The Ministry of Culture recently presented a draft of urban planning regimes and regulations on the territory of the All-Russian Exhibition Center. Reconstruction is not far off, however, as the coordinator of Arkhnadzor Konstantin Mikhailov notes in Gazeta.ru, conceptually nothing has changed in the project for the development of the unique ensemble: the heritage is still considered as a ballast, for the sake of which extensive commercial real estate is being built. True, it now looks “not aggressive” and is located somewhere on the edge, there are no “additions” in the front alley, but they are implied, the town defender is sure. The thing is that the designers and management of the All-Russian Exhibition Center consider the central complex of buildings not as an ensemble of architectural monuments, but as a landmark: Konstantin Mikhailov emphasizes that new construction may take place here with special permission, and it will undoubtedly follow, as happened during the reconstruction stadium "Dynamo".
Meanwhile, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin believes that the situation with the heritage in the capital has improved radically - in an interview with The Village, the mayor noted that today there are dozens of times more monuments under restoration than there were under his predecessor. Moreover, according to the official, the authorities have removed from the map of Moscow almost all the "conflict points" marked by city rights activists, of which there were more than two hundred earlier. But the activists have different numbers: the In Defense of Moscow coalition notes that 2013 cost the historic city the loss of more than 20 monuments, including the Bolkonsky House, disfigured by the restructuring, the Proshins' Apartment House, the buildings of the Novo-Catherine Hospital, etc., writes Yopolis.ru … Historical buildings on the territory of the Sretensky Monastery have recently been added to the mournful list. Although with a lofty goal (the construction of the Temple of the New Martyrs), the current reformers continued the work of the Bolsheviks, who destroyed three ancient temples and a bell tower on the territory of the monastery in 1929, Gazeta.ru quotes Konstantin Mikhailov.
Returning to the plans of the mayor's office for next year, which Sergei Sobyanin announced to The Village portal, we note a new mega-project for the construction of hundreds of kilometers of road and path network in residential areas, which will be implemented under the slogan of transport and pedestrian accessibility of metro stations and transfer hubs. As the article on the mr7.ru portal shows, the problem also exists in St. Petersburg: here residents of residential areas, due to the low density of the road network, are forced to drive to a bakery and walk from a kilometer home from public transport stops.
Sobyanin did not talk about the unsuccessful projects of the year - but they are called "Moscow News". The loudest, perhaps, is the senseless and expensive "greening" of Tverskaya Street. City activists also remind about the waste of budgetary funds on drawing markings for pedestrians in the south-west of Moscow, idle "guide parks" in Sokolniki and the Central Park of Culture and Leisure named after Gorky, etc.
An interesting description of the Moscow mayor in an interview with The Village is given by the well-known Dutch architect Erik van Egeraat. The architect does not hide that he is nostalgic for the Luzhkov era and is very disappointed with one of the first Sobyanin bans - on construction in the historical center. “Sobyanin is more of a technocrat, an administrator. Luzhkov was really passionate about urban planning, he felt and loved the dynamics of this business,”says Egeraat. The idea of forgetting about the center and expanding New Moscow, according to the Dutchman, will lead to the city spreading like an oil slick, like Los Angeles, and traffic will simply stop there.“We need to build parking garages in the center to free public space from cars, to replace low-quality buildings with new ones”; it is another matter that the construction business, according to Egeraat, is "backward" in Russia and it is incredibly difficult to achieve this quality.
Moskovsky Komsomolets and The Village are again writing about the study “Archeology of the Periphery” presented at the Urbanforum, which is now readily cited everywhere. “The city for its own residents is one big outskirts, there is no need to add any new Moscow,” Alexander Urzhanov writes on The Village. Panel "sleeping bags" are a modernist project only in appearance, Moskovsky Komsomolets quotes Grigory Revzin, the current environment was supposed to be avant-garde, but it is conservative; 46% of respondents spend their free time exclusively in their own "district". Drawing on the experience of London, Alexander Urzhanov believes that the only way to relieve social tension is to connect potential ghettos with the "mainland" using the metro. Well, what about this to the Urbanurban.ru portal was told by one of the authors of the study of the periphery, architect Yuri Grigoryan, you can read here.
Architect Sergei Skuratov at this time in an interview with RBC shared his thoughts on the status of the architectural profession, which, in his opinion, "we always have somewhere on the side, as if at the same time, it is not included in our value system." The saddest thing is that such an attitude towards architects generates oncoming traffic, notes Skuratov; so-called The court district in St. Petersburg is a vivid example of "the service of power by an architect, its taste preferences, delusions, lack of forward-looking thinking, ignoring the opinion of the professional majority" and so on.
And at the end of the review, on the contrary, it is not a commercial project at all, which was born at the end of the year by a group of Moscow designers and architects who decided to place memorial plaques on the capital's houses with the names of residents shot during the years of repression. The project is called "Last Address". According to Afisha, the idea belongs to the journalist Sergei Parkhomenko, the architect Yevgeny Ass is engaged in the design, and the most possible version of the memorial signs was developed by the architect Alexander Brodsky.
