Fatigue from the problems of a metropolitan metropolis is a perennial network topic on which amateur urbanists like to speculate. Architectural futurology has recently been added to popular topics about parking, traffic jams and the Moscow metropolitan area. The RUPA community recently discussed one such forecast for the development of modern million-plus cities in the blog alanbigulov.livejournal.com. Until now, urbanists and deurbanists have argued in architectural futurology; but the author of the blog Alan Bigulov writes about the scenario of "reurbanization". Reurbanization is the construction of new cities (in the future in 50 years), in which new principles of life will be initially laid. According to the blogger, the existing megacities will not have to be rebuilt and people will voluntarily leave them, since they will exhaust their functions of industrial and transport centers. Megalopolises will disappear from the historical scene, like the once feudal estates, the author of the blog concludes. New cities will be multicluster, few in number, environmentally friendly and comfortable; their residents will work remotely and print everyday items on their 3D printers.
As Anton Chupilko notes on RUPA, “cities are prisons that have turned people from individuals into gears”. And, nevertheless, traditional cities were and will be, since the main purpose of the city from antiquity to the present day, as the user Nikolai Nikolay writes, for example, is the exchange of ideas, goods, knowledge, technologies. Igor Popovsky notes, “the city is good because it can provide a choice of environmental paradigms, which means that the future belongs to agglomerations that will take into account mistakes”. To resettle everyone in new territories and turn modern cities into "Detroits", the user adds, means a verdict on the eco-balance. And according to the user of the Seventh Seal, the construction of new cities in Russia is a fantasy in itself, since "in the last 23 cities, cities have not been built in our country, but only closed as virtually nonexistent due to the departure of the last resident."
But in Yuri Kuznetsov's blog on Facebook, urbanists ran into economists who accused the former of speculating on the real problems of the city. The author of the blog wrote that urbanists are de-imposing their "correct" ideas on city dwellers without taking them into account. “People are unreasonable children, with the exception of urbanists, who can better see how to properly arrange the life of these insignificant, unreasonable insects,” Yuri Kuznetsov ironically says. “The intellectual elite wants to teach the unreasonable by using power and violence, and urbanism is a good excuse.” “Until we figure out how to reasonably introduce private ownership of public spaces, we are doomed to all sorts of isms,” summarizes Vladimir Nazarov, who unleashed the dispute.
In the blog of Ilya Varlamov, who also loves to write about urbanism, a post appeared the other day about Moscow, which was not built due to the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. Wonderful sketches for the reconstruction of the capital in the spirit of 1930s neoclassicism. and the excursion with Alexander Usoltsev led Varlamov to the idea that if it had not been for the war and the general plan of 1935 had been fully implemented, Muscovites would not have been stuck in many kilometers of traffic jams today. The war prevented the cutting of all the highways laid down in the general plan, and, according to the blogger, was one of the reasons for the current illiterate traffic organization: “The center was not closed, it was not converted into a pedestrian center, as it was done in the second half of the 20th century. in many European cities, but at the same time, new thoughtful projects of reorganization of the movement were not implemented. Varlamov, however, did not convince everyone: for example, shurik_m believes that the war obviously influenced the rejection of only one project - the Palace of Soviets - and everything else is far-fetched; “Here, it seems to me, it’s not a war, but a revision of the attitude to the architecture of the authorities, and, above all, after the death of Stalin,” the user notes.
The seregalk user on the culturalwar.livejournal.com blog, meanwhile, states that in terms of the power of the ideological charge, the Stalinist Empire is not inferior to another, parallel architectural line, associated by the author with late constructivism and modernism. The author calls both that, and another "supermodern". It is not worth looking for precision in terms in this post, however, the author rightly notes the gigantic potential of the style, which, unfortunately, did not have time to fully develop.
In the seregalk collection, meanwhile, the Kaluga Museum of the History of Cosmonautics, a recognized masterpiece of Soviet modernism, would also take a worthy place. Now, below the main building (standing on the high bank of the Yachensky reservoir), a large-scale construction of the second stage of the museum begins, almost four times its volume. Information about this project so far can be found mainly from blogs. An open competition for the project was held back in 2009, and it is known that Voronezhproekt OJSC became the author of the architectural solution, and the Rospan Group of Companies (which was engaged in the reconstruction of the Moscow planetarium) was the general contractor. The new building in the project is built into the coastal slope, and the dome of the solar observatory will be located on its roof. Details can be found in the presentation of the museum.
But another large project in Moscow - the development of the Western Port in the immediate vicinity of the famous Church of the Intercession of the Virgin in Fili - threatens to destroy the wonderful panoramic views. The blog filidom2.livejournal.com publishes the results of the public hearings held at the end of December. The project, meanwhile, not only eats up part of the protected areas of the monument, but also involves the construction of roads near residential buildings. In addition, the development, as noted in the blog, will deprive the last hope for the reconstruction of the Naryshkin estate with cascading ponds and a pier for pleasure boats next to the temple.
In the community "Architectural heritage" on the eve of the New Year there was a "black book of urban planning vandalism of St. Petersburg" for 2013. According to the holicin blogger, the most severe loss was the destruction of buildings at the St. Petersburg-Varshavsky station. However, in the course of this confrontation, adds holicin, some of the buildings of the city rights defenders still managed to return under state protection, from which they were removed under the previous governor.
At the end - a post by Alexander Rappaport about modern "chimerical architecture". Rappaport calls the mass development of residential areas in Russian cities a chimera because it does not correspond to either the concept of style or the "environmental approach" that is opposed to it. The new urban planning environment in Russia does not correspond to anything and at the same time, according to the philosopher, it is not catastrophic, but reflects only the transition to global peace. In addition, the chimerical monsters of current architecture can be overcome: for this, writes Rappaport, one must turn to the categories of "scale, normality and substance."
