The Wowhaus bureau has developed a concept for the development of the Luzhnetskaya embankment territory. The customer of the project was the Luzhniki Olympic Complex, the company that manages the famous sports complex; last year she held a competition for the reconstruction of the Luzhniki swimming pool; now it is reconstructing the Big Sports Arena for the Football World Cup'18. Now we are talking about the transformation of the territory that unites sports facilities into one whole - about this strange low-lying place - "Luzha", which every resident of Moscow must have seen from the Vorobyovy Hills or at least from the car window, driving along Komsomolsky Prospekt, but where is a significant part of the townspeople, excluding enthusiastic athletes, I have never been.
The architects began their work with a study, considering not only the embankment, but all 180 hectares surrounded by its arc in the bend of the Moskva River. It turned out, as often happens, a lot of features. The wet soils of the low-lying floodplain require reinforced reinforcement, piles and other things - but since 1920, despite the difficulties, stadiums have been stubbornly built here. The place is perfectly located: an hour's walk from the Kremlin, in the best elite district of Moscow, Khamovniki - but difficult to access, as it is cut off by the Third Ring Road, and the entrances inside are not too obvious. It has many features of a park, but does not have the status of a park - it is listed as a natural area. The main specific feature of the Luzhniki Stadium is its excellent sports infrastructure, which, however, is available mainly to professionals and very purposeful amateurs, owners of various season tickets. In addition to sports facilities, there are enough prerequisites for development: clean air, Vorobyovy Gory metro station, one of the exits of which leads directly to Luzhnetskaya embankment. There is a bicycle path on the embankment, and cars enter it with passes: traffic is limited. But it is impossible to completely remove car traffic, the FSO uses the track.
Now the surroundings of the stadiums being reconstructed for the World Cup, including the embankment, looks like a slightly shabby memory of the 1980 Olympics: with chipped curbs, cracks in the asphalt, traditional bald patches of the lawns and with rare late additions in the form of also old stalls-trailers. Luzhniki is mainly visited by people who specialize in sports in one way or another, which is a minus on the one hand - the city does not fully use the pleasant natural space, and on the other hand, a plus: there is no influx of profane walking public, which favorably distinguishes it from Gorky Park and Crimean Embankment, where on a holiday and on a scooter it is not easy to drive without accidentally bumping into anyone. It is even a pity to change a slightly mossy, but reserved place.
In short, the Wowhaus architects quite rightly did without radical transformations, proposing many improvements for the development of what already exists. In this, the initial data of the project, in particular, also differ from the Krymskaya embankment: there was nothing and no one except the artists of the vernissage. Here, it would seem, everything remains almost in its place, and the audience will expand not that much - at the expense of amateur athletes, without a radical change in specialization. There will be little space for idle festivities, and the planned storage rooms at two entry points are designed so that they can be used simultaneously by about four hundred people. “The concept can help to use the embankment area as efficiently as possible and make Luzhniki the most convenient and comfortable place for sports and outdoor activities in the center of Moscow,” says one of the Wowhaus executives, Oleg Shapiro.
Probably, as a result of such a specialized, and in many respects - pragmatic task, as opposed to the hedonistic goal of the park, the style of the project turned out to be very rational, some kind of Dutch even economical in a good, sustain-able sense: there are no undulating benches and complex volumetric flower beds, although some, not too noticeable work of this kind is envisaged, it is in the background. It is even planned to preserve, re-register, some of the old benches. The minimum of decor is limited to the application of branded Luzhnetsky flourishes in the spirit of "time, forward", and swallows on the asphalt.
The main thing is not the decor. Now along the Luzhnetskaya embankment there are three asphalt roads separated by greenery: the one closest to the river is given to a sports track drawn in the middle without any additional markings: either it was driving or running, small strips of asphalt were left along the edges, pedestrians lack them, and other sidewalks no, the other two roads are completely automobile roads, although there are few cars on them due to the partial closure of the highway. Therefore, everyone moves along the path along the embankment at random - the authors note in their study: pedestrians enter where someone is running, someone is driving, on roller skates or a bicycle. It turns out unsafe, and as many as four car lanes are almost idle. Although athletes, of course, now run both on automobile asphalt and on grass, this is not the result of organization, but a personal decision - not to be afraid of rare cars.
The Wowhaus architects proposed to change the overweight and leave the cars only one of the three roads, the internal one. On the other hand, the path, which is located closer to the river and now serves as a running track, they took for walks and slow jogging. You can imagine a mom here walking with the child while dad is exercising. The entire middle line, taken from the cars, was given to sports, having laid out on as many as six lanes, two directions for three sports: runners, skaters and cyclists. Thus, three "cyclic sports" (I wonder where do skaters belong to skates?) Tightly, as in the periodic table, are located on one asphalt track; even direction arrows are conceived so that those running and rolling do not enter oncoming lanes. The width of each sports strip is about two hundred meters.
For marking paths, decoration and other markings, the authors offer two types of coating to choose from, and here we learn that road paint lasts 7-8 months (which in Moscow you guess every spring), and thermoplastic 4-5 years. In addition to sports lanes, using markings, the authors create many pedestrian crossings on the embankment, somewhere every one hundred and fifty meters, distributing them, however, reasonably: in the “dead-end” eastern part of the crossings there are no crossings at all; they are grouped near the metro, entrances and a small central square.
Of course, the project is not at all limited to disciplining markings in the spirit of "draw and live". Its second “layer” after the drawings on the asphalt is the arrangement of greenery: instead of postcard Soviet tulips, “frost-resistant perennials” appear, now popular multi-colored cereals, and in general - plants selected so as to bloom from spring to autumn inclusive. In addition, now a wide lawn with grass and trees is fenced off from the jogging track on the embankment by hard bushes, which physically do not allow walking on the grass. The grass is okay, but it is like the Mona Lisa behind glass, one can only know that it is, nothing more. The authors, on the contrary, offer to walk and sit on the grass and even arrange several sites for this. They preserve the bush only partially, covering it with flower beds in many places, but they separate the car lane with a hedge, protecting people from cars. In order not to irritate the runners with the responsibility for the flowers, “technical sidewalks” are laid along the curb: from pebbles or small stones on a cushion of gravel. Laconic and low lanterns will shine on the pebbles, the lamp is facing downward, they do not blind the eyes, but illuminate the path.
Behind the road where athletes are now running on the grass, a winding wooden walkway will appear on a wide lawn, similar to the one laid by Evgeny Ass in Muzeon Park. Well, for the FSO, the authors provided for retractable metal "bulls" that block the road and are removed automatically.
Further: now it is boring on the embankment, only benches, half of the old stalls are closed. The architects propose to make the track habitable using mobile kiosks with different functions, from lockers (about 190 at each entry point) and showers (sic!) To coffee and sandwich machines that do not require a seller. All this, except, presumably, showers, is placed in optimistically painted mesh metal boxes on wheels - mobile kiosks. So you can imagine how, when the FSO approaches, the iron bulls leave for the ground, people scatter, and the kiosks disperse to pre-prepared shelters. Which, of course, cannot be, they cannot leave quickly, because they are connected to the electricity grid, and some of them are connected to the water supply. Kiosks are placed at the entrances, vending machines are about a hundred meters away on the embankment.
And finally, three important centers appear in the project, or rather grow out of existing ones. In the western part of the embankment, from the side of Novodevichy, there is an entrance for motorists, where the authors are developing a small parking lot around a triangular lawn in front of the entrance, there are thirty places (now there is about the same, only in a somewhat chaotic manner). Under the bridge - the brutal concrete space next to the exit from under the overpass is being tidied up, with the same minimal means: lamps under the concrete overpass, a kiosk, a couple of benches, parking for bicycles, painting the asphalt. The third center is, relatively speaking, a ceremonial center, akin to a small square opposite the square on the axis of the Bolshoi Sports Arena. There is a wide pedestrian crossing, tables, a wooden amphitheater on granite steps overlooking the river and Vorobyovy Gory, similar to the one built by Wowhaus in Gorky Park; cafe tables by the water.
The project is similar and not similar to other works by Wowhaus for public spaces in Moscow, which have become one of the bureau's calling cards over the past five years. Of course, he continues the ideas of Gorky Park, Krymskaya Embankment, Sokolniki, Vorobyovy Gory. But the authors themselves emphasize the characteristic features of the Luzhniki Stadium: it is a sports park, open, but not designed for too large an audience, specialized. Perhaps this is the origin of the features of the solution we have already noted: it is very delicate, without unnecessary changes and reversals, rethinks the existing space, preserving even the benches, supplementing but not destroying, continuing but not crossing out. This is a kind of urban planning glaze, a translucent addition, and also mobile - kiosks on wheels. The solution is emphasized simply: for the framing of kiosks, the architects offer not only slotted metal, but even a painted mesh-netting. Simple, lightweight design, no glamor, everything is on the case: paths, lighting, lockers, showers. It looks like an open-air gym - and indeed it is.
