Press / Dream of Venice
For the first time in history, at the XIV International Biennale of Architecture in Venice, an exposition of not only Russia, but also Moscow will be presented. The curator of the pavilion "MOSKVA: urban space", which will become part of the parallel program, will be the chief architect of the capital Sergey Kuznetsov, the commissioner will be the chairman of the board of directors of RDI Dmitry Aksenov, and the art consultant will be the architectural critic Christina Fireis. The Art Nespaper Russia quotes the architectural critic Elena Gonzalez: this is the first time when a private person becomes the commissioner of a project, and the state acts as a conductor of architectural ideology. A video on the topic was also prepared by the Dozhd TV channel.
The exposition will show the transformation of the capital over the past 100 years and indicate the current vector of the city's development. Public spaces will become one of the central themes, and Zaryadye Park will be one of the main characters. The portal of the Moscow Archives Council reveals the details: “the past of the capital will appear on the edges of the prisms on the ceiling, where religious buildings of the avant-garde, Stalinist empire and functionalism of the 1960s-80s will be demonstrated. The faces, replacing each other, will create the illusion of a running film, and the centenary history of Moscow architecture will come to life before the eyes of visitors."
By the way, on the territory of the future Zaryadye park, an information pavilion was opened on April 29 - a copy of the central part of the interior of the Russian pavilion at the 2012 Biennale. After the end of the Venice Biennale, the MOSKVA project will move to this information pavilion.
And more about the Biennale. Mitya Kharshak and Maria Elkina from Art1 talked with the new commissioner of the Russian pavilion (who recently replaced Grigory Revzin in this post) Semyon Mikhailovsky. According to Mikhailovsky, "it is no longer possible to change the project [of the exposition], but it can be made more precise."
Interview
Urbanism is getting more and more popular. This week, New Yorker Daniel Latorre was asked by Theorists and Practitioners about how to involve residents in the process of transforming the city, about social ideas in architecture, the creative approach to creating public spaces and the role of technology in their development. Daniela Brahm told UrbanUrban how a small group of people managed to revive a factory site in a depressed district of Berlin and save it from becoming a luxury real estate block. The association, ExRotaprint, created by her, managed to buy the building, preserve its fantastic appearance and find funds for further development. Petersburg 3.0. cites part of a series of publications from TheCityFix about the leaders who have written the best pages in the history of urbanism. One of them is considered the Singaporean dictator Lee Kuan Yew, who over 50 years of rule managed to transform one of the most disadvantaged cities in the world into a city with the highest standard of living.
Sofia Trotsenko, head of the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art, became the hero of the Portal of the Moscow Architectural Council, who spoke about her successes in cooperation with the city authorities. It will not be so scary to get to the art site soon: the square between the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art and Artplay, as well as the main roads to them, will be improved.
The Expert Council of the ARCHIWOOD Prize, which turns five this year, has determined the 2014 shortlist. The curator of the award Nikolai Malinin told Archi.ru about the main trends that this list reflects. Four more nominations were added to the five permanent nominations: "Interior", "Wood in decoration", "Restoration", "Object design", all of them attracted a large number of interesting projects. Maria Elkina from Art1 talked with the master of wooden architecture, Totan Kuzembaev, who spoke about the peculiarities of working with the material, its advantages over concrete and some common myths.
Reviews
Vedomosti figured out how much money and what else cities and regions need to spend before the 2018 FIFA World Cup (12 stadiums in 11 cities will host matches). TECHNE.com posted a series of curious photographs of Frank Herforth, who traveled for four years across the former USSR and took pictures of high-rise buildings. The result was a book about post-Soviet architecture "Imperial pomp - Post-Soviet high-rise buildings" (the book was published last summer, for more details about the book, see the article by Sergey Khachaturov).
Blogs / The fate of the All-Russian Exhibition Center
Fedot Puhlov told on Facebook about his communication with the man who heads the team of restorers who will work with the Ukraine pavilion on the territory of the All-Russian Exhibition Center. It turned out that the "experts" had not seen any documentation or archival photographs in the eyes, they also vaguely imagine in what year and who built the object.
Arkady Gershman walked around the All-Russian Exhibition Center with a camera and recorded the changes. Paid parking lots have appeared; shopping arcades with souvenir products are being made on the square in front of the main entrance. New asphalt was laid inside, work is underway to dismantle attractions and points for the drawing of prizes. Almost all the pavilions are being restored, the famous Green Theater is being renovated. As part of the reconstruction, the VVTs was merged with the Botanical Garden, which is now being improved.
The planner's sadness
Also in his blog, Arkady Gershman spoke about the network of pedestrian roads "+15" in the Canadian city of Calgary, independent of city streets. It consists of bridges and corridors 15 feet above ground level (4.5 meters). This system was chosen due to the high level of groundwater, high saturation of underground utilities and relatively low construction costs. Readers started an eternal dispute: which is better, a ground or underground passage. A lot of comments were also collected by Ilya Varlamov's post about the circular movement in the Netherlands, in which cycle paths are inscribed.
Alexander Antonov's report “Compact city against the broad Russian soul” received a wide discussion on Facebook. Someone considers compact cities a utopia, someone blames their absence on the creative and professional laziness of planners. Yaroslav Kovalchuk explains that “compact city policy” is a set of principles (collected in the OECD report “Compact City Policies”) used by most European cities in developing their master plans. In Russia, these principles were almost never used (the readers were able to recall only Perm and Ulyanovsk). Dmitry Narinsky believes that a compact city is the result of the work of a certain administrative model of a city-municipality, and it would be interesting to analyze the Chinese experience.
A similar problem was raised by an article in RBC about the performance of Petersburgers against the "concrete ghettos" and "urban genocide", to which the Facebook community also responded. Evgeniya Pryadokhina writes that “by the time everything is going well with the regulation of IOT, the phase of centrifugal development of large Russian cities will end and the phase of centripetal development will begin”, so it is necessary to simultaneously come up with competent schemes for sealing and infill development. Dmitry Sanatov calls what is happening as a crisis of urban planning as a discipline.
Dmitry Narinsky in the RUPA planners 'community posed a direct question: "Maybe it's time to honestly admit that the project of creating professional planners' communities in Russia has failed?" He believes that Russia does not need its own professional planners, the group should be renamed into Russian Urbanism. Alexander Lozhkin put an end to the flurry of discussions: "Your sorrowful work will not be lost, a flame will kindle from a spark."Finally, Yaroslav Kovalchuk presented readers with a link to the "Turnkey Cities" community. They offer ready-made solutions not only for apartment buildings and mansions, but also for entire cities. Commentators scoff: "a three-column portico for connoisseurs of classical architecture", "a house a la a successful official", "when the monolith was invented, the entablature must be destroyed." Efim Freidin napsial: I want to unsee.
