Perhaps the main news of the week was the return to the leadership of the former chief architect of Moscow, Alexander Kuzmin, who, according to Vedomosti, will head the Construction Research Center OJSC in the structure of the Ministry of Construction and will develop new building standards. In an interview with Itogi magazine, Kuzmin recalled that he was leaving his post, not his profession, so that his appearance in the city government was apparently a matter of time. For those who have forgotten what Alexander Kuzmin is famous for, an interview gives a lot of interesting information: the official recalls how he worked under the wing of Yuri Luzhkov, the first foreigners who came to build in Moscow - Norman Foster and Frank Gehry, his work on the TTK project, for which he once praised by the famous art critic Aleksey Komech, etc. Now Kuzmin has to form a team to update outdated SNiPs, which give rise to a lot of problems for designers. Engaging in such routine as building pedestrian zones or introducing one-way traffic in the center was not accepted under Luzhkov, the architect adds, "I think it was too small for the previous leadership in terms of energy investment."
However, according to an article on urbanurban.ru, Russian cities are still under the hypnosis of megaprojects, willingly getting involved in the competition for hosting international events. What benefits can be derived for the city, for example, from the Olympiads and how they turn into a cynical global business, read the article by Ksenia Mokrushina. And what about the Olympic Sochi? Grigory Revzin considers it a delusion to say that the city was crushed by the Olympics, at least for geographical reasons, because "the park was built as a separate global place in an uninhabited area." In an article about Sochi, which Revzin published the day before on Lenta.ru, the critic stated that the Park conceived by the Populus Bureau partly turned out - as "something so deeply cosmic, about the 21st century." And this is all the more important and great, Revzin believes, in the specific conditions of the Russian construction policy, when architects were suddenly no longer allowed to visit objects and everything that happened was covered with a veil of secrecy. As a result, we got a number of good and not so good stadiums, among which the critic gives the first place to Bolshoi Ice. Perhaps, everything was done there "on a living thread", for one-time use and then everything will have to be rebuilt again, the author adds, but "a feat is an expensive thing."
Meanwhile, the article by Nikolai Malinin and Nadezhda Nilina in Vedomosti brings back titanic projects to the ground from the heights and analyzes how well the so-called. "New urbanism" or in the words of Aaron Betsky "architecture besides buildings." According to the authors of the article, it has not yet been possible to humanize the capital, despite a number of successful improvement projects of the mayor's office; critics note that by and large they were all limited to the Garden Ring and were rather monotonous, cloning the new Gorky Park everywhere. But in the Moscow region, a kind of bridge, thrown from the previous urban planning era to the modern one, was the project of creating new "Moscow-City", about which "Kommersant" writes; it is already known that business clusters are expected near Odintsovo and Zheleznodorozhny.
What is really new Western urbanism, you can learn from the new book by Vitold Rybchinsky "City Designer", a review of which is published by colta.ru. Here are collected the most famous ideas of the last century, among which one of the main plots is the polemic of the two largest American urbanists - Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs. By the way, the chief architect Sergei Kuznetsov, who attended the next “business breakfast” of Rossiyskaya Gazeta, is much more optimistic in his forecasts regarding the development of the capital. The architect, among other things, emphasizes that the competitive practice that is being introduced now, which is actively criticized by some colleagues in the shop, is beneficial not only for the city, but also for the participants in the construction market; in any case, it introduces in Russia "a system of coordinates that is understandable throughout the world," the official notes, from which our architects will subsequently be able to enter the western market, where they are still almost invisible.
In the meantime, the Ministry of Culture is preparing to support the unpopular project of dismantling and relocation of the famous Moscow Shukhov tower, for which so. make an exception, like the monument to "Worker and Collective Farm Woman". Arkhnadzor coordinator Konstantin Mikhailov in Gazeta.ru reminds that the Shukhov landing stage of the Kiev railway station was lost in a similar way, which was dismantled due to its dilapidation. The protests of the defenders of the heritage, however, are not embarrassed by the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications, and a new location is already being selected for the tower: Gorky Park, Kaluzhskaya Square and VVTs are called, although they promise to make the final decision following public hearings.
The new project of placing the Art Gallery in the reconstructed building of the River Station has become just as unpopular in Perm. Commenting on it to the newsko.ru portal, Grigory Revzin notes that as a result, Perm may end up with "a station damaged by postmodern intervention, and an office building attached to it." The critic regretfully spoke about the projects of Yuri Grigoryan and Peter Zumthor, rejected one after another, and said that the current version is "another step in the destruction of the Permian cultural renaissance and all its fruits." And in conclusion, there is one more cultural tragedy associated with the destruction of the Bolshevsk labor commune in the Queen. Kommersant publishes a report from the exhibition of Vasily Maslov, the author of the very unique frescoes that were discovered during the demolition and were immediately lost again under the rubble. The author of the article, Igor Gulin, draws parallels with the dramatic fate of the artist himself, who was shot along with other communards in 1938 and was consigned to oblivion.
