In Domodedovo near Moscow, where last year they intended to build the first aerotropolis in Russia, they have now decided to create an analogue of Cambridge and bring the main technical universities of the capital here. The architects are already smiling sarcastically - the next "sovereign's decision" came, as always, unexpectedly and contrary to any town-planning logic. “We have just expanded Moscow two and a half times. We have just held a mega competition for the master-development of New Moscow, - Mikhail Belov is perplexed. - Hey! Domodedovo is outside this territory! " “No one from the big world will go to New Cambridge-Vasyuki,” user Maxim Kantor warns in the comments, “because this place will never have a reputation.” However, architects are forced to admit their own powerlessness in front of the project: in the current business chain, Belov writes, they occupy the penultimate place, while the customer remains the key figure. You can scold and boycott projects, but the architect is sure that they will be built without you, only very badly: “This is the main problem - to drag the architect from the field of business to the field of culture. This is possible only under the pressure of society. And the society now hates architects / … /. Let's make architects cultural leaders with responsibility, and improvement will begin,”concludes the author of the blog.
The philosopher Alexander Rappaport also spoke about the social responsibility of architects the other day. Several recent articles in his blog are devoted to architectural education, and in one of them, entitled "Profession as an order", Rappaport writes that only architects themselves can achieve recognition of their social role, for which they must "first of all realize it and give architectural education not so much scientific as moral status, like a medieval order. " Pyotr Kapustin objected to Rappaport against “adding magic, mythopoetic and even romantic to the profession”: “These things today,” he writes in the comments to the article, “appear in the gaps, in the cracks, in the intermunitions, and so are valuable. And the profession today, if the Order, then in the spirit of the SS. That is, in the spirit of the notorious "corporate culture"."
During the discussion on Mikhail Belov's blog, meanwhile, interesting statistics are provided: only three percent of all buildings under construction are published and discussed. We add that even from these three townspeople are almost always scared - they are scared by the uncertainty of the final result. For example, the readers of the onliner.by portal recently discussed an almost comic example of the devaluation of the high-profile Mayak Minska project. In 2008, according to blogger darriuss, an interesting concept with a high-rise dominant of almost 300 m won an international architectural competition for a project at the intersection of Independence Avenue and Kalinovskogo Street. Over time, the height of a complex engineering structure slowly dropped to 25 floors, and its soon it was gone, and instead appeared modest panel high-rise buildings, neatly arranged in a row. The developer is justified by the pressure of the city and demands to lower the dominant for the sake of the neighboring building of the National Library; bloggers feel sorry for those who have already bought apartments in the "dream quarter" and suggest further simplification.
From the grandiose idea of the artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater Valery Gergiev, it was as if nothing of the kind was expected, and now numerous Internet users are experiencing a culture shock for the second week. Some are already collecting signatures for the demolition of the building, others are looking for the culprit. The Fontanka.ru blog, for example, blamed the city authorities: “The very idea of shoving a theater building larger than the old Mariinsky was the initial urban planning mistake,” bloggers write, “although it looked like a very good option for the theater / … /. It was enough just to retreat behind the Obvodny Canal. " True, there were also opinions that the second scene was ruined by the Russian SNiPs and even the St. Petersburg intelligentsia, who buried the "brilliant project of Domenic Perrault" with their criticism.
At the same time, words in defense of the building are increasingly appearing on the Internet, and mainly from the side of architects. Kirill Ass wrote about this on colta.ru, and the already mentioned Mikhail Belov invited his colleagues to compare the Mariinsky-2 and the new opera in Oslo: “We recently admired the opera in Oslo. Today we are outraged by the opera in St. Petersburg. You don’t understand: what was good yesterday is bad today”. The architects, however, did not share the irony: the Norwegian opera, unlike ours, was recognized as a complex deconstructive composition, perfectly inscribed in the panorama of the city, despite the fact that it was only 800 meters to the historic parliament.
Large projects for Vladivostok were recently discussed on the blog dkphoto.livejournal.com. The author of a popular magazine discovered them at last year's exhibition "Architecture and Construction". Among other things, there are 550-meter skyscrapers in the panorama of the Golden Horn Bay and a giant covered gallery connecting the roofs of multi-storey towers. Bloggers were impressed by the scale, and also noticed that some of the "projects beyond the bounds" are already being implemented, such as the huge Transfiguration Cathedral on the central square of Vladivostok.
Last weekend, the well-known local historian Denis Romodin took a tour of the Shchukino area - and the blog f-greg.livejournal.com was followed by the first report on the degradation of standard housing in Moscow. Shchukino, it turns out, is replete with quite exotic examples on this score - from the post-war "German settlement" in the spirit of Leningrad neoclassicism to the experimental panel houses of Posokhin the Elder, where the seams between the slabs were still trying to be masked with plugs - "rods"
By the way, f-greg notes that by the time of the adoption of the well-known resolution "On architectural excesses" in 1955, the decor, judging by the houses built in Shchukino, "was not so much anymore." Continuing the conversation about this undoubtedly significant moment in the history of Soviet architecture, we should mention the discussion that unfolded on Archi.ru between two major researchers - Felix Novikov and Dmitry Khmelnitsky. The stumbling block in the dispute was the concept of "socialist realism" and its existence after the famous 1955 resolution "on excesses".
Meanwhile, in his blog on Snob.ru, Yuri Avvakumov recalls the "wallet" architects of the 1980s, and in particular, the work of one of his favorite masters - Vyacheslav Petrenko, whose exhibition recently opened at the Museum of Architecture. According to Avvakumov, Vyacheslav Petrenko turned out to be the first "wallet" not only for formal reasons - for example, the use of etching techniques or the combination of words and images. “He somehow managed to show all of us that thinking is not water for pouring from empty to empty, but a viscous resin, in which the momentary modern acquires the ability to solidify, like in amber, outside of any time,” writes the author of the blog.
And the architect Sergey Estrin added to his blog a note about one of the brightest postmodern wonders of our time - Las Vegas, where, among other things, architecture “plays” with the European tradition. “Do you want to ride a gondola along the canal or a helicopter over the mountains; do you want to see New York, Paris or Luxor? Please, all in one place. - writes Estrin. - We think too much about the structure of life to think again during entertainment. Here's your concept, Vegas! And it works."
