The recently concluded competition for the concept of a modern Orthodox church is once again a feat of bloggers to talk about what kind of architecture today "suits" the sacred space. Almost all of the competition projects have now been published on the blog of the famous church architect Andrei Anisimov, and there is an opportunity to evaluate them personally. Most of the work was not approved by colleagues in the shop. In the comments, they write about artificial, tortured solutions, "which were not taken from the millennial history of temple building, but from the results of brainstorming of several people or the suddenly surging inspiration of an architect who has never even been in the service." By the way, these are the words of Andrei Anisimov himself, whom, by his own admission, the past competition finally convinced that “no revolutions are needed”.
Only the dome has been adopted from tradition in modern churches, adds Irina Yazykova, and sometimes it turns into "bags for seeds." Such a peculiarly understood “modernity”, according to Igor Feller, gives only the squalor of forms and the absence of sacredness. The modernization of the external appearance eventually reached a dead end, but the victory of mainly traditional projects is not convincing for everyone, especially since among the winners there was an outright and indecent plagiarism. The author of the blog ar-chitect.livejournal.com, who joined the discussion, published his favorite, which was not included in the number of winners. As renardetraisin notes in this blog, few of the architects who design churches today remember that the plasticity of the interior space should also be "prayerful", but architects think as if it were a club or a theater, the user concludes.
At that time, the blogs of Moscow ethnographers discussed the Internet project "Know Moscow", started by the Department of Cultural Heritage. The website and the mobile application offer to wander around the city, learning stories from the life of the capital's houses, told by local historians and ordinary citizens. On the Internet, they quickly discovered that the resource gives information at times strange and inaccurate. "Postmodernist Alexei Shchusev, a cross-domed structure at the Park Kultury metro station and in the Temple of Philip Metropolitan in Meshchanskaya Sloboda, the Leningradskaya hotel, which is both baroque, pseudo-Russian style, and Stalinist Empire" was found on the website by an employee of the Museum of Architecture named after … Shchuseva Elizaveta Likhacheva. “The people who made up the rubricator and wrote the tags are just enchanting amateurs,” the author of the blog writes and adds that now the stain of unprofessionalism will spread to good texts, written, for example, by the famous local historian Alexei Dedushkin. However, there is also an opinion that a wide audience of a popular resource will not even notice blunders.
City defenders this week mourn the Bolkonsky House on Vozdvizhenka: a photo of the ex-monument, where the scandalous reconstruction ended the day before, is published on her blog by Victoria Inozemtseva. It was one of the loudest and longest conflicts between activists and city authorities, but even the selfless actions of Arkhnadzor, whose participants once defended the dome of the building while on the roof, did not stop its destruction. Today it is another faceless new building, they write on the net; “Both the proportions of the house and the outlines are obscure. In fact, it breaks up into separate blocks,”comments, for example, Lilya Palveleva. And instead of a complete architectural whole, now it evokes only feelings of compassionate disgust, adds Boris Bocharnikov.
Speaking about futurology in architecture, philosopher Alexander Rappaport, meanwhile, comes to an unexpected conclusion: after 100-200 years, any design work, in his opinion, will turn into work on reconstruction, and not on construction from scratch. According to Rappaport, mankind will come to a policy of optimizing built-up areas simply due to creeping over the surface of the planet and a shortage of resources. The author of the blog also assumes that the level of design, criticism and expertise will be incomparably higher than the current one determined by the "bulldozer" ideology. And in an interview with Strelka, also published in the philosopher's blog, Rappaport reflects on the “idiocy of urban life”, the hypocrisy of high-profile urban projects and the need for publicistic activity of architects.
By the way, about the loud and spectacular city planning statements of the mayor's office: in the blogs of urbanists they are again discussing “quarter development”, which the Moskomarkhitektura called it mandatory for implementation the day before, although this is not spelled out in the law. Architect Dmitry Khmelnitsky asked his colleagues if it follows from this that the Archcouncil will now require everyone to design in quarters and how the promised comfort is expressed. More than 200 comments on this topic were left by members of the RUPA community.
