The loudest architectural event of the past week was undoubtedly the opening of Le Corbusier's exhibition at the Pushkin Museum. Some of the excitement around it is caused both by the ever-present scale with which the museum organizes such events, and by the special popularity of the great Corbyu in Russia. For all Soviet architecture, this is indeed the most important figure: in Moscow he realized only one object - the building of the Tsentrosoyuz - but he had a colossal impact on the development of the architecture of the young Soviet country. As Grigory Revzin put it in his article published on the eve of the opening of the exhibition in Kommersant, "we are living at the Le Corbusier exhibition." “This man began to build under the auspices of a concrete manufacturer, then continued with panel manufacturers, he came up with the first typical houses, pre-made at the factory, he came up with a microdistrict, he came up with the need to demolish historic cities and build up the vacated territories with factory products.” All this, as you know, found the most fertile ground not only in Soviet, but also in world urbanism. Only when the panels were tired, the shadow of general irritation fell on Corbusier himself. However, was this his fault? "The materials for building the city are: sun, space, air, vegetation, steel, concrete" - arguing this, Le Corbusier, naturally, did not mean the dominance of standard boxes and the inhuman geometry of many modern downtowns, "Velimir Moist writes in Gazeta.ru.
The author of yet another report from the opening of the exhibition, Valentin Dyakonov in Kommersant, is also not inclined to see Corbyu as a “naive rationalist”. His "home cars" are "an ethical choice for transparency, cleanliness and light over dirt, poverty and inequality," the critic said. At the current exhibition, Corby is presented by curators, first of all, as an architect-artist: “This is rather a set of keys to Le Corbusier's thinking. And an attempt to return him to the camp of artists from the dark corner into which the thinkers of the last 30 years have driven the architect,”says Dyakonov. "The exhibition invites you to see the poet in a pioneer of functional housing and, perhaps, to see poetry where we are, and not where it is good." By the way, Le Corbusier himself really began as a painter - Aleksey Mokrousov mentions this in his article in Izvestia - and he loved to repeat that he had "two hearts", one devoted to architecture, the other to painting. And the Afisha magazine offers its readers an overview of the buildings of the great master. In France, Corbyu is considered a national genius, the newspaper says, and this status turned out to be very beneficial to his architectural experiments: the objects built by him are well preserved and are still the objects of pilgrimage for numerous admirers of the genius of modernism. Among them are the Chapel in Ronchamp, La Tourette Monastery, Villa Savoy and many others.
Another equally significant exhibition opened at the Museum of Architecture. Shchusev. The exposition entitled “Big Moscow. XX century”presents landmark projects for the development of the Russian capital of the XX century and allows you to take a fresh look at the concept of development of a new Moscow agglomeration. The exposition, writes Maria Fadeeva in Vedomosti, focused on the architectural “frames” of the capital - avenues, squares, boulevards and iconic buildings, with which the architects secured the territories to be joined. Compared to its pre-revolutionary size, Moscow has grown fivefold during the Soviet era. And it could even merge with Leningrad into a single city, if, for example, it began to develop according to the famous "parabola" of Nikolai Ladovsky. Some works - such as materials from Shchusev's plan "New Moscow" or the project of reconstruction of the Central Park of Culture and Leisure by Alexander Vlasov, are shown to the general public for the first time, the newspaper Izvestia notes.
Two notorious buildings at once were included in the register of heritage sites this week. We are talking about the cinema "Forum" and the Circular depot at the Leningradsky railway station. As a reminder, Russian Railways intended to lay new tracks on the site of the depot, and only the intervention of Arkhnadzor saved it from demolition. Russian Railways have not abandoned their idea, but a compromise has been found: the monument will either be raised on an 8-meter stylobate so that trains pass under it, or it will be partially dismantled and the line will be passed right through the building, Kommersant notes. The "Forum" Electrotheatre built in 1914, which was badly damaged in 2002 from the fire, also appeared with hope. According to the head of the Moscow City Heritage Site Alexander Kibovsky, an investor has been found who agrees to restore the building and keep the cinema in it, according to the Moscow News newspaper.
The main concern of the Moscow keepers of the heritage is now caused by constructivist "workers' settlements", because recently the so-called. The "passable commission" must determine the fate of all 26 quarters at once. As it became known to "Kommersant", the city plans to renovate "Budenovskiy Gorodok", Usachevka and a complex of residential buildings on Rusakovskaya Street. Whether as a result they will be preserved as ensembles (for which the quarters must be included in the register of cultural heritage objects) or at least in part is still unclear, but the chairman of the commission, Aleksey Yemelyanov, has already announced that there will be demolitions. The objects that the commission will spare will be overhauled. But as Arkhnadzor writes on its website, repairs for a monument are often completely unprofitable. So the House on the Embankment of the architect Iofan and the House of the People's Commissariat of Defense, built according to the project of Lev Rudnev, as a result of recent overhauls, have radically changed their historical color.
On the other hand, another famous object of constructivism, the Palace of Culture ZIL, built by the Vesnin brothers in the mid-1930s, is predicted to revive soon, and in its former capacity. According to The Village portal, the experiment to turn it into a modern cultural center has already begun. Nothing will be changed in the internal structure of the building: the existing lecture hall, studios, pillared hall and library will be modernized. The magazine "Mezzanine" tells more about the historical competition for the project of the Palace of Culture, which once collected all the cream of the architectural avant-garde.
In St. Petersburg, meanwhile, the confrontation between the defenders of historical buildings and the city administration escalated again and even became a reason for holding a rally. City activists were outraged by the letter of Governor Georgy Poltavchenko to the President of the Russian Federation, in which he expressed doubts about the possibility of recognizing St. Petersburg as a "landmark" according to the UNESCO recommendation. The letter got to the journalists of Kommersant: as the newspaper writes, according to Poltavchenko, the city should not claim to be a “landmark”, since numerous already existing protected zones of monuments and ensembles are protected “each individually”. Activists remind that such "protection" did not prevent the destruction of more than 150 historical buildings in the city over the past 12 years.
It is interesting that just a few days ago the authorities of St. Petersburg officially announced the start of a program for the preservation and renovation of the historic center, says the same Kommersant. Within the framework of the St. Petersburg Economic Forum 2012, the concepts for the development of the territories "Konyushennaya" and "Northern Kolomna - New Holland" were presented, carried out by seven teams during the competition. The newspaper notes that by "renovation" the organizers of the competition meant the replacement of engineering networks, the reconstruction of bridges and embankments, the resettlement of communal apartments and the construction of underground parking lots. The contestants, however, did not stop there: as the Expert magazine writes, “A. A. Litvinov”, for example, proposes to make the Palace Embankment a pedestrian, and drive cars into an underwater tunnel. And in A. Flax”was invented to clear the cars of Malaya Konyushennaya Street, at the same time turning it into a covered gallery. Inspection of buildings and development of planning projects will begin in 2013. What kind of project will eventually be implemented should be the topic of a special public discussion.
In the center of Moscow, meanwhile, the modernization of public spaces is also slowly unfolding. Following the reconstruction of the TsPKiO im. Gorky, the city authorities decided to improve the adjacent Crimean embankment. According to The Village portal, architects Yevgeny Ass and Oleg Shapiro presented a project for the reconstruction of the famous vernissage. It includes a comprehensive improvement of the embankment with the installation of multifunctional modules for the sale of paintings.
And finally, an interesting urban planning initiative from the deputies of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation: the other day they offered to return the chief architects of cities the opportunity to control developers - in the opinion of the people's deputies, this will help stop the chaotic development and destruction of historical centers. As Kommersant reminds, the chief architects had this right until 2008: then, for example, the Moscow Committee for Architecture and Construction or the KGA could monitor the development of projects at all stages. Now developers, in order to obtain a building permit, can formally limit themselves only to the provision of a pre-project, which, as the newspaper writes, “is neither subject to examination, nor subject to verification”.
