Let's start our current review again with cult architecture: this time, heated discussions on the Internet caused the results of a recent competition for the project of the Church of the New Martyrs in the Sretensky Monastery. As architect Andrey Anisimov comments on the news on his Facebook page, the competition was open and a total of 47 projects were sent to it. The first place went to the team of the architect D. M. Smirnov, the second - workshop No. 2 "Mosproekt-2". The majority of bloggers, meanwhile, did not find the winner almost any sympathy: in the blogs of Andrey Anisimov, Project Russia magazine and hitrovka.livejournal.com, the project was found “non-canonical and wild”, “cinematic, like scenery for some kind of opera” and "A temple turned inside out", where "instead of the western facade there is an iconostasis, instead of the main outer door, there are the royal gates."
Andrey Yakhnin, the participant of the competition, spoke more indulgently than others, in whose opinion the design was significantly complicated by the conditions of the site, where there were many buildings of different times, which are monuments; nevertheless, here it was necessary to place a temple for 2,000 people with a large number of auxiliary premises: “Only a serious team with extensive experience can cope with such a project,” the architect writes, and immediately notes that he does not classify the winners as such. "In Sretensky lanes there is no room for such a pompous building," Konstantin Mishurovsky agrees, "it will contradict everything around and crush the historic cathedral of the Sretensky Monastery." User Dmitry Vaysburd suggested moving the Temple of the New Martyrs to the center of Lubyanka Square, and blogger ar-chitect - generally replace one giant temple with "twenty to thirty educational parish centers (wooden frame) of the simplest architecture, with libraries, classrooms, small temples …".
However, the choice of the jury, of course, is not accidental, and in order to dispel the last doubts about the tastes of the customer, Andrey Anisimov cites in his blog the project of reconstruction of the school building on the territory of the Sretensky Monastery for a seminary, just opposite the future church, which bloggers dubbed "the work of a pastry chef"
At the other extreme of Byzantine luxury and pomp are these churches in the spirit of ascetic modernism, which Andrei Anisimov cites in his blog as a continuation of the discussion around the cult projects of young architects. Here the usual decoration and icons are replaced by the play of light, shadows and proportions. In the comments, however, not everyone appreciated the architectural asceticism; some thought that a Russian person would never go to such a church. However, in the opinion of bloggers, this does not at all negate the search for new forms, since, as Vladimir Shcherbinin, for example, notes, “churches in the Old Russian style among the boxes of new buildings, squeezed by ugly hypermarkets, look not only foreign, but rather wild”.
By the way, Franciscan monks experimented with the form and materials of the temples: Sergey Estrin in his blog recalls the Capela dos Ossos chapel in Portuguese Évora that struck him. "Medieval humorists" built it from the skulls and bones of five thousand monks. As the architect wrote, to glue the remains of five thousand poor people with cement in the shape of a building with arches is a terrible picture; he himself stands for traditional elements - “domes, columns, balustrades and for a careful thought of the concept of an object made of inorganic materials”.
Meanwhile, the audience of the Archi.ru portal was recently discussing a competition for the design of the second stage of the Empire Tower in Moscow City. The initiative of the chief architect Sergei Kuznetsov to hold a closed competition sharply divided bloggers into its supporters and opponents. For example, Vitalij Anančenko believes that with a huge number of competitions, if they are held for all significant objects, the number of competitors should still be healthy - up to ten, and not abnormal when there are more than a hundred projects. But Oleg Kruchinin sees in closed competitions an infringement of rights and the desire of "TOP architectural workshops" to get rid of "unpredictable youth."
In Moscow, meanwhile, the improvement is going on as usual: by the summer, the mayor's office promised to repaint and renovate the facades of 29 streets. In the circles of city defenders, they recalled that there is still no definite policy with the coloring of historical buildings and incidents occur, such as, for example, with the constructivist House on the embankment, which was almost repainted pink. According to Natalia Dushkina, the fight against "grayness" is absolutely unacceptable here, and the fact that the "Moscow" hotel was restored "yellow", and the Zuev club recently became pink and burgundy, should have been followed by the Moscow City Heritage Site. But psychologists, on the contrary, believe that a person is comfortable living in a bright and variegated palette, but most of the Soviet buildings with a meager color scheme clearly do not correspond to this.
The blog moya-moskva.livejournal.com recently recalled the "village" Moscow of the middle of the 20th century. According to the blogger seakonst, the explosive expansion of the city to the Moscow Ring Road then led to many villages, villages, summer cottages and barracks within the city limits, which modern residents of Krylatskoye, Izmailovo, Maryina Roshcha still remember very well.
Cozy courtyards and wooden buildings of low-rise Moscow of the mid-20th century still evoke persistent nostalgia in many. And among urbanists there is even an opinion that, along with that atmosphere, Moscow has lost its courtyards as the most important socio-cultural phenomenon. In principle, there are no courtyards in the microdistrict development, Alexander Antonov writes in the RUPA community, and the adjoining space with high-rise buildings does not differ in any way from the passage of the ownerless street space. This, meanwhile, is a commentary on an interesting discussion around the study of the Higher School of Urban Studies, devoted to local communities in Moscow, or rather to their absence. Urbanists argued about whether it is possible to improve the social environment of the neighborhoods and return to residents the private space of the courtyard, along with the desire to manage it.
But the capital city defenders continue to defend the "alien" courtyards of architectural monuments. And discontent is brewing in their circles again - this time with the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art, which encroached on the Tsurikov-Naryshkin Palace on Gogolevsky Boulevard, the blog il-ducess.livejournal.com reports. The authors of the comments urge to stop construction work in the courtyard of the federal monument and remove the "bronze idols" of Tsereteli that have already appeared there.
