These days, the Moscow Central Exhibition Hall "Manezh" is hosting almost the main architectural event of the season - the International Urban Forum, so the lion's share of the architectural press this week is dedicated to it. The director Olga Papadina told in detail who and what is speaking there to the newspaper "Moscow News". And "Evening Moscow" talked with Yuri Grigoryan about the results of the study "Archeology of the Periphery", which was carried out by a joint group of architects, economists and culturologists of Spaced. According to Grigoryan, Berlin today demonstrates the ideal urban periphery, where a large-scale reconstruction of industrial housing was carried out. However, in addition to Berlin, the Moscow outskirts have two more options - "Asian", with the construction of high-rise buildings on the site of low-rise buildings, and "English" - with cottages and townhouses, the RBK portal is drowning. Why is the Berlin experience preferable? Because nothing needs to be demolished: as Yuri Grigoryan notes, the free planning of micro-districts reproduces and maintains a special social structure in them - “that's why the society there is quite homogeneous and ghettos have not yet been formed in these micro-districts. The arrangement of the space itself, ventilated, passable, inherited from the Soviet era, is still minimizing it."
Gazeta.ru, meanwhile, interviewed one of the forum's speakers, professor at the Beijing Municipal Institute of Urban Planning and Design Feng Fei Fei. Now it has become popular to compare Moscow and Beijing; even the deputy mayor of Moscow, Marat Khusnullin, in a recent interview with Itogi noted that only in our country and in China there is such a concept as a general plan, which is firmly connected with the Soviet planning system. Feng Fei Fei, however, notes rather the differences in the expansion of the Moscow and Beijing agglomerations. For the Chinese, the territory of the Moscow region is “very large” and the population is “only a little more than 7 million people,” so there are enough opportunities to develop cities near Moscow by pulling people out of the capital, according to Feng Fei Fei. Beijing went through this, the expert adds, however, for the sake of expansion, it once severely damaged the ecological and cultural system around the city.
Meanwhile, the capital's mayor's office, as can be understood from the interview with Khusnullin, is just planning to fill the annexed territories with new "points of growth." The main concern of the authorities now is to build places of employment; in New Moscow, twelve of them have already been identified, including Rublevo-Arkhangelskoye, Skolkovo, Rumyantsevo, Vnukovo, up to a million jobs in total. On the eve, Gazeta.ru talked about this with the French architect Philippe Panerai, head of the PANERAI & ASSOCIES bureau, who reached the final of the competition for the concept of the International Financial Center in Rublevo-Arkhangelskoye.
Architect Sergei Skuratov this week gave a long interview to Novaya Gazeta, in which he spoke about the birth of the author's ideas, as well as how difficult it is to fight for a project at all stages - "from initial expertise to final designer supervision" - and generally exist in the current building "climate", where, for example, the concentration of power of the chief architect, according to Skuratov, is "indecent" high. At that time, Afisha magazine asked the architect of the metro stations of the new Kozhukhovskaya line, Alexander Vigdorov, about how they would look. According to the architect, never before had such a large piece been designed and built at the same time, and this gave an amazing opportunity to do everything in a single style, with a single navigation and a single technology. But some of the stations eventually dropped out of the planned "coordinate system" - they will be made according to Spanish technology; and yet Alexander Vigdorov promises to surprise Muscovites with high architectural quality.
The Napoleonic plans of the mayor's office, in addition to OT, continue to extend to the pedestrian infrastructure - Moscow 24 writes about the design of new pedestrian routes, which will now connect Shchelkovskoye and Ryazanskoye highways with the Garden Ring and will run along Stromynka, Rusakovskaya, Krasnoprudnaya and Nizhegorodskaya streets. They will not completely cover them for cars, but they will significantly narrow the roadway. The same portal reports on the long-awaited decision to restore the pearl of the Moscow avant-garde - the Melnikov house in Krivoarbatsky lane, which will be financed by the Ministry of Culture.
And in St. Petersburg, meanwhile, disputes are going on around the reconstruction of two very large-scale monuments. Maria Elkina on the portal art1.ru speaks critically about the quality of the sketches for the reconstruction of Apraksin Dvor, prepared by the workshop of Timur Bashkaev. The sketches should be attributed to the genre of architectural utopias, the journalist writes, since they do not contain answers to fundamental questions - about transport accessibility, the adaptation of historical buildings to new commercial functions, etc. And "Fontanka.ru", in turn, reports on the difficult situation with the reconstruction of Gostiny Dvor, which seems to have changed their minds to cover with a glass dome. The publication writes about adjusting the project, but it is unclear whether the current version is final, so that in the fate of the monument, which occupies a whole block, like Apraksin Dvor, there is an ellipsis again. At the end of the review - Grigory Revzin's remark towards the sensational, but also suddenly died down stories with a "suitcase" on Red Square. The critic could not stand aside, because the pursuit of such a wonderful symbol "about the attitude to reality as a fun secret, about the ironic joy from the diversity of life" is considered unfair. “Red Square is our place where the authorities have historically fought with the city for who determines the image of Russia,” the author writes. It is sad that this time the authorities turned out to be completely in solidarity with the Muscovites that everything here must be “cleaned out of the crowd, out of fun, out of joy, from purchases and gifts, drive the French in three necks, and walk in formation, amicably,” notes critic, got what they wanted.
