The new competition for the NCCA museum and exhibition complex continues to sow doubts among architects and the art community. The day before, Mikhail Belov understood the logic of the next creative competition in his blog. Belov considers the organization of an international competition with an open phase a month in length a mockery, since “in a couple of weeks it is beyond the power of either students of architecture universities or“architects working for their uncle”to shake off the concept of a symbol of contemporary Russian art. So The most important, according to Belov, the open part of the competition has been squeezed to the point of formality in order to quickly weed out unnecessary competitors and proceed to the “beloved, clear, understandable” closed part.
However, it is possible that not only the competition is formal, but also its purpose, Mikhail Belov continues in comments on Facebook. More recently, Yuri Avvakumov wrote about the transfer of the project from Baumanskaya to Khodynka as an obvious absurdity, but, according to Mikhail Belov, from the position of the authorities, everything is very logical: the new museum is five percent of the volume of the cyclopean shopping center planned there, a kind of cultural burden for a retail investor, but in fact, "an architectural kazyavka on the body of an architectural monster," writes the blog author. It would even be more pragmatic to rent out part of the retail space for one-time shares of the NCCA, Belov notes, than to architecturally “sprinkle the snow of contemporary art” with another retail, which has appeared there, by the way, in the shadow of the aviation museum, which has already sunk into oblivion.
Mikhail Belov recently heard about other popular projects of the Moscow mayor's office from a round table with the participation of S. Sobyanin, S. Kuznetsov, G. Revzin, Y. Grigoryan and others, shown the day before on the Russia 24 channel. Again "socially chatting" about parks and embankments,
comments Belov, leaving out of brackets the most painful issues of the current city policy, such as the activities of the City Land Commission or the pressure on the architects of the "yoke of the building complex", which Grigory Revzin recalled.
Meanwhile, the very popular projects that Sobyanin's administration has become famous for in recent years, according to blogger Oleg Kozyrev, are actually turning out to be populist. So, under the guise of landscaping, specially protected natural areas are being destroyed, transport hubs under construction turn out to be shopping complexes and "strangleholds" for traffic, and the decision of the mayor's office to massively build on five-story buildings leads to the fact that the quiet green courtyards of the Khrushchev buildings will look like Novokurkino, Kozyrev concludes. In the comments to the author, however, they noticed that all of the above is mainly "merit" not of Sobyanin, but of his predecessor, under whom both the first TPUs and standard projects for the superstructure of five-story buildings appeared. Moreover, the latter, according to Yuri Timchuk, are not so bad, they borrow the German experience and are implemented only with the consent of the tenants. And user Alex Ordo reminded that TPU facilities are transferred to the investor as an encumbrance, so there is nothing to be surprised at the appearance of a number of commercial facilities.
Denis Galitsky wrote about the new lighting in the project for the reconstruction of the Perm embankment at this time in his magazine. The blogger discusses which type of lighting fixtures will suit her best: modern designer ones with directional light, or traditional lanterns that create a familiar garland of lights with a spectacular reflection in the water. Local authorities have already spent money on prototypes of the first, but Denis Galitsky writes that "this is just a handicraft horror of the level of Artemy Lebedev's stops." - “Like hanging ones, with barbed wire, like border ones, quite,” the perfectmixer user agrees.“They are acceptable in the natural landscapes of a western village or as a design trend in geometry”; but in the conditions of the embankment, the lamps proposed in the project are completely inappropriate, the blogger concludes.
And Ilya Varlamov, a blogger and propagandist of the pedestrian city, writes about the oldest tram stop in Moscow. Varlamov found her in Krasnostudensky passage. By the way, it can be called preserved with a stretch, since as a result of the fire, only metal columns with a lattice remained from the original structure; but they, as they write, were either built in 1926, or even in 1886, "when a steam tram line was laid here, or, as it was affectionately called, a steam train," Varlamov specifies. Bloggers found the stop to be graceful, well worth the old Parisian metro pavilions, and could even serve as the basis for similar modern projects.
In the meantime, the study of deeper antiquity was started in the VKontakte community dedicated to ancient Vologda, where a video of a three-dimensional reconstruction of the local wooden Kremlin from the times of Ivan the Terrible appeared. And in the blog u1ver.livejournal.com there were images of the project of the main skyscraper of the new complex Grozny-City 2, which is called the Akhmat tower. The 400-meter skyscraper going to the record will resemble a traditional Chechen medieval tower. However, the network called the project ugly and too literally reproducing the images of national architecture.
