This week Skolkovo unexpectedly changed the course of its urban planning policy: according to RBC daily, this happened after the curator of the innovation city, Deputy Prime Minister Vladislav Surkov, criticized the already approved concept for the development of the Russian "Silicon Valley". Its key objects, we recall, were two super-expensive buildings - the so-called. "Dome" and "Rock". Surkov urged to abandon them and not build anything "overhanging" and "monumental" in the innovation city at all. The Skolkovo environment, in his opinion, should be created by buildings "where people are comfortable and interesting." Now the management company has to come up with an alternative concept in a month.
RBC daily clarifies that in fact, the high authorities gathered for a meeting in the Skolkovo Hypercube for a completely different reason - the agenda was a project for the development of a network of innovative cultural centers in the regions, which we mentioned in the last review, in the context of history with a museum of contemporary art as part of NCCA. Recall that the project of regional centers with the submission of the same Vladislav Surkov to the Ministry of Culture began to develop in the summer. Today, as the newspaper reports, the first three candidates for the construction of the so-called. “Houses of new culture” are Kaluga, Pervouralsk and Russky Island. Together with the officials, the architects discussed the town planning proposals. So, according to Sergei Tchoban, who is quoted by RIA Novosti, “the signal nature of the architecture itself is of great importance - it should be recognizable in any city, the silhouette of this city will be recognized by it”. And Yuri Grigoryan noted that “the question is not to build a pretentious building, but to arouse interest and a chain reaction when you want to steal a good idea”. Deputy Prime Minister Surkov also spoke out against the pathos and "vanguard ideas". According to him, the buildings of cultural centers should be "a message of a completely different level of civilization, it should be a message for our own people, for subtle people, for those who are interested in it."
In the opinion of a number of experts, we recall that it was the initiative to create regional cultural centers that caused the rejection of the project for a new building for the Museum of Contemporary Art at the NCCA. Is this so, or did the officials really not like the architectural and conceptual solution in the Khazanov-Mindlin project, but the conversation about its implementation is apparently closed. This was once again confirmed by the public hearings held last Friday, followed by a meeting at the Ministry of Culture. As Maria Semendyaeva, who visited them, writes in “Artchronika”, the hearings soon turned into “a mixture of a booth with a public flogging”, in which members of the working group at the public council of the Ministry of Culture took part: “Speeches by Sergei Kuznetsov, Sergei Kapkov, Olga Sviblova (in a video message), Anton Belov, Alexander Mamut were devoted to how unprofessional and tasteless the project of the new building of the NCCA was made and differed from each other only in the degree of sarcasm. The next day, the discussion continued in the same style at the Ministry of Culture, the same author reports on the pages of Kommersant. However, although the critics obviously went too far, the project is really outdated, believes Maria Semendyaeva, and most importantly, the position “the main thing is to have a building, and then we'll come up with an exposition”, which suited the former officials of the Ministry of Culture, but categorically does not suit Vladimir Medinsky and his entourage …
However, in Moscow in the near future it will nevertheless become one more innovative museum: the other day the results of the competition for the best concept for the development of the Mikhail Bulgakov museum were summed up. It will be modernized by Olga Moskvina's team from the Italian studio of architect Gabriele Filippini, Afisha and Moskovskie Novosti write. The Museum of the writer, as you know, occupies an apartment in house number 10 on Bolshaya Sadovaya, where Bulgakov lived in the 1920s and which he described in his immortal novel. Here on 250 sq. m. the exposition and archive are located, and on the ground floor of the same building there is the theater "Bulgakov's House". Italian architects proposed to combine into a single museum-park an apartment, a theater, and the area around the Patriarch's Ponds, and even some other points of Bulgakov's Moscow. For example, on the Patriarchs, according to their project, a floating theater will appear, and a pavilion for temporary exhibitions will appear in the park next to house No. 10. In the apartment itself, which will remain the heart of the museum, part of the exposition, in addition to genuine Bulgakov's things, will be video art works, for the creation of which the Italians promised to invite Peter Greenaway himself, the Afisha magazine reports.
The director of the Museum of Architecture named after V. I. Shchuseva Irina Korobyina and Professor Jean-Louis Cohen, curator of the Le Corbusier exhibition currently underway in Moscow. According to Irina Korobyina, the best expression of this idea in the 20th century was the Frank Lloyd Wright Guggenheim Museum. However, according to her, the museum does not always have to be revolutionary in its appearance: the Swiss Peter Zumthor, for example, showed how the usual “boxed” design of the exposition can be very expressive. By the way, the Moscow Museum of Architecture itself, it turns out, has plans for the construction of a new building. Details, however, Irina Korobyina has not yet reported.
In the meantime, another equally spectacular museum could appear in the capital - a unique engineering structure, which tourists from all over the world come to see especially - the Shukhov Tower on Shabolovka. However, until now, as Moskovsky Komsomolets writes, there is no money, not only for the museum, but even for the conservation of the monument, which has rusted to an emergency condition. Today, as the newspaper notes, the tower has three options for its further existence. The first one is restoration: the upper part will be removed by helicopters, the 100-meter lower one will be repaired on site, the antennas will be removed. The second is conservation: the tower will be enclosed in a special "sarcophagus", inside of which it will still be possible to climb to the observation deck. The third is the inclusion of the monument in a single tourist route between the Shabolovskaya, Leninsky Prospekt and Tulskaya metro stations, with the creation of an entire recreational quarter with an underwater museum of oil, gas and pipeline transport in Russia. However, in the first two more realistic versions, everything rests on the state examination, which cannot agree on the restoration project in any way, which means that budget money for the monument is still not available.
The condition of a number of other monuments of the same age as Shukhov's hyperboloid became the subject of a review by the Afisha magazine. We are talking about the famous workers' clubs of the 1920s and 1930s, built according to the designs of Melnikov, Golosov, and the Vesnin brothers. Of particular interest in connection with the upcoming restoration are two of them - the Palace of Culture ZIL, which in the near future will become a modern cultural center, and the Palace of Culture im. Rusakova. The latter - the famous cogwheel club with protruding volumes of transforming halls on the facade - will experience a large-scale restoration for the first time. Director Roman Viktyuk, whose theater occupies the building, told the magazine that work will begin this fall. In DK ZIL, in turn, by the end of the year they will start only engineering and historical and cultural expertise, Afisha reports.
Continuing the theme of preserving constructivist objects, RIA Novosti says that three of the 26 workers' settlements in the capital will definitely be preserved - the so-called. The "passable commission" under the Moscow government recommended preserving residential buildings in the villages of Budenovskiy Gorodok, Dubrovka and Pogodinskaya. And this is despite the fact that, according to officials, the cost of the restoration of the blocks will be comparable to the construction of new ones in their place. What will happen to the rest of the monuments is not yet clear.
Constructivism also became the hero of a new exhibition: Kommersant tells about the exposition dedicated to the architecture of the All-Russian Agricultural and Handicraft Exhibition of 1923 and later buildings in the park. It is symbolic that this extremely fascinating theme of temporary structures is told within the walls of the new pavilion of CSK Garage, which was designed by the world famous Japanese Shigeru Ban. He prefers to build from paper and cardboard - in the version for the Central Park of Culture and Leisure, Shigeru Ban used paper pipes that form an oval volume of the hall with a height of 6 meters and a total area of 2,400 square meters.
In the vicinity of Gorky Park, next spring, another interesting building will appear - the vernissage pavilions on the Krymskaya Embankment, designed by architects Yevgeny Ass and Oleg Shapiro. This week the final appearance of the structures was approved by a special working group. As Afisha says, there will be 14 of them, united by a wave-like roof, they will include both exhibition areas and rooms for storing paintings.
Soon, another exhibition site in Moscow, best known to architects, will be transformed - the House on Brestskaya. Despite the scaffolding that has been hiding the entrance to the building for many years, exhibitions are regularly held here and a model of Moscow is displayed. As reported by RIA Novosti, the Tekhnokom group is ready to take on this building and turn it into a modern multifunctional center. For this, eight floors will be built over the existing 4-storey building, and a swimming pool will be arranged on the roof, which will be replaced by a restaurant in the cold season.
And at the end of the review - promising news for heritage defenders: the Ministry of Culture has prepared a package of amendments to federal legislation, which should end the development of protected zones in the Moscow Region monuments. All monuments, without exception, will be entered into the cadastre, even those whose boundaries are not determined using coordinates (as required by federal legislation since 2007), but simply described verbally, the Izvestia newspaper reports. In addition, the regional security authorities intend to seek the demolition of what they have already built in court. Speech, in particular, about objects built within the boundaries of such monuments as the estate "Arkhangelskoye", Borodino field, New Jerusalem monastery, Serpukhov settlement and many others.
