The second stage of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg has recently freed itself from scaffolding and building fences, revealing a virtually complete architectural appearance. Finishing work will continue, but it is already obvious that the promised architectural masterpiece did not work out. Blogs are indignant: it was worth holding international competitions, inviting world-famous architects, spending twenty billion rubles and demolishing the historic quarter, in order to eventually build a "shopping center", "utility block", "warehouse", etc. Most of all bloggers are angry that the inglorious ending was a foregone conclusion from the very beginning: “Throughout this long story, one can clearly feel a deliberate bureaucratic game of 'fool',” they write in the comments, a pompous competition, which ended in a compromise choice of Perrault's project, with the idea to overwhelm him, etc.”.
However, according to Yuri Avvakumov, the competition itself was not decorative - “the foreign members of the jury quite sincerely considered their choice to be the best. As a result, they built something vaguely similar to Hollein's project, it was the second in the number of votes. Perrault suffered a setback, as he, like any foreign architect, demanded full control over the construction until the very last stage and his trusted contractors, writes the user vik_kis. But in the Russian system, flinter_ab specifies, the master defines only the appearance, while the working project is done by other people; Now, on the blog smirnoff-98.livejournal.com, they are wondering whose “collective work” eventually graced the Kryukov Channel.
Perhaps the only one who was satisfied with the result was Mikhail Belov, who did not expect a masterpiece: “Absolutely inadequate hysteria around the usual and normal world average theater of opera and ballet. Super-tech. Think of the Théâtre Bastille in Paris or the New Theater in Tokyo. Practically: a global opera standard for appearance."
In the same St. Petersburg, opposite New Holland, Evgeny Gerasimov's bureau is designing another elite house in the spirit of historicism, and bloggers, meanwhile, argue whether it is possible to build in the city today in a “pseudo-style” or not. In the debate that unfolded
on Archi.ru, the project is mainly criticized by fans of the Graffiti hostel, which will now be demolished. It seems true that the point here is not in the confrontation between neoclassicists and modernists defending the three-storey building of the garden, reconstructed into a hostel in the spirit of Mondrian, but in the fact that this is one of the few places where you could live for a penny in the very center.
Incidentally, criticism of a particular style very often develops into open hatred. Why there is no hatred in mathematics and physics, and where does it come from in architecture - Mikhail Belov wondered in earnest. Why were the "Renaissance figures" ready to raze the Gothic cathedrals to the ground, while the "progressives-constructivists" hated the "Zholtovites"? For Belov himself, the origin of this phenomenon is “dark and mysterious”, but the user Andrey Neopalimy believes that the reason is that the architecture has a customer, “and hatred is a derivative. Moreover, Her Majesty Architecture is art, hence passion."
But the well-known culturologist Vladimir Paperny would explain the emergence of hatred for styles by the replacement of Kultura 1 and Kultura 2, which he recently recalled in an interview with Novaya Gazeta. Only now Mikhail Belov considers Paperny's bestseller to be just a “cute glamorous essay,” and not a theory, about which he did not fail to write a whole review on his blog. The architect's witty dynamics described in the book does not agree in any way: “What should be glazed spreads. That which spreads, glazes. The new rich built up half of Rublevka with fluid Ku-1, and the other half with glazed Ku-2 /… /. I would like to add on my own that this actually happened a long time ago, that there are Ku-3, Ku-4, Ku-5, etc. And I'm afraid that's always been the case."
The Facebook audience, meanwhile, together with the absentee discussion of projects, can now seem to directly influence the result. In any case, the management of the Nizhny Novgorod International Airport promises to listen to her opinion, which invited users to comment and vote in their account for the project of the future passenger terminal. There are two options to choose from - the Russian company Nefaresearch and the English company Hintanassociates. Vote, let's clarify, for the facade and interior solutions, the technical side is left to the judgment of professionals.
Nobody offers users of the Belarusian portal onliner.by to vote for projects, so they comment in absentia on another high-profile project - the reconstruction of the Minsk Dynamo stadium. Recently, the winner of the competition was announced: it was the German company GMP, which, despite the fact that it outstripped two local bureaus in the final, earned generally positive reviews from bloggers.
In the professional community of urbanists RUPA and in the blog computerra.ru these days they discussed the initiative of representatives of high-tech business to build a special microdistrict for IT specialists in Moscow. According to urbanists, there will be no benefit from the concentration of IT specialists in the next Startapovo village, since in the west innovation cities are being created around scientific institutes, and our IT microdistrict will be built where there used to be a forest, and now New Moscow. It is unlikely that people will voluntarily move there; As Alexander Antonov recalls, in the USSR there was such a practice, “when scientists were settled in one place, and they did not even pay for housing at all. There was only barbed wire around the perimeter."
Meanwhile, the head of the ABTB bureau, professor of Moscow Architectural Institute Timur Bashkaev, whose project was published by the blog computerra.ru, proposed an alternative urban planning concept to New Moscow. Instead of sprawling the city into newly adjoined territories, the architect developed a “layered” arrangement of the capital on artificial platforms, where the first and zero tiers will be given to industrial zones, transport and business centers, and the upper ones will merge into a continuous green landscape for residents.
There have been no comments from urbanists on this score yet, but in the already mentioned RUPA community, they are concerned with an equally important issue - trust in their profession among the population. Referring to the interview of the famous urban planner Alexander Vysokovsky to Novaya Gazeta, whom bloggers took with hostility, Alexander Antonov writes that such a professional is strongly associated with the authorities among the people, which means he is an "enemy and a pest". However, the dispute about how to change the attitude towards the profession smoothly spilled over into a much more acute topic - how to establish a normal dialogue between “celestial experts” and “approving officials”.
