"Substitution" is one of ten concepts shown in 2010 at the Moscow Biennale of Architecture within the framework of the project "The Future of the Metropolis. Project Moscow”, curated by Elena Gonzalez.
Let us remind you that just three years ago the terms “urbanism” and “new urban planning policy” were not at all as popular as they are today, and the problem of residential areas worried only the inhabitants of the latter. There was still a year left until the idea of expanding Moscow appeared, and the fiercest debates on urban planning were around the approval of the General Plan of Moscow (which is already being revised today). This is the background against which Elena Gonzalez initiated her project. The curator asked ten architectural bureaus of the capital: “What will Moscow look like in 40-50-60 years? Show your vision in one picture."
In fact, the project participants had to express themselves with the help of some futuristic canvas on an architectural and urban planning theme, but the DNA architectural group took this task deeper. The team used it as an excuse to ask the question: what problems are there in the city and what would they like to change? Moreover, it should be changed at the structural level.
“And yet, despite the fact that we have significantly expanded the scope of the initially set task, this is not a scientific or even strictly design work, but rather a conceptual and artistic project,” says Natalya Sidorova. Perhaps it would have remained in the biennial's portfolio and catalogs if the theses voiced in it three years later had not formed the basis for the formation of a new urban planning policy for the city. “We also want to show“Substitution”because, by a curious coincidence, then, three years ago, we chose the Biryulyovo-Zapadnoye district to illustrate our position, to which heightened public attention was recently attracted,” adds Konstantin Khodnev. But if today the topic of publications about Byuryulev has shifted towards acute social and political statements, then the architects drew attention to this part of Moscow precisely as a classic example of a "sleeping area" - a gigantic town-planning formation dominated by structures of cyclopean size and comparable in scale vacant lots. It was quite obvious to the architects that, for all its unattractiveness, this area and numerous similar places in Moscow have enormous potential for the qualitative development of the city, and, unlike industrial zones, the reorganization of which is not only lazy, people already live in these territories, acutely in need of positive change.
Without limiting themselves to one picture, the architects nevertheless found one key concept for their work that conveys the essence of all proposed structural changes. Substitution is an attempt to literally incorporate one piece of urban fabric into another. In this case, a piece of the Moscow center as an example of the most socially and town-planning environment in Biryulyovo-Zapadnoye. “We have mixed on the same scale the existing inhuman superstructure of this territory and the development of the city center, clearly showing what is lacking in“sleeping areas to form a full-fledged urban environment,”explains Daniel Lorenz. “Our main task was to smooth out the existing strong heterogeneity of districts in the center and in the periphery, where a normal urban environment is essentially absent.”
The architects literally impose a picturesque pattern of narrow winding streets, chamber courtyards, pedestrian squares, boulevards and squares on the general plan of Biryulovo, thereby clearly showing how poor the environment of the modern Moscow sleeping area is. Even where houses are grouped into enclaves of neighborhoods, there is so much uninhabited space that even greenery does not brighten it up. It is clear that such a social and spatial vacuum makes the area the antipode of a cozy, inhabited center. As for greenery, the authors of the project are not afraid to redistribute it, turning it into “urban greening”, that is, creating conditions for the organic coexistence of nature and architecture.
In addition to landscaped squares and parks, the development must be saturated with clubs, cafes, shops, offices, theaters, museums - in other words, public functions and places of employment, to which pedestrian accessibility must be ensured. In the long term, architects believe that the most important means of fighting for the humanization of the environment is a gradual change in the quality of existing buildings by reducing the height and creating spaces that are human-scaled. "Substitution", thus, extends not only to the general layout of the district, but also to its main "content", i.e. panel housing. In the DNA project, the existing building is first transformed into a more comfortable 5-7-storey building, and then, over time, it is dismantled and replaced by parks and ponds that preserve the memory of the place. So, on the general plan "Moscow 2060" "gears" and "arcs", in reality formed by monotonous multi-storey buildings, still dominate, but in green and blue colors. “The project was purely conceptual, with a large fifty-year planning horizon, but it sets the real vector of development,” the architects say. - In order for such a transformation of residential areas into a normal urban environment to become possible, now it is necessary to think over and put into strategic documents of territorial planning a new, denser network of streets in addition to the existing ones, and to carry out the transformation or replacement of existing buildings in stages, based on a single maps of "age of life" and the state of houses and types of their series."
Today, when the replacement of one type of urban space with another is becoming a defining strategy for the development of Moscow (microdistricts are replaced by neighborhoods, roads, where possible, pedestrian zones, vacant lots - parks, etc.), the project developed by the architectural group DNA three years ago is perceived as a come true urban forecast … And the architects themselves continue to consider it more than relevant - after all, not Biryulyovo-Zapadnoye, as any other part of the "sleeping belt" of the capital can be transformed according to this scenario into a full-fledged urban environment.
