Everyone imagines the ideal street in their own way: popular urbanists on a voluntary basis from the "City Projects", for example, draw it exclusively for pedestrian purposes, with greenery and a high-speed tram in the center. Maxim Katz once again writes about the benefits of trams, conducting an educational program about the pros and cons of different types of public transport. On the page of the General Planners Forum, it is recommended to use the “street designer” and draw your own version. Katz's variation is nothing more than a smile here; in response to the Projects, the members of the forum offered to rearrange all the houses on the rails - “and no transport problems, the roofs go by themselves,” writes Oleg Safonov. - You, of course, will laugh, but then … the problems of resettlement, no need for cities - the main thing is the rails.
In the meantime, City Projects quite seriously proposes a high-speed tram as an ideal option for Ufa, because the city has an elongated shape and because it is inefficient to build a metro and expand roads over six lanes. The RUPA professional community objected to the Projects that the metro should not pay off, and that in Europe it is being built in cities with a population of 500-700 thousand inhabitants, even less than in Ufa. But Alexander Lozhkin rather agrees with the arguments of the City Projects - building a metro in our province, taking into account the size of the city budget, is a utopia, “even in Soviet times, the subway in the provinces was a political toy for regional committee secretaries, and not a means of transport”.
However, Moscow does not seem to need a "pedestrian" scenario promoted by City Projects, since the capital, as Alexander Antonov writes on his Facebook page, "has chosen the path of Hong Kong and is rapidly moving along it." And Hong Kong is a tower with a density of 75 thousand squares per hectare, which will not be able to serve even the 6-8 lane highways conceived by the mayor's office, the architect notes. Judging by the projects passed by the Architectural Council, while they are single, the author of the blog writes, but nothing prevents the towers from being placed next to each other: “It remains to recall with nostalgia the norm proposed by PZZ on the maximum building height of 100 meters and the“ring of skyscrapers”program. Now skyscrapers will not be on the ring - they will be everywhere”.
The Minsk Towers over 160 meters in height, announced for the World Hockey Championship, which is to be held there in May, would fully correspond to the world standards of skyscrapers. Only here the project of the Austrians, like a dozen others, the review of which is offered by the Onliner.by portal, remained on paper. Bloggers believe that the preparation for the championship has failed - hotels, transport interchanges, metro stations and other high-profile projects, many of which were initially simplified to wretchedness, and then completely abandoned by the investor, remained unbuilt.
Lev Schlosberg, in turn, writes about the legacy abandoned by the Pskov authorities to the mercy of fate. The city rights activist draws attention to the deplorable state of the federal monument - the so-called. Pechenko's houses, which the local administration refused to lease. This means that in the near future the house associated with the name of the famous Pskov architect and restorer Yuri Spegalsky and based on the chambers of the second half of the 17th century will continue to collapse. A similar fate is at the most majestic ruin of the Moscow region - the Pushchino estate on Nara, which the regional government this autumn decided to lease out on a “preferential lease”, implying restoration. However, the author of the blog adds that not all objects of the unique ensemble, which were much fuller in the mid-1980s, survived to the happy day. And the blogger deni-spiri has collected a record number of comments for a post about the disappearing wooden huts of the Russian North, which impressed the network audience with their “primordial strength”.
About the true source of 20th century architecture - symbolism - Alexander Rappaport writes in his blog. Shielded by the symbolism of the avant-garde and modernism, symbolism, according to the philosopher, formed "something like a tightly stretched string between archaism and futurism, thereby missing the most important thing - modernity." But today, in the era of globalism and the threat of the latest technologies, which not so long ago were praised by architects, symbolism is reborn, which means that in the near future we should expect the emergence of “non-utopian life reality, the deficit of which after a century of utopian dreams has become something kind of deep vitamin deficiency,”concludes Rappaport.
