Do Architects Need A Thought?

Do Architects Need A Thought?
Do Architects Need A Thought?
Anonim

So far, critics have written quite optimistically about how Russia performed at the last architecture biennale in Venice, for the good and reason for this - for the first time the exposition of our country was awarded a special prize. But last week the Moscow News newspaper published an article by Alexander Zmeul, who believes that the content of the Russian pavilion was a complete failure this year. According to Zmeul, showing the Skolkovo Innograd in the context of the common ground theme is at least strange: “It is difficult to surprise the modern world with a state construction site with an indistinct message and vague prospects for implementation,” the critic writes, especially since the very idea of building something very cool and expensive for public account is completely opposite to the main message of the exhibition - “initiatives from below”. The prize, which our pavilion received, was deserved exclusively by Sergei Tchoban, says Zmeul, whose design solution “disguised the non-modernity of the Skolkovo approach”. Visitors are happy to enter into the game he invented with iPads, but nobody really cares what exactly is encrypted in dozens of QR codes that decorate the walls, writes the author of the article. The pavilion "in every sense has become a triumph of form over content." (For more details on the arrangement of the Russian exposition, read the report by Archi.ru). Skolkovo itself received, in the opinion of the critic, a very peculiar "world advertisement", having stood in a row with the projects of China and the countries of the Persian Gulf.

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At the same time, the commissioner of the Russian pavilion Grigory Revzin appeared in Kommersant with a no less devastating article addressed, however, not to the authors of the biennial exhibition, but to all Russian architects, whom the critic reproached for being terribly backward from the global process. The reason for the publication was the idea to restore, under the new chief architect of Moscow, the town planning council, which with the arrival of Sergei Sobyanin completely ceased to function. “And even such a brilliant idea arose to create an institute of“mainline”architects who would oversee this or that district of Moscow, be responsible for its condition, this council of elders would be made up of them, possibly with the addition of someone else. Now such a situation, they explained to me that our most remarkable architects have practically no orders and it would be correct to use their forces for the good of the city,”Revzin writes, explaining that such an idea personally seems absurd to him. "Why, if they have no work, it is necessary to correct their situation by giving them a piece of the city for feeding?" - the critic is indignant. And he delivers his verdict: “Today it makes no sense to reproduce the City Council, which can only be a tool for lobbying projects. And instead of creating a “boyar duma” again and turning the chief architect into a “leader of the nobility”, we need contests and “a jury for each competition, and the chief architect’s office should prepare the competition documentation and make sure that everything is fair”.

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And yet the City Council, it seems, will be restored - as reported by the same Kommersant, the other day a proposal to Sergei Sobyanin was sent by the new head of the Moscow Committee for Architecture and Construction, Andrey Antipov. The Council will consider especially important objects (with an area of 1.5 thousand sq. M.). It will most likely include some members of the previous council, including Mikhail Posokhin, Andrei Bokov and Alexander Kudryavtsev. A total of 21 people, who will be approved by the mayor within three weeks. And it will be headed by the chief architect Sergei Kuznetsov. By the way, not only Grigory Revzin is skeptical about the activities of this body: Boris Pasternak, deputy chairman of the expert advisory public council of the Moskomarkhitektury, believes that the distribution of the municipal order will put pressure on the council members. And the coordinator of "Arkhnadzor" Konstantin Mikhailov is sure that only deliberately passable projects will get here, while others will, as before, approve various closed commissions.

Meanwhile, Afisha magazine has prepared an overview of the most discussed Moscow construction projects in the recent past. This is the MIBC City, and the Dynamo stadium, and the incredible reincarnations of the development project of the Golden Island, and the dead end with the development of Zaryadye, which came after the recent competition for the arrangement of the park here. Alas, while the situation with almost all grand projects is the same - their prospects are more than vague. But the Gorky Central Park of Culture and Leisure continues to improve with might and main - the same "Afisha" says that the main Moscow park will acquire a long-term strategy, which will be developed by the English bureau LDA Design, which worked on the Olympic Park in London and Central Park in New York.

In the meantime, all the megastrojects listed by Billboard were frozen for a variety of reasons, real construction work was in full swing in the center of the capital, where they unexpectedly began to arrange pedestrian zones. In fact, the project had been talked about for as long as a year, but the construction came as a surprise to many, because, according to The Village portal, neither the government procurement website nor the website of the customer - the Department of Major Repairs - published information about the government contract for the work, nor its cost. Currently, work has begun on the route from Tverskaya Street to Lubyanka, which involves the reconstruction of Kamergersky Lane, Kuznetsky Most Streets, Rozhdestvenka and others. According to the portal, the old paving stones are already being removed here. According to the deputy mayor of the capital, Pyotr Biryukov, quoted by ITAR-TASS, more than 100 such routes will appear in Moscow in two years. The three largest are in the center: in addition to the above, another one from the Tretyakov Gallery through Lavrushinsky Lane to Bolotnaya Square and a route from Gagarin Square through Neskuchny Sad to Khamovniki all the way to Kievsky Railway Station. Here, in particular, it is planned not only to modernize the coating and arrange benches, but also to return the buildings to their historical appearance, and to illuminate the streets in a different way. By the way, traffic on some of them will be closed.

Interestingly, in parallel with the initiative of the city authorities, the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design began to implement its concept of arranging urban space. The Agents of Change project was invented in the spirit of the American exposition at the already mentioned Venice Biennale with its micro-projects of spontaneous interventions. Strelka students turned to residential areas, where, in collaboration with the local administration, they created a number of interesting public spaces. Moskovskie Novosti writes, in particular, about the arrangement of the original “city living room” opposite the shopping center in Mitino.

This week the press continued to discuss the results of the competition for the development of the Moscow agglomeration. This time its results were analyzed by the editor-in-chief of "Architectural Bulletin" Dmitry Fesenko. And the newspaper "Moscow News" interviewed the architect Andrey Chernikhov, whose team at the second and third stages won by the number of points, but did not win. According to Chernikhov, one of the main advantages of his concept, in contrast to foreign colleagues, was the development of the city within the historical borders, and not only on empty annexed territories. The architect proposes, for example, to restore some of the architectural monuments demolished during the councils - the Red Gate, the Sukharev Tower and the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition Complex (VDNKh), as well as to implement the textbook "paper" projects of Soviet avant-garde artists - the skyscrapers of Ivan Leonidov, Nikolai Ladovsky and Yakov Chernikhov.

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The aforementioned Strelka also presented its concept for the development of the Moscow agglomeration the other day. The study carries with it mostly cultural and educational pathos and suggests building up new territories with predominantly student campuses. But even this is not the main thing in this concept - as the professor of the institute, architect Yuri Grigoryan, remarked during its discussion, “I don't even know if it is worth building the new campuses that we drew in the project…. It seems to me that we need to rethink the urban body that is now in front of us, and this will be modernization."

At the end of the review, we will mention an interesting initiative of Rostov architects - here, at the Institute of Architecture and Arts of the SFedU, they are going to create an architectural museum using the buildings of the former Krasny Don plant management. According to the architect Sergei Alekseev, interviewed by the Expert magazine, the museum will become a long-awaited venue for the broadcast of modern Rostov architecture, including student works. After the demolition of the exhibition hall on the embankment, which had occupied the station building for many years, local architects simply do not have such space.

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