The Ostozhenka bureau carried out an architectural and urban planning study of Volkhonka's districts in the first half of 2014 at the request of the Bely Gorod Project company as part of another, larger-scale project carried out by both Russian and foreign experts, and included in the book entitled “Territory of culture: Volkhonka quarters”. The aim of the project was to develop proposals for the formation of the so-called "museum quarter" - an urban space that unites the central Moscow museums, in particular, the Pushkin Museum and the Museum of Architecture.
Within the framework of the project, the Danish studio of Jan Geil assessed the state of public spaces in the area, the Italians from Mobility in Chain analyzed the transport situation, Professor Gabriele Filippini gave his recommendations for landscape design, Philips studied the lighting design of the area. Ostozhenka was invited to participate a little later, and the architects had the opportunity to rely on the results of their colleagues' work. However, the architects were also helped a lot by their own considerable experience associated with the work on the urban planning concept of the neighboring Ostozhenka district.
“Once, many years ago, we were engaged in a detailed study of the fate of the Ostozhenka area,” says Alexander Skokan, “this area was not built up for a long time, in fact, throughout the entire XX century, because the avenue leading to the Palace of Soviets had to pass along it. … Volkhonka, just like Ostozhenka, found itself in the sphere of influence of "big construction projects": first a temple, then a palace, then again a temple - in fact, Ostozhenka turns out to be one wing of this center, Volkhonka - another. For us, these territories form an interconnected group, one logically continues the other."
In the process of research, which preceded the development of the actual project proposals, the main problems of the region became apparent. First of all, the central region with huge potential, which has in its assets the most important cultural and public facilities, is underestimated and not attractive enough for both Muscovites and tourists. Firstly, it turned out that the town-planning module of the entire district, the system of manor courtyards, is completely intact, and the charm of old Moscow inside the quarters is quite palpable. But "field research" - a thorough walk through the area with a GPS tracker - showed poor permeability of this environment: if a rare walker wanders into the gateway, he will have to get out the same way, describing intricate loops that are clearly visible on the tracks. Most of the courtyards are inaccessible, and movement is possible only along large "arteries". Secondly, the plans of failed great construction projects violated the integrity of the fabric of the historical city, some of the red lines were lost, gaps were formed, so spacious that it is not even very clear where this part of the city has an entrance and an exit. And finally, Volkhonka has become a busy highway, it cuts the area into parts, and in general, the streets are given to cars, there are few crossings, and pedestrians are uncomfortable.
Working on the first of the listed problems - the low permeability of the interior spaces of the district, the architects carefully counted all the manor yards and squares potentially accessible for walking - there were twenty-one of them, and proposed to create new pedestrian connections between them. Two options turned out: in one, fourteen connections were added, in the other fifteen - moreover, according to the mathematical theory of graphs, which the architects applied to the analysis of the route between courtyards as a discrete system, it was found that the addition of only one additional connection, between the courtyard of the Golitsyn estate and the center of the quarter between the Bolshoi and Maly Znamenskiy lanes, significantly increases all the coefficients at once, and therefore makes walking tours much more varied, and the area itself - permeable and open, as befits a museum town.
The network of courtyards and squares - places of quiet rest, was superimposed on the main walking route along the streets, which also became more ramified, stretching from the exit from the Kropotkinskaya metro station on the left side of the Volkhonka past the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts to Starovagankovsky Lane, thus reaching the Museum of Architecture. The core of the route - a kind of gate leading to the museum quarter, the architects consider the Prechistensky Gate Square and the Volkhonka fragment, from the metro to the Pushkin Museum.
With a number of cafes, flower shops and a covered path from the metro towards Ostozhenka (in the early nineties, Ostozhenka designed a shopping center on this site, as part of its regeneration, about the same size as the pavilion). The monument to Engels, now standing alone in the middle of an empty square, remains in the round cut of the ceilings, like a tree. Under the roof of the pavilion there could be an exit from the Kalininskaya (yellow) line Volkhonka metro station under construction.
The culmination of the walking route is a boulevard laid along the sidewalk on the left side of Volkhonka, towards the Pushkin Museum. It repeats the contours of the lobby of the Kropotkinskaya station located below the ground at a depth of some five meters, which until 1958 was called the "Palace of the Soviets" and was even considered as its ceremonial lobby: from the station it was planned to exit directly into the space of the temple of the victorious proletariat. The paving pattern reflects the contours of the five-pointed stars carried by the columns of the station, and in the center of each pentagon, continuing the axes of the underground columns, a lamppost is placed on the boulevard - the station thus "grows" upward, significantly manifesting itself in the above-ground space. At the eastern end, it opens literally - with a new exit in the form of an oval pedestal facing the Museum of Private Collections. The sketches show that sunlight could penetrate from the outside into the underground lobby, so close to the surface.
The metro station, the solemn arch pavilion built by Samuil Kravets in 1935, as well as a fragment of the substructures of the Palace of Soviets, preserved underground as part of the exhibition halls of the new church and the square around the gas station of the Kremlin garage - the architects linked all these memories of grandiose Soviet plans into one plot, naming its boulevard slightly ironically - "The Bright Path", and thus giving, among many other things, a lot of new clues to future guides. And for thought - walking.
A new exit from the eastern end of "Kropotkinskaya" faces the building of the museum of collections, in the courtyard of which the authors are building the glass prism of the new atrium. Nearby, at the corner of Volkhonka and Maly Znamenskoye, a new building of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts appears, of quite modern architecture, but its volume again repeats the scale of the lost house and restores the red line of Volkhonka. From this building in the direction of the Boulevard Ring, cutting the "Light Path" diagonally, along the historical red line, there are a number of park pergolas that mark the scale of the disappeared old buildings, recalling the layering of different eras, at least two: the Soviet and the old manor (therefore, pergolas), but in fact, of course, not two, but many. All together, it comes together in a somewhat theatrical, backstage-like installation in memory of the city's transformations: the “lobby of the Palace of Soviets” meets the disappeared line of the old street, continued by a fragment of a cobblestone pavement in the middle of traffic flows in the center of the square and further on by Engels, whose figure is embedded in the contours of the house that forty years ago for the installation of the monument. In this intersection, layering, pulling from the place of historical meanings, bookmarks and reminders - the main plot of the project.
The architects proposed to restore the volume of pre-Soviet buildings in two more places: on the Prechistenskaya embankment behind the Glazunov gallery and on the site of the public garden at the beginning of Volkhonka, also cleared for Nixon's arrival. For both cases, the authors of the project calculate the urban planning potential, it turns out to be relatively small: 8700 m2 in one case and 5200 m2 in the other, since it refers only to regeneration - the restoration of gaps in the urban fabric. All calculations are quite hypothetical and do not go beyond the recommendations for adjusting the regulations, which currently prohibits any construction.
In addition to the studies of the transport situation carried out by specialists from the Italian bureau MIC, who, on the basis of electronic calculations, proposed to narrow the Volkhonka carriageway by providing it with a dividing strip - all this without reducing the capacity - the architects suggested possible places for additional parking for cars and excursion buses, and developed a convenient scheme of pedestrian crossings on the Prechistenskiye Vorota square, the center of which with the "cobblestone museum" becomes a pedestrian island.
In addition to architectural inclusions and urban planning studies, the book presenting the work of "Ostozhenka" is supplied with additional sections - one of them is called "The Volkhonka Archive", it contains information on the history of the area, which the architects relied on in their work, as well as information that the authors considered interesting as a supplement. “The uniqueness of Volkhonka is that practically all the most important stylistic and urban planning concepts have left their mark here,” the authors of the project say, paying attention not only to well-known, but also to half-forgotten things. A lot of curious things are revealed. For example, not everyone knows that Ivan Nikolaev's communal house was built on the vaulted basements of the Church of Our Lady of Rzhev, in which a restaurant is now located. The narrow slit windows of the library storage library are practical because they follow the rhythm of the arrangement of the bookshelves inside. Courdoner of the wooden palace of Catherine II of the architect Kazakov, was similar to his subsequent projects of the Kremlin palace, and all together - to the Roman forum. And the competition for the Lenin Museum, where Leonid Pavlov, Boris Mezentsev and other celebrities participated, made it possible to hone monumental designs for other, later museums of the leader of the revolution, in particular, for the famous museum in Gorki. The museum was planned to be built to the right of the Pushkin Museum, behind the Antipia church, completely destroying the entire quarter to Znamenka.
Another appendix is a brief history of Moscow ubranism, at the origins of which in the sixties were
Alexey Gutnov and the Department of Advanced Research of the Research and Development Institute of the General Plan, headed by him, as well as Andrey Bokov and Alexander Skokan, who worked in the seventies on projects dedicated to the improvement of urban space and the creation of pedestrian routes - all that are now actively educated by the Moscow authorities and architects. They are somewhat different from modern urbanism: then they thought less about transport problems and more about preservation and regeneration, about half-forgotten Moscow history. And also about the permeability of urban areas, about pedestrian paths, which in those socialist times, it would seem, were many - almost all courtyards could be walked through, it was even a kind of attraction: to find the shortest paths and more route options. Urbanists of the Gutnov school proposed to comfortably equip these paths, force them with benches, plant trees, and often cover the passages with glass roofs. Probably one of the main differences between the Gutnov school and modern urbanism is its somewhat less technicality and a greater fascination with history and culture, an attempt to preserve the remnants of old Moscow, recall what has been lost, draw old lines, restore forgotten connections, grow the old city out of remnants and memories.
The urban planning study carried out by the Ostozhenka bureau headed by Alexander Skokan, one of the authors of the seventies projects, is, on the one hand, a set of ideas ordered for a book and an exhibition, a conceptual study. The project stands somewhat apart, away from
competition for the reconstruction of the Pushkin Museum, although it considers the same territory, only wider, focusing on the territories located a little further from the Pushkin Museum and, one way or another, offering its own vision of the area. As you know, Alexander Skokan was included in the jury of the competition for the reconstruction of the Pushkin Museum, everything was almost parallel: the exhibition and presentation of the book were held at the end of May, the results of the competition were announced at the end of June.
On the other hand, in addition to momentary tasks, the architectural and urban planning research project has a more than ambitious goal: being at the level of generating ideas, the authors tried to develop universal principles for the reconstruction of the historical centers of Russian cities, combining the successful aspects of a highly technical, proven European approach - with a more historical, place-sensitive method of exploring the culture of the city, meticulous reading of the place and writing, to some extent, its history by means of urbanism. Old Russian cities have too contradictory and multi-layered structure, there are too many "scars" on it, and therefore it requires more attention, the authors believe. No wonder the last page of the booklet flaunts a combined pattern from Burda magazine - a visible display of the many contours found and manifested in the city - traces of memory that make its space not only comfortable, but also meaningful.
The architects prepared the publication of their project in the form of a separate brochure, and in December they showed it at the stand within the framework of the Zodchestvo festival. In January, it is planned to print the print run of the book, presenting the results of the architectural and urban planning research.
