatives emphasized, speaking of their social responsibility.
The head of the company, Sergei Kalinin, began his opening speech with gratitude to Arkhnadzor (however, there were no representatives of the movement at the presentation). City activists, he said, did not let the company calm down and forced them to look for a new solution. And now this solution has been found. Yesterday's presentation is a turning point in the story of Detsky Mir, developers hope. The central atrium, said Sergei Kalinin, will be given over to the management company, and various events for children will be held in it, it will be a kind of covered city square, open to the city (indeed, in the project of Pavel Andreev, many unnecessary elements have been removed that blocked the entrances to the previous project of the architect Sergei Leonov from "Mosproekt-2"). According to Sergei Kalinin, the fears of the opponents of the reconstruction, who assumed that there would not be enough tenants with children's goods for the store, did not come true. There is already a queue of potential tenants - said Sergei Kalinin. However, he later stressed that the project is social and not that profitable. However, representatives of the developer spoke a little and reluctantly about the commercial component of the project (even the commercial consultant Maxim Gasiev spoke mainly about architecture, entrances and ceilings). So the topic of payback remained not fully disclosed.
The project was praised: the head of the Moscow City Heritage Site Alexander Kibovsky, the chief architect of Moscow Alexander Kuzmin, the head of the Union of Architects of Russia Andrey Bokov, the architect Yuri Platonov. Restorer Larisa Lazareva briefly spoke about her work with Detsky Mir, not giving any assessments to the project, but without leaving the overall positive tone. IKES expert Andrei Batalov, assessing the work of Pavel Andreev in a very positive way (the expert is familiar with the architect from the experience of joint work on the restoration of the imperial chambers of the Great Kremlin Court), spoke about the project ambiguously. On the one hand, the project is good and definitely better than all the previous ones. On the other hand, according to the expert, the oval vestibule of Detsky Mir should be restored; make a glass vault in the place of the original overlap of the atrium; and restore at least part of the main staircases.
Natalya Dushkina, the granddaughter of the Detsky Mir architect, a teacher at Moscow Architectural Institute and an ICOMOSa expert, spoke out more radically. To begin with, not a single letter from the building's defenders has received a response from developers over the past three months. During this time, the interiors (including the remains of the Lubyanka underground passage) were practically destroyed. “I am convinced that capitalization has fallen sharply due to what was done not by AFK Sistema, but by GALS-DEVELOPMENT,” said Natalya Dushkina. And at the beginning, the developers talked about the need for underground floors for the parking lots of a large store, and for this it is necessary to break everything. And when they broke it, it turned out that the FSB had forbidden digging and there would be little parking at Detsky Mir,”Dushkina said. Adding that her grandfather's building is subject to copyright and the project for its reconstruction must be agreed with her as the heir to copyright. Natalya Dushkina believes that it is necessary to return to the formulation of the protection subject of Detsky Mir as a monument that was rejected in 2005 to please AFK Sistema and which, according to Dushkina, “does not protect anything”.
It should be added to this that if the subject of protection is changed, as required by Natalia Dushkina and Arkhnadzor, then the developers will be obliged to restore the atrium in its previous forms (two-tiered), the lobby and stairs that Andrei Batalov spoke about. This was also said at the presentation.
Pavel Pozhigailo (chairman of the board of trustees of VOOPIIK) and architectural critic and curator Elena Gonzalez (“I will join the minority”) expressed different shades of skepticism about the project. Elena Gonzalez also said that, in her opinion, it is not the developer who is to blame for the loss of the Detsky Mir interiors, but the architects. "A developer always strives to get what he wants, this is natural, and here architects must tell him what can and cannot be done, so this is a sad story about the social responsibility of architects." “Now we have closed this sad page of our history, now we have a new project,” the representative of GALS, who was leading the meeting, immediately retorted this statement.
Summarizing all that has been said, we can say: no one listened to the opinion of the defenders of the original interior of the building; the interiors and remains of the Lubyanka passage are completely lost (all this, however, was done within the framework of the law); the large parking lot, for which this was done, did not work out. Meanwhile, GALS-DEVELOPMENT changed its architect quite correctly (absolutely everyone who spoke at this meeting highly appreciated Pavel Andreev as an architect, only Natalia Dushkina did not touch on this topic in her speech). Pavel Andreev has already coped with more than one controversial project - the most famous is the Manezh, which he reconstructed after the fire I liked the interior of the Manege).
In a word, a terrible amount of negative emotions have accumulated over the years around the project of reconstruction of the Children's World. GALS fights them hard, working hard on a positive image; so far it hasn't worked out very well. The emergence of a new project is a rather strong step ("GALS changed tack - Pavel Andreev joked"). Probably, in the near future we will find out whether one architect will be able to overcome the train of losses and sadness that has accumulated around the story with Children's World.
