This Olympic week, all bloggers' attention is focused on Sochi: the Olympic Park is being tested and the impressions of the first settlers are being actively discussed on the Internet. The collection of construction blunders is replenished - here, for example, critical posts of foreign journalists who are faced with everyday difficulties in newly built hotels are collected. However, at the "Forum of General Planners", or, for example, in the blog of Ilya Varlamov, more objective reports are expected. For comparison, moscowwalks.ru publishes an interesting study on the urban planning consequences of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. For the old city, they were catastrophic: on the eve of the games, Moscow lost entire areas of historical buildings near the Olympic sports complex and the eponymous avenue, dacha Sokolniki with masterpieces of wooden Art Nouveau and old huts of the village of Kolomenskoye, the author of the post writes.
Meanwhile, Sergei Sarychev complained to the RUPA community about how the old buildings in Tambov are currently disappearing. “The first line of development is false facades, the second line is multi-storey buildings,” the blogger comments on the ongoing reconstruction of the center, no competition, no public discussion, no expert analysis. A similar story is in Tver - only here, under the bulldozer, there are small-apartment standard "stalinkas", reminiscent of small mansions. They are not guarded and the developers are actively using this, they write in Tverskiye Svody; as a result, the building loses its scale and façade uniformity.
In continuation about the "false facades" we read Ilya Varlamov: in the post, however, we are not talking about historical buildings, but building grids that hide them, which can "decorate" the city with the image of a favorite monument. However, according to urbanurban.ru, false facades have more important tasks - for example, to depict the active improvement activities of the local administration. The review contains a variety of variants of "Potemkin villages", hidden not only by nets depicting flower pots and cats, but even by fake plywood windows.
Curiosities, meanwhile, sometimes become part of history - to restore one of them, the so-called. Khomyakov Grove on Kuznetsky Most, offers
blogger usolt. There is little cost, the grove is just a small triangle of the lawn, which the homeowner Khomyakov used at the beginning of the 20th century. demonstratively blocked the road, which prevented him from expanding his buildings.
Petersburg city defenders have recently won a long-term war for the archaeological sites of the Okhtinsky cape - the blog Bashne.net reports the good news. This is the second big victory after the move of the Gazprom skyscraper to Lakhta. The monuments remained under the threat of development on the basis of a dubious examination (the defenders believe, ordered by Gazprom), which proved that they were not on Okhta. In the current court, its authors were no longer so convincing, and the conclusion was declared invalid.
Save a monument of the 16th-17th centuries from destruction. in Karelia, meanwhile, a lucky chance helped. The famous architect-restorer Alexander Popov tells how experts accidentally discovered the Ilyinsky chapel from the village of Lazarevo literally torn to pieces by "restorers" who clearly did not expect an inspection: the building was dismantled without marking the logs, the floors of the 16th century were thrown away, the "excess" was cut. Popov, meanwhile, is not surprised - a normal restoration firm will simply not work for work that takes a year, but is allotted for 2-3 months. At the same time, the situation with restoration tenders seems to suit the Ministry of Culture, the architect believes, since officials continue to issue thousands of licenses to unknown firms.
While the falsification of the historical environment is successfully marching through the province, in the capital, the chief architect speaks out against public hearings, which many city advocates consider to be almost the only way to reconcile the interests of residents and developers. However, some members of the RUPA community agree with Sergei Kuznetsov that the hearings in their current form are a field for speculation and their results are easy to falsify. “They more easily turn into a noise than a discussion,” notes, for example, Alexander Pishchalnikov, especially since the opinions of residents are taken into account only at the stage of setting tasks. Bloggers tend to believe that the hearings will not be canceled, but whether they will be made effective, for example, by adding working groups from different parties, is a big question.
More than a thousand comments on the blog of the already mentioned Varlamov, meanwhile, collected a post about Minsk - as always, from a blogger in two parts, with a plus and a minus sign. Minsk, according to him, is a clean city in a barracks manner, but it can hardly be called comfortable and friendly: “Minsk is a licked city from Soviet postcards, which has remained in the scoop,” Varlamov wrote, which brought on himself a stream of angry comments.
A very popular post of the week is on the skaznov blog, which simply photographed one of the new residential buildings in Nizhny Novgorod. In the picture, the width of the facade is less than a meter: the key lies in the fact that the house itself, as it turned out, has the shape of an "iron". Bloggers remember their St. Petersburg and New York counterparts and wonder why the Nizhny Novgorod architect had to save every square centimeter in this way when there is a lot of free space around.
Well, Mikhail Belov, who wrote another essay about modern architecture, probably would not be surprised at this turn of things: the current architecture, in his words, only reflects our "idiotic, confused, crooked and oblique time." The architect, however, is opposed to serving "that which with an accelerated, albeit measured run, leads us to an empty broken trough" and considers it right to return to the eternal classics.
