Contemporary temple building remains a favorite topic of online discussions. So, recently on the blog hitrovka.livejournal.com a discussion of a series of ultra-modern projects of young architects from the workshop of the prominent church architect Andrei Anisimov was launched. These works, meanwhile, were discussed at a roundtable held on February 21 with the participation of church architects and critics. And if in the professional circle the authors were gently reminded that there is a canonical tradition that it is desirable to follow, then the bloggers did not hesitate in expressions: the projects of the temples were dubbed "giant salt shakers", "soap dishes" and "something humpbacked-poor", crowned with " design cross ".
“Young people are being pumped up with 'modern' architecture and at the same time they form the most severe taboo on traditional architecture,” ar-chitect user indignant in the comments, “but the modern architectural form is not capable of giving a solution to the temple. The result is predictable - a kind of plasticine blank is taken with a silhouette that vaguely resembles a traditional shape (without understanding how it is built), and all the pathological manipulations familiar to a modern architect are performed on it - cuts, piercing, blasting, flattening, etc. " However, there is an opinion that the point is not at all in the modern language, that there are wonderful works by Tadao Ando, and in the current ones there is simply no main thing - “there is no idea of Christianity,” as the blogger unim notes. User keerpeech reminds that the temple is primarily built to fulfill a religious function: “If a church is at least three times aesthetically perfect, fits perfectly into the surrounding buildings, it has a school, a hospital and a toilet, but it’s impossible to pray in this church, then it’s worthless ". But the blogger prussak knows “good examples of combining the old and the new”: “And if the church and youth center is really addressed to young people, then why not, this is not a claim to totality…”.
Another group of young architects, meanwhile, published an interesting project for the city of Grodno in the blog biktyap.livejournal.com. The other day it was discussed on the onliner.by portal. The authors of the project took up the reconstruction of a large industrial zone on the banks of the Neman River: it is located directly opposite the historical center and, according to the architects' idea, becomes part of a single tourist space. Here, hotel and restaurant complexes, shopping facilities and a river pavilion, connected by a network of pedestrian routes, appear, and a futuristic building of an educational center with a "museum of dialectics" becomes the compositional core. This last, by the way, instilled in the project the mistrust of a number of bloggers who fear for the appearance of the historical Grodno. “Architects, land, think about technology and where you live,” writes, for example, sash-ok8, “it is Zaha Hadid who can afford to twist such forms”.
Meanwhile, considerable concern among the residents of Yekaterinburg was sowed by the new urban planning initiative of the mayor's office, which decided to conduct through public hearings the project of zones of stabilization and development of the existing and prospective buildings of the city. Residents immediately saw this as an attempt to build up green areas, which, as explained in the blog leonwolf.livejournal.com, partly fell into the "developing" territories. Alexander Lozhkin in the RUPA community notes that there is an attempt to create a document with an unclear legal status, replacing the general plan, and use it to carry out some convenient decisions for the authorities. But Alexander Antonov writes in the same place that in theory the document is not bad: “Zones of intensive development, zones of conservation - protection from development - and the rest of the territory, which lives its own leisurely life. Then the PPT and concepts will be made for the red territories - for the city budget with the invitation of Zaha Hadid."
But the Perm authorities, on the contrary, decided to reduce social tension by abandoning the project for the reconstruction of the esplanade according to the projects of Evgeny Ass, who made a lot of noise a couple of years ago. Alexander Lozhkin writes about this in the archiperm.livejournal.com community. The more traditional “small architectural forms” - benches and urns - were preferred to the avant-garde wooden wall in front of the Theater-Theater under the pretext of cheaper prices.
Meanwhile, the scandal with the esplanade project very clearly reflected the general failure of the modern architectural workshop to rehabilitate itself before society "for participating in the madness of the construction boom", about which, in turn, Mikhail Belov writes. In the essay "How to make Russian architects blessed cultural figures and pull them out of the swamp of business interests" the architect proposes to create something like an order of "professional blessed", true devotees, "either priests or Masons", whom everyone recognizes in person and who have no room for error. It is these chosen ones, who bear a considerable responsibility to culture, according to Belov, and should be trusted with its “material embodiment”. The user Maxim Kantor saw in this a wonderful continuation of Rabelais' thought in the project of Thelem Abbey, as well as the Vhutemas, Bauhaus and even the embodiment of Van Gogh's ideas of a new renaissance. But according to Sergei Bulgakov, the idea of the order breaks down on the existing reality: the essence of the profession of a practicing architect is that he performs a task for money, and if not, “then he is no longer an architect. But just a reflective private person."
Architect Sergey Estrin prefers to write about more joyful things in his blog: his last post is about his passion for small sculpture, which the architect brings from different countries and gladly decorates his interior. As Estrin writes, sculpture is somehow unpopular in modern design - "probably also because it requires space, which is so expensive, hard to get and easily filled with more practical things." However, it is precisely such exotic things, according to the architect, that can create a special atmosphere in the house.
In conclusion, about one more sculpture, which is associated with a recent historical discovery. Local historian Alexander Mozhaev in the community mos-kreml.livejournal.com writes about the sculptural head of a man "with a phlegmatic expression on his face." The head adorns the cornice of the northern facade of the Faceted Chamber; earlier assumptions were made (completely, however, incredible) that the head is a portrait of the architect who built the chamber, Italian Pietro Antonio Solari. There is also a legend that the pothole on the sculpture is the trail of a bullet of some unkind Pole who shot at the portrait during the Time of Troubles at the beginning of the 17th century. Architect-restorer Georgy Evdokimov, who was involved in the study of the Faceted Chamber, demonstrated his version of the graphic reconstruction of its northern facade at the recent Davidov readings. In particular, a full-scale examination of the sculpture showed that the head is a water cannon, and therefore, the hole in it was a drain. There were several such water cannons along the entire cornice. This means that the stone head has nothing to do with the Polish shooting and it can hardly be the image of Solari. Now the sculpture has been replaced with a copy, and the original is placed in the depository of the Kremlin museums.
