Regulations and city codes are tools that are familiar to architects around the world, but not in Russia. The norm, under which the rules of the game in an urban area are established in advance and do not change during its course, began to be introduced into practice in Europe and North America back in the 19th - early 20th centuries. By now, has reached unprecedented heights, on the one hand, the ability of urban planners to describe in words and numbers the characteristics of almost any architectural solution through the limiting parameters of the building for their inclusion in the regulations; on the other hand, architects have also been trained to make the most of the framework provided. The result of any urban planning competition is immediately described in the form of a "building envelope" and, even if the project architect changes or different architectural firms are involved in the implementation, the space-planning solution approved by the jury remains. In different cities, regulations set more and less stringent; in the United States, smart codes are increasingly used, flexibly linking the characteristics of a building to the location of a land plot in a city.
As for our country, the regulations for our architects remain something incomprehensible, unpleasant and constraining the framework of fantasy. Naturally, architects are supported by developers, for whom the regulations limit the amount of profit. Although the place of regulations in the system of town planning regulation is determined by the town planning code of Russia, in almost all cities they are written in such a way that de facto they do not regulate anything. It’s easier for us, we are used to not setting the rules in advance, but agreeing on them already in the process of working with those who are "feeding".
Of the republics of the former Soviet Union, today only the Baltic States have introduced the system of urban planning regulation that is familiar to Europeans. Rather, they simply restored the provisions of their building codes of the pre-Soviet period there. Thus, Riga returned to the simple regulations of the early 20th century, according to which a building cannot be higher than the width of the street on which it stands - this allows to create a humane, human-scale building.
Surprisingly, in Russia, despite the fact that few of the designers are familiar with the modern principles of urban planning regulation, it was the architects who initiated the first projects developed within a predetermined spatial framework. Perhaps the most famous example is the reconstruction of Ostozhenka on the initiative and in accordance with the urban planning concept of Alexander Skokan, Andrey Gnezdilov and Rais Baishev.
The Ostozhenka area, as you know, throughout the Soviet period remained a territory where no new construction was carried out at all. This was due to the fact that, according to the Stalinist plan for the reconstruction of Moscow, instead of the narrow and crooked Ostozhenka, a wide avenue was to be laid, running from Gorky Park to the Palace of Soviets, built up with ceremonial ensembles, and it was planned to demolish all the low buildings of the Ostozhenka lanes. This decision was translated from the master plan into the master plan, but even the mighty Soviet state did not have the strength to carry out a large-scale resettlement and demolition.
And so it happened that neither Stalinist skyscrapers nor Brezhnev's pink brick houses appeared in this area. In the 1980s, the idea of a prospect was finally abandoned and it was decided to build houses in the area to manage the affairs of the USSR Council of Ministers. The Moscow Architectural Institute was asked to design, where a team was assembled, which later became the Ostozhenka bureau. The project they developed was very different from the traditional detailed planning projects for that time, it was based on the ideas of the "environmental approach" that were fashionable at that time, which until that moment were almost never realized in real urban planning works, remaining the lot of brilliant theorists. Conceptually, the project was remarkably similar to the master plan for Berlin by Hans Stiemann, which was being developed around the same time. The architects, according to Alexander Skokan, set the task of restoring the historical urban environment, meaning by this not the restoration of mansions or the construction of new objects of similar dimensions, but the restoration of the town-planning fabric of the district [1]. Although, according to the Soviet tradition, no regulations were formally established, the development projects were initially coordinated with Ostozhenka and the general principles of the project, which provided for building no higher than existing buildings, were respected.
Since the beginning of the 2000s, buildings began to appear in the district, built by excellent Moscow architects - Sergei Skuratov, Yuri Grigoryan. At some point, a unique environment for Moscow really emerged here, when historical houses peacefully coexisted with modern buildings.
But the high quality of the environment plus the proximity of the area to the Kremlin played a cruel joke on Ostozhenka: the area became extremely prestigious and the price of real estate in it quickly skyrocketed to sky-high peaks. And, thereby, it attracted the interest of leading Moscow developers, who until then had not shown interest in more than modest in scale and costly for demolition and resettlement development projects in this old corner of Moscow. It turned out that a delicate approach to preserving the environment while improving its quality increased the capitalization of real estate here many times over, but the resulting investment hyperactivity did not benefit the territory. Since the height restrictions were not fixed in legally binding documents, their observance was monitored only in manual mode, when the projects were coordinated. And, as usual, by hook or by crook, developers began to try to increase the number of storeys, increasing the output of the sold areas. The first to rise above the neighbors was the building of the Galina Vishnevskaya School, and now there are already a dozen of such "protruding" houses, although "high-rise buildings" have not yet appeared. The second negative consequence of the "investment boom" is that they began to buy apartments not in order to live in them, but primarily with the aim of investing money in the rapidly growing real estate. Residents began to disappear from the area, today there are much more guards than pedestrians. Nobody took care of the social aspects of the project in time, and there is no experience of social design of territories in Russia yet. Finally, for the sake of profit, they began to demolish not only dilapidated houses, but also historical buildings, which actually formed the environment of Ostozhenka.
As a result, Ostozhenka will destroy itself today. Several important conclusions can be drawn from the experience of its development. The first is that regulations only work when they are legally binding. There is a whole legal basis for this, we will talk about it a little later. If the restrictions are established only as a good intention, there will always be those willing to violate them. The second conclusion: it is not enough to normalize only the actual parameters of buildings; it is necessary to form a socially diverse environment, using for this, among other things, regulations and standards of urban planning. It is also necessary to legally protect the most valuable buildings from possible demolition.
[1] Anna Martovitskaya. Alexander Skokan: “An architectural structure always grows out of place” // archi.ru, 2.04.2012. URL:
