The victory of Maksim Atayants in the competition for the "court quarter" in St. Petersburg caused an extraordinary animation in blogs. Apparently because such architecture has not won here for a long time and sometimes did not even participate in competitions. In addition, the competition itself was unusual for Peter: for some reason, foreign stars were not invited to it, and even the winner was not from among the architectural elite. All this is very inspiring for some and annoying for others. Architectural critics spoke in favor of Maxim Atayants: Grigory Revzin wrote in Kommersant, and Lara Kopylova noted on Facebook that this is “a project worthy of old Petersburg”. Mikhail Belov in his blog even called the incident "a change of paradigms", and personally congratulated Maxim Atayants.
But the classical paradigm, as one might expect, was not supported by everyone. Boris Vorobyev called the project on the page of Mikhail Belov “retro attempts to satisfy the tastes of the bureaucracy, which sees in the bureaucracy of warrants a kind of expression of the power and greatness of state power over the rabble”. “Well, Peter chose his own development, he will be“canned food”, writes Vitalij Anančenko. “We are growing beards and getting ridiculous, urgently! Until they were taken away or publicly branded,”comments Sergey Skuratov. Some, meanwhile, found Atayants' project very metaphorical: “The project is so exactly in line with our courts, Mussolini would have approved,” Yaroslav Kovalchuk, for example, writes on Facebook. "Rigid, totalitarian, formidable architecture is what is needed for the court," notes kleomen. "Lack of greenery, public spaces and massive, goofy buildings behind, Dance Theater in the backyard - all this didn't matter anymore when there was such imperial beauty." "The empire wants imperial architecture," agrees Alexander Lozhkin.
Mikhail Belov was seriously affected by the controversy surrounding the Atayants project. To critics of the project, who consider the development of the quarter around the perimeter primitive, “like in the 18th century,” the architect reminds that this “primitive”, invented three centuries ago by the Betskoy town planning commission, “penetrated the soul of the Russian urban landscape and did not damage it, but only increased the metaphysical quality ". Such a layout, Belov writes, seems monotonous only at first glance, "the point is in a unique and accurate fit into the scale of the Russian landscape."
Primitivism is more about modern "urbanism", in which a residential area can look like a poultry farm or a Ford conveyor belt. This is roughly how the new microdistrict "Perspective" in Stavropol looks like. And the blog mingitau.livejournal.com is already discussing another inhuman quarter - the Koshelev-project in Samara: “To build almost a hundred barrack houses for 50 thousand people in a tape - urban planning in Russia did not reach such baseness even in the 1930s … No balconies, no courtyards, no public spaces. Sociologists urgently need to establish monitoring of the development of social relations, because The "Koshelev-project" will be included in textbooks as an example of a fertile environment for all kinds of deviations. " “Its author either read social dystopias or committed professional hara-kiri when he created this,” notes mingitau. - After all, this is MEGA's understudy, a real hypermarket of people, where instead of shelves there are apartments. The outer wall and roof are missing. " It remains to save the situation by reformatting the first floors for social and cultural facilities and a radical increase in the area of apartments, adds beskarss217891.
Meanwhile, at RUPA, impressed by the urban seminars held the day before for the mayors of Russian cities, they finally decided to find out what to mean by the term “urbanism”, which unexpectedly turned out to be a very fashionable occupation. Alexander Antonov and Yaroslav Kovalchuk proposed their versions. Meanwhile, in two days of "accelerated urbanization" ("this is a process when in 2 days the mayors were taught what I studied at the institute for 3 years, and then another 20 years in practice," Antonov explains), some of the officials took that the only institute in the country that knows how to engage in urban planning is Strelka, an unknown source quotes the architect.
But Strelka itself, in passing, found itself in the center of another network story. The website calvertjournal.com published an article by Anna Poznik, who teaches there, about the Moscow Architectural Institute, more precisely, about what is wrong with the country's main architectural school and why it is losing out to modern ones - Strelka and MARCH. Markhishniks greeted unpleasant lines about themselves violently: not that they did not agree, but they were very agitated. “Everything is much more dramatic than you think,” comments, for example, Oksana Kupriyanova, “foreign students haven’t come to us for a long time, we have no actual dissertations to defend for a long time. But comparing the Moscow Architectural Institute with Strelka and MARSH is even more stupid, because, despite its backwardness and wretchedness, the Moscow Architectural Institute has a developed teaching method and Ladovsky's author's course in the first two years. - “Students at the Moscow Architectural Institute are really passive, and there is guilt in both teachers and systems, but this is gradually changing,” notes Dmitry Karelin. And according to Yaroslav Kovalchuk, the Moscow Architectural Institute is degrading and needs a serious reform, because what they teach there is almost unrelated to architecture. “She is now about something completely different. Drawing, constructions, projects of clubs - this is all from the last century”, but you need to teach yourself to think independently, the architect believes. And “to be able to compose architectural objects,” Oleg Maksimov is sure; but this is precisely what is being called into question in today's Moscow Architectural Institute.
By the way, true creative thinking will never allow an architect to sit still - here Sergey Estrin, in the composition of architectural images, has long since switched from paper to scrap materials and decorates women's wardrobe items with graphics. On his blog, the architect publishes photographs of the recent "sports collection" of textile designs.
At the end of the review - the exposure of the sensational story on the network with the destruction of the medieval church in the Kaliningrad region. The day before, the well-known East Prussian local historian swinokotleta accused the participants of the recent Russian-Belarusian exercises “West-2013” of destroying the monument, who allegedly used it as a target. However, blogger varandej later found out that Gross-Engelau had collapsed earlier, “between March 2011 and November 2012”. However, the reasons for the collapse are still not clear; bloggers suggest that back in Soviet times, the church suffered greatly from the bursting of shells at a nearby training ground, and perhaps the matter is in elementary mismanagement, since it turns out that the construction of the 14th century was not guarded.
