A well-known fighter on the Internet against stereotypes of the improvement of Russian cities, blogger Ilya Varlamov recently angered the Internet audience with a provocative post entitled "Novosibirsk is a city without a face." "The impression that I walked for two days in the parking lot near the shopping center," - writes the blogger. - The city is not visible because of the advertising, which here in 10 layers covers everything in general. Beautiful wooden houses and constructivist monuments are hopelessly drowning in this urban chaos and, most importantly, according to Varlamov, this is the portrait of the absolute majority of Russian cities.
The authorities of Novosibirsk, according to bloggers, have accepted the challenge and are ready to prove the opposite to Varlamov; and meanwhile, the users themselves one hundred percent agree with the diagnosis of the famous science city: “The roads are hell, very dusty, a flea market, there are very few parks and walking areas,” writes, for example, tsymbulov. However, others called Varlamov's post unfair, since the city's budget is too small compared to the capital, and he has not yet built up any historical “fat”, as masha_klim writes: “It is simply being built up the way they are building in the world today. Maybe without any architectural refinements, but not worse than others."
Meanwhile, what the right urban environment should be, Varlamov and his colleagues in the "City Projects" are now trying to find out during their summer practice in St. Petersburg. By analogy with Tverskaya Street in Moscow, activists examined Nevsky Prospekt for the presence of a variety of public spaces and visual advertising rubbish on the facades.
In Volgograd, the project for the improvement of the central embankment sowed serious discord among architects and townspeople. In addition to the fact that the embankment will be “dressed in concrete,” a number of new objects will appear on it, side by side with two dozen memorial sites, which, according to experts, still do not have security zones. In this regard, bloggers fear that small spots of development will quickly grow into large objects and wonder why they even need to redo something that looks good now. For example, the user Guest proposes, instead of dubious improvement, “to build a new embankment in a new place in the Voroshilovsky district”.
The blog of architect Andrei Anisimov discusses a competition held inside the studio for the project of a memorial complex with a temple at the Levashovsky cemetery in St. Petersburg. The participants in the discussion were especially impressed by the project of the underground temple of Anna Menshova, which, according to Anisimov, is perhaps the only relevant one if it is not possible to withdraw this territory from the nature protection zone. “The idea of an underground temple impressed with the possibility of a new concept,” writes Konstantin Kamyshanov. - The intersection of the worlds of the living and the dead at the point of Easter. The Temple of Calvary is very interesting. The architecture of this variant, which started modestly, can develop into an amazing architectural and theological find. " Meanwhile, Konstantin Kamyshanov replies to the adherents of traditional solutions that “the idea should provide new opportunities for revealing the meaning of worship, especially since“the development of old forms, sooner or later, will come to a dead end as soon as all the possibilities of geometric derivatives are exhausted …”. The underground temple is a favorite project of Andrei Anisimov himself, a supporter of a non-stereotypical line of thought. And Elena Gurova adds that the church in the bowels of the gentle, grassy Russian hillock is “a parallel, very traditional, but practically non-existent form of sacred space. The cave is the ideal of architecture. Both natural and man-made."
Another St. Petersburg, this time a very eccentric project to "dress" the scandalous Mariinsky-2 in new facades has caused a lot of controversy on the network. The neoclassical clothes for the second scene, making it more "appropriate" in the urban context, were invented by the architect Sergei Politin. Cutting off "unnecessary details" - a glass bridge, awnings, orchestral balconies - Politin promises to turn it from a "shopping center" into a "Venetian palazzo" quite painlessly for the theater. “Dressing up the modern architecture of the theater interior in retro clothes is inappropriate and strange …”, - a user under the nickname Architect comments on the idea. Moreover, if these clothes are simply mechanical, in the words of Almak, repetition of identical sections or "a heavy lump of perforated stone", according to the user Engineer: "Monotonous, endless repetition of identical three-part windows, monstrous heavy cornice, no silhouette. It resembles neoclassicism, but in its worst manifestation - like the oil office under construction from Mityurev on Aptekarskaya embankment,”the blogger concludes. However, there were enough supporters of the theater aging project in the network.
Meanwhile, philosopher Alexander Rappaport discusses the traditional values of architecture according to Vitruvius in his blog. In particular, he is interested in one of the fundamental categories of the Vitruvian triad - utility, which Rappaport is willing to argue about the necessity of. The values of modern architecture, as the philosopher writes in another article, were perfectly expressed by Rem Koolhaas, describing, in particular, the most important phenomenon of our time - bigness or super-scale. Rappaport finds in him both the “phantom pain of urban expansion” and the echo of the avant-garde “planites for earthlings”, but not in the sublime, but in the everyday sense, embodied, for example, in the Luna Parks.
The age-old traditions of construction, meanwhile, are bursting today not only from the crisis of ideology, but also from the onslaught of technology. The economics of construction and architecture itself change dramatically when buildings stop being built and start being flooded with giant 3D printers. In the blog theoryandpractice.ru, researcher Petr Novikov talks about this technology and his experiments with 3D printing of buildings and 3D printing in the air.
However, high-tech thought is still incredibly far from Russian architectural reality, Mikhail Belov notes, in turn, commenting on the recent lecture of the famous Japanese minimalist Toyo Ito at Strelka. The performances of such "transcontinental pilgrims of pulsating architectural thought", according to Belov, only confuse the architectural youth: they "froze in a contemplative pose and expects that Russia will wake up tomorrow as an innovative building superpower", while it is high time to move it "from the infantile and a contemplative position into a purely working and productive position,”concludes the architect.
And Sergey Estrin shares in his blog design experiments on decorating clothes with architectural graphics. It turns out very gracefully: on a white top, a Gothic cathedral grows in thin lines, and on a long skirt - an old city with streets, towers and roofs: “The skirt moves, and the drawing, as in a kaleidoscope, now gathers into a single whole, then breaks into pieces with picturesque fragments cities , - the architect admires his creation.
