The competition in October last year was announced by the investment and financial company LIRAL, which owns an industrial zone with a total area of 26 hectares in the capital's Dorogomilovo district. On the map of Moscow, this territory is marked with a gray spot, traditional for industrial zones, the size of which is impressive. It stretches from the Kievsky railway station to the Third Transport Ring, occupying the entire space between the railway and Berezhkovskaya embankment. In terms of its dimensions, this site is comparable to the territory of "Red October", however, not only the area makes it extremely significant from the urban planning point of view, but also the location itself. The proximity to such highways as the Third Transport Ring and Kutuzovsky Prospekt, as well as the proximity to one of the largest railway stations in the capital, immediately make this industrial zone one of the transport accessible ones, and the access to the Moskva River and the location right opposite the Novodevichy Convent endows it not only with spectacular views, but also the opportunity to actively participate in the formation of the river facade of the city. Actually, this is precisely why the regeneration of the site, which by the decision of the Moscow government will be released from production in the coming years, became the subject of a competition.
With the participation of the Union of Architects of Russia, LIRAL held a closed competition, to which it invited seven teams - "Asadov Architectural Bureau", "Meganom", TPO "Reserve", "ArchProject-2", "Creative Workshops" under the leadership of Mikhail Shubenkov, and also author teams led by Pavel Andreev (Mosproekt-2) and Vadim Lenk (Mosproekt-4). The competition was in the nature of a preliminary consultation, i.e. its main goal was to determine the preliminary parameters and functions of development, which will then form the basis of a tender for the development of territorial planning documents. It must be admitted that this is a rather rare practice for Russian development: usually developers consult with marketers, not architects. At the first stage, LIRAL decided to rely on architects and their vision of the development of the site, considering that it is necessary to start reorganizing such a territory with the development of an architectural and urban planning idea, which is then optimized from the point of view of economics and marketing. “At this stage, we deliberately did not set strict restrictions and requirements for architects, but only shared with them our views on the prospects for the development of the territory,” explains Vsevolod Stepanov, director of marketing and sales of the company, “because we wanted them to be as creative as possible and offer solutions., which will not only take into account the peculiarities of the urban planning situation, but also new trends in urbanism and spatial planning architecture."
All seven teams were guided by similar principles when developing the concept for the development of the former industrial zone. Firstly, taking into account the materials presented by the customer, reflecting the current situation, it was obvious to all the architects that one function could not prevail on the territory of such an area, therefore each of them proposed his own scenario for multifunctional development: housing, offices, all kinds of public spaces. and service departments - in fact, the projects differ only in their ratio within the boundaries of the site. Secondly, all the teams took into account the proximity of the vast natural complex, which includes the territory of the Park. Gorky and the Setun river valley from the Sparrow Hills. Of course, from the point of view of pedestrian accessibility, they are located far from each other, but the Moskva River and its embankments combine disparate parks into a single ecosystem, so the decision to extend this green prominence to a part of the city that was completely devoid of any vegetation looked not only the most logical, but also the most humane in relation to the projected area. But, as they say, the devil is in the details: the ratio of green and built-up areas in all projects turned out to be different.
The most experimental in this sense can be called the project of "Creative Workshops" by Mikhail Shubenkov, which provides for the creation of a single megastructure of bionic forms with a hilly green roof throughout the territory. Inside the futuristic complex, it is planned to place a cultural and exhibition complex of international class, as well as public, entertainment and sports centers.
The team led by Pavel Andreev suggested the most dense and traditionally Moscow building area. Having enclosed the site along the outer perimeter with auxiliary non-residential functions (for example, the new district is supposed to be separated from the railway by a buffer of multi-storey parking lots with green roofs), the architects split its entire main area into self-sufficient quarters with landscaped courtyards forming through green axes. Closer to the Kievsky railway station and the building of the thermal power station, which is not subject to demolition, office buildings are grouped, and the residential and business districts are connected by a green boulevard, which "shoots" right through to the Third Transport Ring. This axis is balanced by the perpendicular of the second boulevard, which leads to a new pedestrian bridge, which the architects propose to relocate to the Novodevichy Convent.
By the way, it is worth noting that almost all projects in one way or another solved the problem of connecting the new district with the city: some teams at the expense of the bridge over the Moskva River, others by creating a crossing over the railway tracks. Perhaps, the Asadov Architectural Bureau worked on this issue on the most scale, proposing its favorite solution - to cover part of the railway tracks with an inhabited platform, which can accommodate business, exhibition and other functions with a total area of up to 1 million sq. M. The proximity to the Third Transport Ring, in turn, gave rise to a spectacularly curving wall-house: acting as a noise shield, it will simultaneously provide its residents with a panoramic view of the Sparrow Hills. And the need for protection from the adjacent thermal power plant prompted the architects to design a developed cultural and social center in the eastern part of the site. Thus, having exposed "outposts" from all unfavorable sides, Asadov's team received a comfortable interior space, where the main residential and public areas are located around the lake in a vast park.
The picturesque park with a lake and a well-developed system of paths was also put in the basis of the general plan by the architect Vladimir Plotkin. The teardrop-shaped shape of the site is emphasized with the help of green spaces and the layout of the main volumes: in the "funnel", closest to the CHP, TPO "Reserve" places public and business buildings that form an almost continuous development front, while residential buildings, on the contrary, are emphatically spaced from each other. friend and from the reservoir diverge in different directions like the rays of the sun. This project provides for two pedestrian bridges at once - both across the river and across the railway, to the Studencheskaya metro station, and the authors plant low trees on them too.
The habitable green platform and linear buildings became the main theme of the project developed by the team of Vadim Lenk. Zigzag fully glazed buildings dynamically and somewhere even chaotically cut into the man-made landscape, forming a complex system of courtyards and squares. Many volumes are raised on supports, which, according to the authors, will make the territory of the complex more accessible to citizens, and the expressiveness of the general plan, apparently, is intended to emphasize its modernity and proximity to Moscow City.
A multi-storey house-screen, forming the letter M in the plan, is also in the project of the Bureau "ArchProject-2". True, the team of Alexei Shutikov interpreted in this way not a residential, but an office building, the zigzag buildings of which protect the territory from the noise of the railway. It is separated from low-rise residential buildings by a boulevard, part of which is laid right through the office buildings. A pedestrian shopping street is laid at an angle of 45 degrees to it - the "target" formed by these axes should become the epicenter of public activity in the new district, and the place of their intersection is a square formed by 2-3-storey volumes of preserved historical buildings, which are supposed to be united by a glass facade stylobate.
The project of the winner of the competition by Meganom Bureau, perhaps, differs from all the concepts presented above only in one thing - its authors did not focus on creating a holistic architectural image of the regenerated territory. On the contrary, realizing that they are participating in the consulting tender, they have relied on a strategy of gradual re-profiling of the former industrial zone by creating separate clusters. The architectural solution of the buildings here, for example, is not worked out at all: on the Meganoma visualizations we see conditional white parallelepipeds, cones and cylinders. The essence of the project is how exactly these volumes are distributed over the territory and what spaces they form inside the site. As the head of the team of authors, architect Yuri Grigoryan, told us, the concept of transformation is based on a successive grid of streets and intra-block driveways, which will allow the industrial zone to transform gradually. "Meganom" does not insist on the complete demolition of the existing buildings - on the contrary, at the first stages of the project implementation the bureau provides for the preservation of most of the volumes and their "modernization" with the help of temporary architecture objects. Meganom proposes to create new pedestrian connections with Studencheskaya, the Moscow Railway station and the opposite embankment.
“Now it is a relatively quiet and inconspicuous place in the city, but it can be“activated”- both by creating at least one pedestrian bridge, and thanks to the appearance of a pedestrian street inside this zone,” explains Yuri Grigoryan. In this context, a logical development of the territory also looks like its significant landscaping - without complicating the project with either bulk hills or green roofs, the architects nevertheless find a way to bring trees to every lane and every courtyard. “The work of Meganom was recognized as the best precisely because of its balanced urbanistic approach,” comments Vsevolod Stepanov. - This project shows not only the result of the development of the territory, but also the process itself, gives, so to speak, intermediate images that allow the investor to see the regeneration in dynamics and how new buildings replace the existing buildings, harmoniously coexisting between yourself."
However, the victory of Meganom in the consulting tender does not mean that the regeneration of the industrial zone on Berezhkovskaya embankment will be implemented according to the scenario proposed by this bureau. Summing up the results of the competition, LIRAL intends to study in detail all the concepts obtained, taking into account the economic and marketing components, as well as consultations with the Moscow Committee for Architecture and Architecture, and combine the most interesting and effective solutions in the final project, which should be developed by mid-2014.
