British architect Norman Foster, who with the departure of Mayor Luzhkov has ceased to be an invited guest in Moscow, this week again attracted the attention of our media. After all his Moscow projects died on the sly, the capital's council decided to sort out the last one - the reconstruction project of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. Pushkin - with whom Lord Foster, together with Russian co-author Sergei Tkachenko, won an international competition in 2009. It turned out that Foster's bureau had nothing to do with him for two months already, they wrote in Kommersant. Rejoicing at the incident, Mikhail Belov comments in his blog that Lord Foster had no right to "lay out his sliced soap in the security zones of the museum." However, if a global figure personally came to defend its project on a council, it could have ended differently, Belov adds, since “we still tend to romanticize Western stars”, not embarrassed even by unprecedented budget losses during such “star construction”, concludes the architect …
In the comments, meanwhile, Foster was declared “not a very great architect” and even worse, but Mikhail Belov, in fairness, noted that the Briton “got out of hand” after the 1990s, when he became a guest performer of the “nomadic circus of world architecture stars”. In turn, Dmitry Khmelnitsky, in the comments on Archi.ru, wonders what exactly and for what reason Foster had to answer to the Arch Council, since his artistic decision had already been chosen once. “If now there is no clarity in the project with the boundaries of sites and land surveying, then this is a puncture of the city authorities. Their clarification does not at all require the personal participation of the author of the project in some public events,”Khmelnitsky writes. - "There can be no place for any state censorship agency in this system."
The RUPA community at that time became interested in the projects of residential development of Moscow industrial zones, which will be devoted to the September seminar at the MARSH school. Urbanists, meanwhile, admitted that the task for a student workshop is unbearable - at least for an interdisciplinary group, writes Igor Popovsky. Alexander Antonov noted that while discussions and exchange of experience are underway, in reality, the fragmentary development of Moscow's industrial zones continues just like under Yuri Luzhkov. And many projects “leave much to be desired,” agrees Yaroslav Kovalchuk, for example, a project reviewed by the Arch Council on the territory of the “Hammer and Sickle” plant, where, according to the user, an ordinary microdistrict was drawn. MARSH students were offered to shift the subject of research to ordinary Russian cities, where, as Alexander Antonov writes, there are also many industrial zones in the center, but it is not profitable for local municipalities to turn them into housing: "It would be much more useful, and the solutions developed could be replicated throughout the country." …
And a little earlier, in the same group, they discussed the curious urban planning phenomenon of Kaliningrad, about which the architect Oleg Vasyutin writes. If today Russian cities are periodically trying to try on Western models, then exactly the opposite story happened here, and the European imperial city, as Alexander Antonov writes, “was not even asked how Soviet urbanism would suit it or not”. They found an example very instructive: the same Antonov, for example, notes that, most likely, the opposite attempt - to come to a Soviet city with European ideas - will end sadly: “There is already one precedent. However, in Perm the experiment did not have time to go far”. The members of the group added that Belgrade and Berlin suffered from the modernist aesthetics of the plan, and that, in general, modernist urban planning, as Vasily Baburov writes, “has a place in a museum, not in life. It's time to end this experiment, otherwise the joke dragged on."
Philosopher Alexander Rappaport, meanwhile, devotes a recent blog post to the aesthetics and symbolism of exhibition pavilions, which, according to Rappaport, have evolved over the past century from temples of scientific achievement to the "sublime absurdity" of booths. What is the famous sculpture of Vera Mukhina, who exhibited images of tyrannous murderers as a symbol of the Soviet world - this, writes Rappaport, can only be explained by the power of ideological hypnosis.
Architect Andrey Anisimov, meanwhile, writes on his Facebook blog about how his colleagues shamelessly quote his project within the framework of the “200 Temples Program”. In the comments, Anisimov was quick to note that one can only rejoice in imitating one's own projects. The architect himself is not going to defend copyright, but he regrets that the project, which has turned into the Church of Saints Constantine and Helena in Mitino, has become worse. “You can take an analogue as a basis, but you have to do better! - Anisimov quotes his teacher. "Otherwise it will be a parody!" As a result, the parody turned out: “The proportions are broken, the thin Nimeyer columns with the bell of the belfry do not fit into the overall composition, the thick apse on the right emphasizes this even more,” notes Vladimir Pryadikhin. “The proportions of the bell tower and the porch are the result of the passion for concrete. If a colleague Obolensky had been building in brick, then all this would have collapsed! " - adds the author of the blog.
Miracles with proportions, meanwhile, are happening in the project of a low-budget baptismal church, which Andrei Anisimov proposed to build for a copper dome already in one of the Nizhny Novgorod parishes. It turned out extravagantly: a miniature temple under a heavy drum literally "flooded or fell asleep under the very neck", writes Oleg Karlson, as if "a monument to fallen temples." The project reminded the user of Ksenia Bo of the fabulous “short-lived hero”: “In temple architecture, it is more customary to see the sublimity, the aspiration to the sky. And here I would like to ask - who lives in the little house? " However, the situation for the design was also extraordinary, as Anisimov himself writes, "there is such a chapter that if not a temple, then a chapel can be made right inside, if not for the metal structures."
And the architect Sergey Estrin shares his impressions of the exhibition of the contemporary Belgian artist Francis Alus in the Gallery on Solyanka. His video installation reminded Estrin of Andrei Tarkovsky's films with long pauses and drawn out scenes. And although the architect, according to him, hardly switches to the rhythm of contemplation and meditation, this time he "froze motionless and for a long time, unable to take his eyes off the monotonous movement on the screen."
