The draft decree on the dismantling and relocation of the Shukhov Tower, which has recently appeared on the website of the Government of the Russian Federation, has caused a violent reaction from city defenders on the Internet. The Ministry of Communications presents the project as an already adopted decision, it is noted in the ru-architect community, although there are no disassembly and assembly projects agreed with experts and the public in principle. "According to our laws, this is a criminal offense, not restoration," the post says. "The Shabolovskaya tower is not demountable and it is impossible to assemble it from the sawn scrap metal." Bloggers suspect the officials of the Ministry of Communications, stubbornly disregarding expert opinion, of a personal interest in the site. The 160-meter height of the tower may become a reason for high-rise exceptions for new construction, they write in the blog, and a modern skyscraper will rise on the site of the monument; there may not even be one, if the adjoining site of the Shukhov Plaza development company joins it.
Against the background of the scandal with the radio tower imperceptible, news passed about another impending transfer - the Soviet monument to N. V. Gogol on Gogolevsky Boulevard, which usolt wrote about in his blog. In its place, the Commission for Monumental Art of the Moscow City Duma decided to return the original 1909 version of the sculptor N. Andreev, standing nearby in the courtyard of house No. 7. The network audience, however, did not find "historical justice" in this and did not support the idea of "dragging Gogols back and forth".
Another wave of criticism in blogs this week overtook the Ministry of Culture for the "surrender" of the security zones of Arkhangelskoe near Moscow - the ministry, we recall, has abandoned its claim against the tenants of the forest plots of the estate. The head of the Moscow Region branch of VOOPIIK Evgeny Sosedov, who has been suing for the inviolability of protected zones for several years, writes in a blog on Facebook that the management of the museum-reserve simply capitulated: connection with its creation. It was on the basis of this decision that two dozen lawsuits were won and dozens of hectares of manor lands were returned to state ownership. The new position of the director means that the museum is giving up not only the landscape park around the Gonzago Theater, but also all other territories that have been reclaimed with such difficulty over the past ten years from the Ministry of Defense, regional and local authorities."
In the meantime, the city authorities and bloggers have actively started looking for another place for the Art Gallery in Perm. After the failure at the recent City Council of the reconstruction project of the River Station for these purposes, the idea of constructing a building on an elongated section along the esplanade is especially popular with the administration. However, according to the author of the blog ar-chitect, this section is so narrow that the exposition will have to be placed “on the Moscow-Vladivostok train”: “What is a 40 m wide section? These are two fire passages and the width of the building is about 20 m. The estimated area of the gallery is about 15,000 sq. M. A three-storey building 20 m wide and 250? Long. Protesters against the Zumthor project on a narrow section along the railway now found the same, only on the other side of the mountain, the blogger adds. However, it is foolish to refuse the esplanade itself, ar-chitect is sure, you need to build right on it: make the section of the street crossing the esplanade pedestrian and erect a symmetrical building on the central axis.
Denis Galitsky, actively participating in the discussion about the fate of the gallery, in turn, proposed to build it on the territory of the Yunost stadium. It is absurd to have as many as three full-size stadiums (Dynamo, Yunost and Zvezda) practically on the main walking street of the city, the blogger writes, because "these are rarely used entertainment venues with high peak attendance." But even this proposal was criticized: “The gallery, on the ground floor of which there is a public skating rink-stadium-hippodrome, is hard to believe,” ar_chitect comments on Galitsky's proposals. “It is better to plant trees thicker between the open stadium and the Rotunda than to put multi-storey chests in there.” And Alexander Lozhkin reminded Denis Galitsky that “the museum is one of the most complex buildings in terms of functional and technological aspects…. A depository is dozens of times more complex than a warehouse, and exhibition spaces are dozens of times more complex than a supermarket. " Therefore, the proposals with the stadium turned out, alas, amateurish.
However, if a blogger can be forgiven for "crazy" design, then getting such projects from official hands is outrageous, says Ilya Varlamov. The subject of criticism in his blog this time was the project of creating a pedestrian street Chokan Valikhanov in the center of Omsk. In an ideal situation, according to Varlamov, when there is a rich investor (Gazprom) and a great idea with a promenade, the residents are being forced into an openly weak project - “an ordinary soviet granite-monumental blevontism,” the blogger is indignant. However, the residents themselves are concerned mainly with the felling of trees, and not with the town-planning quality, which, according to Varlamov, is also bad.
And one more interesting discussion unfolded in the blog of architect Timofey Shapkin, who marked out there a competitive project of the entrance group of the hotel "Ukraine", developed by him as part of the Arch Group. He was not included in the number of finalists, but he was the only one who proposed a kind of “intangible” architectural solution: in order not to spoil the monument of architecture with awnings, the project developed an air canopy that blows away all precipitation at a distance of 8-10 meters from the entrance with a directed stream. On accusations of, albeit not as significant as others, but vandalism in relation to the monument, Timofey Shapkin noted that, in his opinion, vandalism is an artificial attempt to revive an outdated model of the building's functioning; it is much better to solve the problem with “minimal innovations”.
