Recently, French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte unveiled his new project of a Russian Orthodox cultural center in Paris, which blogs immediately began to compare with the previous project by Manuel Nunez-Janowski and the project of Frederic Borel, lobbied by the mayor's office. Recall that the prefecture of Paris blocked the approval of the winning Nunez complex and ordered Vilmott to re-execute it. To please the mayor, the Frenchman promised to make the ensemble less extravagant than a glass cover with gilded domes sticking out from under it, and wrapped the building with "bandages" of Burgundy stone. In blogs, the architect's gesture evoked many interesting associations: for example, in the blog of Grigory Revzin they write about the film “Mr. hidden in the "woods" ". The project is also accused of the absence of anthropomorphism characteristic of Orthodox churches, which was replaced by "bandages", allegedly indicating the "illness" of the Russian Orthodox Church itself.
Mikhail Belov, devoting a post on his blog to the project, writes about the triumphant return of decor to modern architecture, which until recently was hung with "lace", and now wrapped with "yarn". “In the“tolerant world”a coiled representation of“Eastern despotism”has appeared,” - a very strong gesture, according to the architect, albeit impractical, since the “bandages” will turn into an “ideal dust-and-dirt accumulator”. Well, supporters of the modern interpretation, on the contrary, are annoyed not by the "bandages", but by the domes sticking out of them, which, for harmony, are also proposed to be "wrapped with tape". Alexey Tarkhanov, however, writes in the comments that this is not at all as bad as in the picture - “four cases instead of one hybrid under the skirt. The church separately /… / and in terms of volume, the Frenchman is incomparably more intelligent than modern Russian church architecture such as the cathedral of the Sretensky monastery."
A little more about the cult architecture from the blog of Sergey Estrin, who shares his impressions of the monuments of Moorish architecture, which amazed the architect with the organization of space that was completely unusual for a European. And Alexander Rappaport in his blog continues a series of opuses devoted to the category of “substantial resonance”, with which the author anticipates a new paradigm of architectural thinking and education. Substance, which, according to Rappaport, was still in the shadow of mainstream knowledge (for example, in P. Florensky's "materials science"), should come to the fore, replacing the space and function dominating in the architecture of the 20th century.
We find another futurological forecast of modern cities in the blog i-future.livejournal.com, the author of which believes that life in megalopolises should become the same privilege as using a car, i.e. it must be an expensive life so as not to attract new settlers. It's time to stop investing billions in infrastructure, which is still not enough for everyone, says the author of the blog, proposing as an alternative to develop a remote work format and relocate to small highly specialized cities.
An obligatory touch to the portrait of the city of the future today is a network of bike paths, about which blogger Ilya Varlamov does not get tired of writing. His next post is about Norman Foster's project to create a network of indoor bike paths in London, stretching over the railways for as much as 220 km. Varlamov adds that in Soviet history the project had its own "clone" - this is the so-called. bicycle political, with heating, lifts and rental, which in 1984-85 was offered for Moscow by the Kharkov engineer Paul Raikin. However, Varlamov is forced to admit that everything that is innovative in Russian urban planning is struggling to make its way, including the reconstruction in a modern way of the capital's Triumfalnaya Square, for which the blogger once gathered a rally. Now Varlamov writes that he is dissatisfied with the way the competition was organized, and in unison with some architects declares on his blog that a full-fledged competition is not working.
In the blogs of city rights defenders they write about a new loss - in the Moscow region of Malakhovka, the outbuilding of the dacha of the writer N. D. Teleshov, the same one from whose Moscow house the VOOPIiK department is now being evicted. They demolished, because the outbuilding was badly dilapidated; and a few years earlier, the wooden building of the theater burned down in the same place - all the buildings of the beginning of the 20th century, the VOOPIIK blog specifies. So from the former ensemble, only the brick main house is now preserved, which experts urge to take away from a careless user, restore and transfer to the local museum of history and culture.
