Under the chief architect of Moscow, the architectural council was revived: last week the mayor's office finally approved its composition, in comparison with the previous one, it is somewhat more progressive. It now includes an architectural critic, a foreign specialist and a number of reputable practicing architects. No one expected that the reaction to the new composition of the council would be completely and completely positive, this simply never happens. Cool reviews appeared on the network, however, devoted not so much to the composition of the council, but to the very fact of its existence as a coordinating authority. For example, Mikhail Belov noted in his blog that the more advice and approvals, the more collapse and confusion, ugly and useless buildings. As the architect explains, the lion's share of projects does not go to the council, but is absorbed by all kinds of regulatory commissions. At the same time, they find themselves in the hands of "effective managers" who, according to the author of the blog, begin to feel like creative personalities and "Mr. Medium comes to the fore." Mikhail Belov severely criticizes the “average level” and opposes it with a “creative person”, a passionate with talent and intellect, who, however, “still needs to be raised”.
The participants in the discussion, like Belov himself, are sure that Moscow needs not just another piece of advice, but a strict regulation: “If there is a regulation (in Europe, it is formalized by a master plan),” writes Yevgeny Zykov, “an urban planning council is needed only to assess whether the developed project corresponds to the master plan. But advice is not needed for this. We need one competent specialist …”. - “Colleagues-competitors, people with whom you share the market, who sometimes draw, to put it mildly, the devil, but at the same time consider themselves trendsetters, and those who got into this council are not clear on what parameters, have the right to pass a verdict, to be or not to be your project in life,”notes Andrey Nikitin. - Regulations - yes, taste, it seems to me, no!"
In the RUPA community, meanwhile, they discussed an interesting interview with the Mexican urbanist Miguel Roble-Durand, who studies the development of modern cities from the perspective of "Marxism-urbanism". Roble-Durand, in particular, is looking for alternatives to the "neoliberal urbanization" of megacities with their rampant speculative development. Such, in his opinion, could be formats in which residents themselves participate in the creation of their own city, in particular communities that are engaged in the construction of housing for themselves on non-speculative terms, developed, in particular, in the United States. Many in the community agree with this, here is what, for example, Alexander Lozhkin writes: "It is time to move from directive planning to indicative planning and build the framework of a system in which organic, and not self-destructive, cities, as now, processes could take place." User Evgeny Tarlo named one of these new formats a linear city along an ultra-modern transport line with islands of small centers, for example, Moscow – Petersburg. However, in response to this, Alexander Antonov warned against inventing new types of urbanization where they do not exist.
A good illustration of the hyper-urbanization of modern megacities could be a photo report in the popular blog raskalov-vit.livejournal.com, which captured the Thai capital Bangkok from the height of its many skyscrapers. Vitaly Raskalov found here a "real city skyline", pools on the roofs of most hotels and fantastic interchanges as high as 10-storey buildings. Some skepticism in this colorful picture had to be brought in in the comments by users who reminded that at the pedestrian level, "high-tech beauties" are replaced by narrow sidewalks, slums, traffic jams and concrete walls.
The community moya-moskva.livejournal.com recently studied a large transport project for the reconstruction of Leninsky Prospekt, which, according to the plan of its initiators, should become one of the main thoroughfares of the sprawling Moscow. “We are persistently told that New Moscow will go along new chords to the nearest railway stations, where it will be possible to change to a train and get to the center,” they write in the blog. However, users doubt what to expect more from the project - improved traffic or an environmental disaster. For example, blogger lepestriny considers the planned reconstruction extremely harmful, since it does not develop public transport in any way, but “only serves the task of 15-20% increase in the traffic capacity of the sections, leaving behind the scenes the simple fact that this is not a suburban highway, but a densely populated avenue having a lot of junctions … . Others call the project good and sparing and propose to supplement it with a high-speed tram in the center of the avenue. True, there are still more disagreements, they recently created a whole community len_prospekt, where they intend to jointly fight for the cancellation of the project.
And on the-village.ru portal, bloggers commented on the new concept for the development of Moscow boulevards, developed by the Wowhaus bureau. Architects propose to make them more attractive to Muscovites with the help of mobile structures - shops, bike rentals, coffee shops and information centers. However, according to bloggers, pedestrian zones need to be approached more fundamentally. For example, the user Sandro Sherents notes that “the attitude of the mayor's office is too formal, given that there was not even any competition on this topic. The tents were demolished, the tents were set up - the cycle of tents in nature. " “The shops and shops are, of course, great, but the problem needs to be approached more broadly,” agrees lena_lena. - We now have problems with all places of attraction for walking people are that all objects are scattered and not connected in any way to each other. The most screaming example is with Artplay or Winzavod … ".
Bloggers' circles in St. Petersburg, meanwhile, were stirred up by another urban planning initiative of local authorities, who decided to introduce restrictions in the city code on the height of buildings within a radius of 10 km from the city's borders. So, in the Leningrad region it was proposed not to build more than 40 meters, i.e. 12 floors. However, the Fontanka blog found this idea utopian: as Stroischik writes, for example, in order to preserve the “skyline” of St. Petersburg, “we need a unified master plan for the development of the city and the region, within, say, 50 km. Then, there is some chance that we will get a real metropolis, like the Ile-de-France. " User max21 adds that if a developer wants to build a bunch of skyscrapers, he will build them anyway, even with the current amendments, just for approval for "rejection" he will go not to the municipality, but to the regional government.
And on the website of the Moskomarkhitektura, new standard projects have recently appeared for various urban objects - from kindergartens and schools to parking lots and pedestrian crossings. The chief architect of the capital, Sergei Kuznetsov, believes that it is quite possible to make standard objects interesting and convenient, however, this position was not approved by the network audience of Archi.ru: “The Soviet experience fully proved the inefficiency of standard design, both from the point of view of creating a monotonous environment, adversely affecting a person, and from an economic point of view, writes, for example, Ivan Perminov. - The cost of linking a typical object reached 70% of the individual … . - No matter how you decorate them, there is no point in standard projects, agrees Dmitry Khmelnitsky. Especially when they also lack new ideas and modern building materials, adds user Alexander Neizvestnyi.
Meanwhile, the popular blogger Ilya Varlamov gave his readers another lesson of "good architecture" by offering to comment on the exemplary modern buildings he had selected in Europe. Most of them are located in Holland, but there are also Copenhagen, Mexico City, Valencia, etc. There are no only Russian examples - as Varlamov writes, “we simply don’t have a customer for good high-quality modern architecture”. However, as bloggers noticed, Varlamov always has an ultramodern architecture, and the author judges solely by its appearance: “If you like it, you don't like it, please, but architecture, in addition to the facade, has a lot more inside and around,” objected user Oleg Semyonov. "Square chicken coops in historic buildings are no better, a new Wright or Corbusier has not yet been born." “We cannot agree that everything that is now being built classic is fakes,” adds ytimchuk. - Filippov is building quite a classics for himself, and he is not alone. I would like to live in a city that he and his like-minded people would build entirely”.
And finally, about the winner of the competition for the Belarusian pavilion for the upcoming EXPO-2015 exhibition in Milan: the other day it was discussed on the blog darriuss.livejournal.com and on the onliner.by portal. The team of winners responded to the theme “Feed the Planet” announced for the EXPO with a very original design of the pavilion in the form of an artificial hill cut by a giant wooden wheel. However, bloggers were more interested in projects that did not make it to the final, for example, the “conceptual pavilion of Belarus” in the form of a plot densely planted with potatoes.
