Following the high-profile competitions for the redevelopment of the ZIL territory and the new building of the Polytechnic Museum on Lomonosovsky Prospekt, the results of the competition for the conversion of the industrial zone on Berezhkovskaya Embankment are discussed in blogs. It is curious that the winning project of the Meganom bureau reminded some users of the decision to reconstruct the ZIL, with which the same Meganom won a month earlier. “There is no difference,” Mikhail Belov writes in his blog. - All this is one and the same solution: in principle, a spatial clone of the Khimki-Khovrino development of the early 70s…. A kind of game of noughts and crosses at the level of the master plan. " However, building “in the genre of early Brezhnevism”, according to the architect, is unlikely to be: “Why change industrial zones in the style of the 70s for microdistricts in the style of the 70s? Do it in the long run? To portray that it is super innovative? Clone the same planning technique everywhere?"
"Noughts and crosses are the details that Rem Koolhaas has been putting into each of his master plans for many decades now, taking them from Corbusier," user Vasya notes in the comments. And “Meganom”, in turn, “tries to be like OMA,” adds Alexey Afonichkin. And if Mikhail Belov is against such continuity, others welcome it; for example, as Olga Funtova writes, “the totally blocky development that now prevails in new buildings lacks the flexibility and some hooliganism that can be allowed by designing in the style of neighborhoods”. And, according to blogger Vitalij Anančenko, the Meganoma project is “the wisest and most strategically verified”, because it has a development strategy and there are no “too binding details”.
In the outgoing week, meanwhile, the laureates of the competition for the project of the Church of the New Martyrs in the Sretensky Monastery were awarded, which gave bloggers a reason to speak again about the results. Let us remind you that the absolute majority of users are not satisfied with the winning project; he was called non-canonical, wild, tendentious, etc. However, as Andrei Anisimov writes in his blog, all this once again shows that "the most correct way for a customer is to choose an architect or artist and work with them to achieve the desired solution, and not immediately seek solutions." In the comments, the project once again received a portion of criticism: for example, according to Olga Runtova, it resembles the Dormition Cathedral of the Pskov-Pechersky Monastery with an "iconostasis on the facade." “Or Romanian churches,” adds Konstantin Kamyshanov. - Painting tears the facade. She kills the wall, makes it guipure. If the author took up this method of dematerializing forms, then he had to find a solution to the entire temple as a whole in a new tectonics. " And the user Maria Shulgina reminded that Yekaterinburg already has a similar "monument to competitions" - the Church on the Blood, "the most pompous and completely destroyed one of the most beautiful places in the city."
Bloggers, meanwhile, not only criticize, but also try to take an active part in urban policy. We have already written about how activists from the City Projects decided to fight the official "anti-traffic" project of the Moscow mayor's office by gathering an independent council of international transport experts. And so the first expert, Vukan Vuchik, came to Moscow for donations collected by users. Together with blogger Maxim Katz, the professor took a ride on the capital's public transport and watched how the notorious highways are being built in Moscow.
Meanwhile, in the magazine of another activist of "City Projects" Ilya Varlamov, a post appeared about a fire in the highest skyscraper of the Grozny-City complex, which stirred up the media last week. Bloggers, meanwhile, are sure that the skyscraper was built with obvious technological violations, which is why the facades burned out incredibly quickly. In turn, the head of the republic almost immediately launched a vote on the Internet for the project to restore the skyscraper, which, as a result, will be recreated close to the original version.
On Facebook, meanwhile, a campaign in defense of the Melnikov House is gaining momentum. It is not the first time that another signal about the plight of the unique monument comes from afar: as the blog of "Arhnadzor" writes, an article about the danger of destruction hanging over the House appeared on the website of the American branch of DOCOMOMO International. Moscow city rights activists did not hesitate to call on the security authorities to take care of the physical condition of the monument again, leaving for a while the problem of the division of property and the debate around the future concept of the museum.
The blog riverpilgrim.livejournal.com recently started a discussion around the disappearance of not one monument, but a whole typology - river stations. With the decline of transit passenger shipping, the very need for these wonderful architectural structures has disappeared, riverpilgrim writes; as a result, the state of many of them turned out to be deplorable. At best, river stations have become shopping and office centers, at worst, they are being destroyed from desolation. For example, the river station in Khanty-Mansiysk is lucky: as the user botsman_m specifies, it performs several functions at once, in addition to the main one, and also a bus station, a hotel and an office building. In Omsk, according to ugeen_omsk, the station was saved from desolation by turning it into a leisure center; “The form was handled with great care,” adds the user. - Nothing superfluous was added, except for blue glazing. But the Kazan river station was closed for the next reconstruction quite recently, the author of the blog notes; it will be converted into a hotel.
However, such a re-profiling of buildings is not yet the worst option: the owners of architectural monuments are increasingly "re-profiling" them with the help of demolition. In Nizhny Novgorod, an attempt to destroy a merchant's mansion on Ilyinskaya Street turned for the developer into a dramatic clash with public figures, with insults, a fight and proceedings with the police. The report from the scene was published on the blog live-report.livejournal.com. And in Syzran, as reported in the blog https://samara-arch.livejournal.com, the other day started to demolish the house of the tradesman Galaktionov. True, there was no "human shield" of public figures here, perhaps because it never occurred to anyone that they would demolish a monument of cultural heritage, to which the regional Ministry of Culture is also holding an auction for the right to develop a protected zone.
In the meantime, the inhabitants of Minsk in the blog realt.onliner.by discussed the most "correct" restoration and reconstruction of historical objects of recent years. They were chosen by the chairman of the Belarusian Voluntary Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments Anton Astapovich. The list, by the way, turned out to be rather short: according to bloggers, there are few good restorations due to a gap in the protection legislation, which allows both restoration and reconstruction on historical sites, up to demolition and subsequent reconstruction.
At the end of the review, there is a photo report from Denis Romodin's recent excursion along Vorontsovo Pole Street, which surprisingly kept the old Moscow buildings intact until the 1930s. However, even the XX century left an unusually many interesting monuments here, from the buildings of Boris Iofan in the 1920s. and Leonid Pavlov of the 1960s, to the most modern, designed by the bureau of Sergei Skuratov.
