On June 24, the 36th session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee opened in St. Petersburg. The most discussed news of the first week of the session was the refusal to raise the St. Petersburg issue on the agenda. Observers saw this as evidence of the crisis of an international organization that is losing ground under the onslaught of the political situation. Meanwhile, Deputy Alexei Kovalev assured that the draft resolution on St. Petersburg will still be adopted at the session. But Petersburgers no longer believe that the destruction of the heritage can be stopped. Director Alexander Sokurov says: "Demolitions continue … KGIOP cannot do anything … Even an appeal to the prosecutor has no effect … The depth of the vice becomes such that it cannot be stopped simply by public efforts and legal civil activity." According to a joint study by Save Europes Heritage, the Moscow Society for the Protection of Architectural Heritage, and the Living City movement, over 150 historical buildings have been destroyed in St. Petersburg alone over the past 12 years, and now more than 1,300 monuments of history and culture are being destroyed. The greatest concern is caused by the fate of the complex of buildings of the Military Medical Academy, the Pulkovo Observatory and the territory on which it is planned to build an elite residential complex "Naberezhnaya Evropy" instead of a park, writes St. Petersburg journalist Sergei Achildiev. He recalls the six-hour telethon “The Fate of St. Petersburg. Fourth Century”, which took place in 2008 live on 100 TV channel. It summed up the disappointing results of the destruction of the historic center of the city. The journalist says that the telethon is still relevant today, because, in fact, little has changed in St. Petersburg. Evidence of this is the demolition of the corps of the Life Guards of the 1st Artillery Brigade. According to the law, the destruction of buildings built before 1917 is inadmissible in St. Petersburg. However, the developer and Gosstroynadzor assure that they were built since 1938, and that none of these buildings is a cultural heritage site.
And the fourth seminar of the competition for the concept of the development of the Moscow agglomeration took place in Moscow. According to its results, the most points (7.6 out of 10 possible) were received by the architectural and design workshop of A. A. Chernikhov. The top three also included the Dutch OMA team and the Ostozhenka architectural bureau. Chernikhov's workshop focuses on the withdrawal from Moscow of all industrial enterprises and railway stations. The annexed territory, according to their idea, should develop on the basis of clusters: educational, medical and others. The OMA bureau proposes to create satellite cities with a population of 2.5 million people on the basis of four Moscow airports. A zone of government facilities will appear near the Vnukovo district, science and education near Sheremetyevo, a business territory near Domodedovo, and an industrial zone in Chkalovsky. And in a third of the territory of "new" Moscow, architects want to create a national park. Ostozhenka proposes to divide the new territories into three functional parts - a stabilization zone with dense buildings surrounded by greenery, a zone of active urban development and a protective agrarian belt. At the seminar, architects for the first time formulated their vision of a parliamentary center on the territory of the “new” Moscow. Thus, specialists from the Central Research Institute of Urban Planning believe that the city for officials should consist of blocks - "cells" with a diameter of no more than 900 meters, in the middle of which there is a public transport stop. But the representatives of the workshop of Chernikhov, Ostozhenka and the Parisian bureau "l'AUC" are sure that it is not worth creating a "bureaucracy". They suggested leaving government offices in the "old" city.
In general, the expert commission of the competition expected more from the seminar. In early July, the mayor of Moscow should discuss with the president the options for moving officials, but the architects have not yet provided any specific calculations and economic justifications. Meanwhile, experts say that there is no money for the "Big Moscow" project: private business has lost interest in investing in a metropolis, and the capital's budget money will be needed to solve intra-city problems.
Interview magazine publishes a conversation with the architect Sergei Skuratov. He, like a number of participants in the competition for the concept of the development of the Moscow metropolitan area, believes that there is no need to create a parliamentary center. “I would try to do everything to reduce the number of power structures in our country to a minimum. The fact that some fantastic cities will be built for them will not make them work better,”says the architect. Sergey Skuratov spoke about what modern architecture should be like, what should be changed in the city center, commented on the idea of creating a park in Zaryadye. The architect does not understand who the park will be intended for. “When they can't build anything here, they create parks,” he said.
The chief architect of Moscow, Alexander Kuzmin, told the Izvestia newspaper about the development of the metropolitan agglomeration, about the full-scale reconstruction of the Kaluzhskoye highway and about Moscow's pedestrian zones. And the journalist of the radio station "Echo of Moscow" Sergei Buntman talked with the head of the department Alexander Kibovsky about the work of the department of cultural heritage of Moscow.
In the Museum of Architecture, in parallel with the exhibition "The Future That Wasn't Happening", which presents fragments of a model of the Grand Kremlin Palace by Vasily Bazhenov, another one, "Imaginary Theaters in Rome", is being held. It exhibits 29 works by photographer Carlo Gavazzeni Ricordi, who uses the double and triple frame effect, as well as the panoramic format for camera scenes.
And in the Hermitage opened an exhibition of the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava "In Search of Movement". The name was not chosen by chance: almost half of the exhibits "come to life" during the viewing. Calatrava is represented at the exhibition not only as an architect, but also as an artist, sculptor and set designer. The main part of the exposition is made up of architectural models of the buildings he built. However, the exhibition opens with paintings and abstract sculptures presenting a person as a kind of architectural structure. The exhibition also includes several huge hanging eggs, created and hand-painted by Calatrava. More information about the exhibition, as well as about the architect's attitude to contemporary art and what he would like to design, can be found in Kalatrava's interview with the Vedomosti newspaper.
