The Moscow mayor's office has ceased to hide plans for large-scale development of the center and is preparing to adopt new land use and development rules for the Central Administrative District by the end of the year. The essence of the now official urban planning program was figuratively expressed by the chief architect Sergei Kuznetsov: “Now in Moscow there are continuous potholes, the city is like a jaw with knocked out teeth. It is necessary to fill in these gaps in the center with housing, "Bolshoi Gorod magazine quotes the official. The plans to "seal" Muscovites, of course, are not encouraging - the network is perplexed why it was necessary to expand Moscow and spend huge money on it, if they nevertheless decided to condense it "to the level of a children's sandbox."
A storm of emotions among network users was also caused by the recent interview of Deputy Mayor Marat Khusnullin to the Afisha magazine. Bloggers argue why the authorities are going to build housing on the site of industrial zones and how the expansion of streets and construction of chords will affect the movement of public transport. “Replacing traffic light intersections with overpasses and tunnels will cause an inconvenient transfer of stops and lengthening of pedestrian routes,” for example, the user alex notes, adding that instead of chords it is more expedient to make “punctures through the railways” and return to the plans of the Fourth Ring, which was approved by the general plan.
Meanwhile, the master plan itself, according to Khusnullin, turns out to be not tied to the economic development of the city, for which the mayor's office is going to develop a master plan. The community "Association of Urban Planning Documentation Developers" on Facebook was very surprised at this. As the user Nikolai Vasiliev notes, the current general plan contains "half a dozen sets of good wishes, not tied not only to the current macroeconomic or demosocial situation, but not even linked to each other." Each aspect, the blogger writes, looks separately in principle realizable, however, having implemented one, the others are already nowhere, there is no time and nothing.
Interestingly, as a kind of preparation for the stormy construction activity in the Central Administrative District, the Moscow authorities turned to the famous Danish urbanist Jan Gale with a proposal to study public spaces and traffic flows. Network users, however, did not see a full-fledged study in the Dane's work: “The goal of the Moscow government, through the media propaganda of copenganization-cyclization, to close the eyes of“believing passers-by,”notes user Mikhail Klimovsky on the page“Associations of Urban Development Documentation Developers”. Bloggers especially did not like Gale's idea of “humanizing” the space between high-rise buildings by building small houses between them. “Surveys of the entire city by 30 students for 15 minutes will not give any reliability,” the user Bob Brown is sure, and Evgeny Nachitov generally believes that such things should be a routine and incessant work of city services, and not a one-time PR-action of the mayor.
A small "post-release" by Mikhail Belov to the high-profile architectural events that took place the day before - "Zodchestvo" and the Urban Forum, also provoked a long discussion on the urban planning theme. The participants in the conversation argued about whether Soviet citizens could settle in three-storey brick houses instead of Khrushchevs, as the "struggle against architectural excesses" announced 50 years ago continues today and why the current "silent architects" have not been able to bring to mind the Law on Architectural Activity.
The architects have not yet adopted the law, but, as it turned out, they have developed a Standard of Professional Activity - the document has recently been available for comment on the page of the Union of Architects of Russia. We also commented on it on the Facebook page of Project Russia magazine. Network users found a lot of contradictions in it - as Yaroslav Kovalchuk wrote, "with the current legislation and common sense." The blogger added that the Standard looks more like an attempt by the Union to create a system of personal licenses and begin to regulate everything and everyone independently from the SRO. However, according to Nikita Tokarev, such a document is written in the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon model of protecting a client from unscrupulous architects and vice versa: the professional department decides whether it is suitable or not, while in a more liberal, for example, the Dutch version, the court and the insurance company protect it. Neither one nor the other works in Russia, and the Standard, as Tokarev writes, is an attempt to define "who we are, what we do and why our work is worth something."
But the architect Sergey Estrin hardly writes about his work in his blog. For example, the last post is about the exhibition dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the film life of agent 007 James Bond in the gallery on Solyanka, whose design Sergey Estrin praises very much. Architect and philosopher Alexander Rappaport, in turn, is also far from urban planning conversations - in his blog there are several new interesting articles on theory, in particular, on typology in architecture, where the author discusses the nature of this concept, as well as the internal structure of style and varieties architectural environments.
In Perm, blogs with renewed vigor fell upon the project to build the Art Gallery. The author of the project, the Swiss Peter Zumthor, whose work was discussed in absentia for many months, made his first public appearance the other day. True, the presentation was impromptu - Zumtor, Perm human rights activist Denis Galitsky is sure, was not going to discuss his project with anyone except the governor, because he was used to dealing with a private customer. But it is much sadder that, according to Galitsky, Zumthor does not have a finished project at all - "there are sketches that change faster than their presentation." Moreover, the current version, figuratively called the "ship", obscures the view of the Kama and rises 8 meters above the Cathedral Square, the author of the blog notes. "It will be a blank wall four stories high and 250 meters long!" - thinks Alexander Rogozhnikov, and even if the architect moves the building a little, the view of the Kama will still be closed from half of Cathedral Square.
However, one should not blame the Swiss for the fact that the project is being implemented in the protected area of the Cathedral and archeological monuments - Denis Galitsky suspects that he was simply not given a full-fledged technical specification, "he sculpted as he wanted." Many people are also sorry to refuse from the eminent architect, especially since, according to the pcrd user, the public has been wanting to see the completion of the object for 20 years. Perhaps the project will not greatly expand the exhibition space for the collection - as Alexander Rogozhnikov calculated, only 2.5 times compared to the premises of the cathedral. However, a number of bloggers believe Zumthor's words that people specially come to look at his buildings and want him to build.
Bloggers reacted ambiguously to the scandalous Moscow project of reconstruction - the demolition of the central Luzhniki facility - the Grand Sports Arena, which was recently announced by the mayor himself. Football fans who have joined the discussion on The Village do not mind the Stalinist ensemble at all: it turns out that the stadium is “terrible” for the fans, the game is not visible from the stands: “Yes, a new building, but here most often it is either an architectural monument or a convenient place for sports ", - notes the user Ivan Veter. But according to the architect Yuri Grigoryan, demolition is not at all necessary: in order for the stadium to meet the requirements of FIFA, “you just need to turn on your brains and come up with options to reconstruct it. Few places for spectators - remove the roof, which you yourself built in the 90s."
The news of the demolition of their own houses, meanwhile, alarmed the residents of Budennovsky town - one of the surviving constructivist quarters of Moscow, on which the "tolerable" commission never issued a final decision. In "Arhnadzor" they decided to keep the ensemble together with the residents, who were actively involved in the discussion on the site of the city defenders. In particular, the authors of the comments deny the accident rate of their houses, the absence of bathrooms and basements in them, microscopic kitchens and rotten reed ceilings, and ask Arkhnadzor to conduct an independent examination.
