The main story of the last week is the destruction of the house on Arbat, 41 - Melgunov's house. It was nevertheless dismantled, leaving, as planned by the developer, the front wall, despite the instructions of the Moscow City Heritage Site and the statements of OATI. Yesterday "Arhnadzor" stated that the house was demolished. Dmitry Lazarev published a detailed report on the demolition in the Arkhnadzor blog: here you can find photographs of cracks in neighboring houses caused by the work of construction equipment, including those within the walls of Melnikov's house. The author took a video interview with Ekaterina Karinskaya, the granddaughter of the architect Konstantin and the daughter of the artist Viktor Melnikov. Since the start of construction, the land around the house has settled by about 20 centimeters, and the frames and foundations have cracked in the house. But the main danger may be construction, as a result of which the underground floors of the new building will block the path of groundwater, and the water, accumulating, will begin to undermine the foundations of the Melnikov house and other neighboring houses.
The UrbanUrban.ru blog publishes Karina Valeeva's report on the Time to Resolve conferences at the Strelka Institute, the main topic of which, according to the author, was the issue of delimiting the city's territory into public places (streets, parks) and common places (courtyards). Sensory Trust project director Jane Stoneham shared her British experience of “making the city for people suffering from isolation”, making urban space more accessible with design, architecture and “new sensory experiences”, in particular modifiable new textures. Architects Ilya Mukosey and Natalia Voinova from the PlanAR studio talked about their experience in designing the intra-block environment of the Moscow microdistrict Marfino, where they managed to add a game element to the internal navigation between typical panel houses.
UrbanUrban.ru also begins publishing a series of articles about Yegor Korobeinikov's “urban expedition” along the route Krakow – Warsaw – Malmö – Copenhagen – Amsterdam – Rotterdam – Eindhoven, the purpose of which was to study “the factors that form a comfortable urban environment”. In the first article of the series - interviews with the manufacturers of unusual Monstrum playgrounds in Copenhagen, where princess castles are connected with rockets and whole ships are located. In interviews, architects with a theatrical background talk about their first experience in building playgrounds, sources of inspiration and share the secret of how to captivate adults on the playground. “We don't want to create a set of unrelated elements. We want to create a storyline,”the creators of the playgrounds say, and admit that their theatrical past helps them in their current work.
City Internet newspaper The Village continues the series of articles "Design from Nature" and this time talks about architectural solutions based on the principles of biomimicry, which are being created in Germany. The German company Arnold, together with the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, has found a way to reduce the number of accidents with birds. Architectural agency JSWD Architekten has implemented the idea of dimming and ventilation inside offices. And the ICD / ITKE tandem presents a pavilion for bionic research, created from modular plates.
Archiblog Shu publishes a chamber work by architect Kazuyo Shojima - a small house that, meanwhile, can be the epitome of Japanese luxury. The effect of fullness of light in it is achieved due to the fact that all floors of the building are connected by large openings in the ceiling, while maintaining full functionality and convenience.
Alexey Starkov's blog talks about the reconstruction of the embankments of Russian cities. The author gives positive and negative examples of reconstruction, and then proposes to create a union of cities that have lost their embankments. Yulia Minutina in the Gorod 812 blog shares her thoughts on the information that has recently appeared in the media about the conversion of the famous St. Petersburg isolation ward "Kresty" into a "creative quarter". Dedushkin Zhurnal vividly demonstrates the history of the Biryukov baths, also known as Krasnopresnensky baths.
The ru_sovarch community tells about the difficult fate of the modernist building of the Astrakhan State Musical Theater and publishes a very interesting series of photographs from the exhibition of student works on the theme of "Soviet Constructivism", organized back in 2010 by the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape Design and Fine Arts of the Western Australian University. The MGSU blog publishes material about the history of monorails, the world experience of their construction, as well as the fate of the Moscow monorail, the idea of which arose much earlier than it is generally believed.
And the blog huck_d tells about the only surviving building of Zakrevsky's dacha, on the territory of which the Krasnaya Presnya PKiO is now located - the Oktagon well pavilion.
