The city's beautification projects sparked a heated debate this September. But while journalists and bloggers are discussing Triumfalnaya Square, comparing it to Krymskaya Embankment, the architects of the WOWhaus bureau, well-known pioneers in the field of transforming public spaces in Moscow, opened at VDNKh the first stage of the City Farm, which they built over the past summer, a project that is typologically completely new for Moscow. (although there are similar parks in the Moscow region). The farm is located at the farthest edge of the exhibition - near Likhoborskiy proezd and Selskokhozyaistvennaya street, not far from the Botanichesky Sad metro station.
The Kamenka River, which feeds a cascade of ponds that descend from the Botanical Garden to the All-Russian Exhibition, not far from here flows into the Yauza, forming the smallest pond behind the last dam - the Fifth Kamensky. To the right, south of the pond, there was a pavilion "Hunting and Animal Breeding" that burned down in 2005 - with a mini-zoo behind an openwork arched facade; only two sculptures "The Hunter" and "Foxes" have survived from it. Over the past two decades, this territory, like the northern part of VDNKh in general, has turned into real backyards, a place of private residences, nomadic kebabs, baths and restaurants that breed fish in ponds, inviting customers to personally catch their prey, which will then be cooked in the kitchen. One of these restaurants, Trout Rechka, was also on the Fifth Kamensky pond (the pond and the river bed are separated here, and the attraction turns out to be double). The VDNKh administration closed the restaurant in 2014, and then invited the WOWhaus architects to equip the territory.
Having studied the history and surroundings, the architects soon came to the conclusion that this part of VDNKh, in contrast to the central part, with its pavilions of republics and space, was more devoted to agriculture, they also remembered the zoo of the hunting pavilion and proposed to create an urban farm - a kind of zoo where children can see pets and learn how to take care of them in a variety of workshops. Such farms are common in Europe, although, as the authors of the project say, they are beautiful and natural, but as a rule they are not interesting from an architectural point of view - and WOWhaus decided to create an “ideal farm” in Moscow, clean, spacious, comfortable and cozy - exemplary, "Like the rest of VDNKh." This was done after the pre-project and marketing research carried out by experts in the transformation of KB23 territories.
The main plot of the project is the farm itself, it has become the nucleus of the first stage, it is fully built and is already practically inhabited: only the pigeons have not arrived in the dovecote, but goats, sheep, donkeys and mini-cows are already settling in the warm barn; rabbits breed in the rabbitry, pedigree chickens, geese with humped noses and ducks with beautiful crests on their heads swim in the pond and rush in the poultry houses. Next to the pond is a large playground, similar to the one that WOWhaus built in the Bauman Garden on Basmannaya - equipped for children with disabilities and grouped along an axial slide road, without stairs. The completed first stage of the farm occupied a large, northern part of the territory, around a pond and a river. A "fishing zone" is planned on the river, a tribute to the memory of the place. Now the already operating City Farm can be accessed through a small entrance pavilion from the side of the Rabbit Breeding Pavilion (a ticket is 200 rubles, and the first regular visitors have already appeared at the farm, as the organizers say).
The second stage - in the southern part of the territory, with the future main entrance near the sculptures - is planned to be fully or partially completed by December. Functions that complement the farm will be grouped here, which already echo their mini-representatives in the completed part: a large cafe, planned at the main entrance, is supported by a tea and sandwich stall and a canopy over the tables built on the bank of the pond; the greenhouse of the second stage - in three parts, with hydroponics, flowers, exotic plants and with lattice facades, which, according to the authors, resemble pineapple skin - is supported by a mini-vegetable garden from the northern part, where winter rye and radishes have already sprouted in high beds and took root strawberry mustache. The future zone of master classes with carpentry machines in the southern part echoes the playground-construction site, where you can knock with a hammer and cut something with a saw - it is planned to open soon. The authors of the project deliberately distributed all the functions between the two stages of construction so that the first stage was immediately as rich as possible, diverse and not boring.
But back to the impressions of the completed part of the farm. A small park now occupies about one and a half hectares, and its central part, if we exclude the utility shed on the periphery of the site, is even less, probably about a hectare, something in between a park and a square. Meanwhile, the elevation difference (from the entrance you need to go down the stairs), the pond and the river make the mini-park very diverse. The architecture of the pavilions is also designed to maintain a richness of experience: the pavilions, designed by different architects of the bureau, are all wooden, but all are very different. By showing them to reporters, the authors even speculated about the difference between houses designed by men and women. There really is a difference, the difference between "hands" and techniques, roughly united by the material, is felt completely, however, just like the authorship of WOWhaus as a whole.
There is no symmetry or pathos here, all buildings, even the most capital and insulated ones - the barn and the rabbitry - remain within the framework of light pavilion architecture. Concrete paths alternate with spots of bright white marble gravel, wooden bridges with benches are thrown to two islets on the pond, and the border of the wooden flooring, raised on legs and running along the river, is dotted with rectangular ledges - small piers, probably designed for future fishing. Everything is scattered over the site, transparent, lattice, the roofs are asymmetric, the buildings tend to "dissolve" in space, releasing terraces, roofs, pillars outside. Architecture is kept on the verge of aesthetics of pure festival creativity, like "Cities" or "Archstoyanie" - and the actual pavilion and park construction, more capital and high quality, but still airy and freely allowing itself the play of contrasts.
It is pleasant to be in this themed garden - and at the same time it evokes a lot of associations. The first, relatively speaking, is the oldest - park ventures of sentimentalism at the end of the 18th century. Many people know that Marie Antoinette had her own farm in the Park of Versailles, where she milked the cows without removing the crinoline. Milking a goat for children at 13:45 on a city farm is somewhat similar, as an attempt to bring a person closer to agricultural reality, in principle, divorced from village life. Actually, the urban farms of Europe originate from those undertakings of the era of the encyclopedists, and the Moscow farm inherits them already indirectly. And yet there is a lot in common: on the one hand, an emphasized emphasis on naturalness and dimness - in particular, although roll lawns were laid on the ground by the day of the city, the architects say that there are seeds of clovers and grasses under them, by next year they will sprout and everything will be look more natural. Some of the wooden buildings, for example the barn and the gazebo for master classes, are tinted gray-brownish, and some of the wood is left as it is, but again the authors expect that by next year they will naturally acquire a grayish silvery. Favorite material - now - the authors call larch shingles, shingles, which is covered with a pointed stall-cafe, which the workers called "pencil" - indeed, very similar, especially from a distance. The poultry houses on the other side of the pond are made of the same shingles and the same shape, they overlap with each other. And we love the material for its texture, warmth and naturalness. He, too, should be gray from the rains. We remember village houses - even if not straw, but shingles here for a reason, there is a powerful charge of pastoralism in it, the figurative quintessence of a farm.
On the other hand, not a single farm, built on the wave of sentimental introduction of the townspeople to nature, is unlike the real one. That the authors also understand, directly admitting that introducing children to industrial animal breeding is traumatic and inhumane. Imagine chickens on a conveyor belt; the local chickens and geese, in comparison with them, are like swans on the Patriarch's. The farm is more like a themed mini-zoo, donkeys are combed out every day. Miniature African cows with humps like a camel give almost no milk, but are small and exotic. There is almost no smell - the ventilation is well thought out, nothing to do with the "Pig Breeding" pavilion, which shocked me so much as a child. In a word, now, when one of the main tasks for a city child entering school is to learn pets and understand that besides a cat, a hedgehog and a turtle, there are also such animals from the peasant's yard, the farm is very useful for this.
If we forget for a while about the proto-farm of Marie Antoinette, then the second brightest association will be the World Expo, which has not yet finished working in Milan. This year it is dedicated to food production, that is, in fact, the same as the city farm WOWhaus, and the roll call between the local vegetable garden and the project
Slow food Herzog and de Meuron are quite tangible, starting with strawberries and radishes, the shape of the beds, now high, now suspended, now built into the wall, and ending with the characteristic shape of the supports, diverging from one point upwards. However, the Milan Expo is full of plants, and the animals are only in pictures.
World exhibitions, the theme of the last of which partly coincided with the plot of the farm, were the prototype of Soviet handicraft-industrial exhibitions, and here we find ourselves already in the sphere of influence of the most direct, Moscow context. It is easy to see that the "City Farm" is in many ways similar to a miniature copy of the agricultural part of VDNKh - excluding the national pavilions, but with a "handicraft" component, with cafes and entertainment. If you look closely from the side of the barn to the other side of the pond, then the pencil kiosk will look like a rocket, and the rescue tower will look like a rocket, and the rescue tower will be its launch module, which has driven to the other side of the river: one of the recognizable symbols of the Soviet exhibition of achievements is “with us”, but executed in wood like the Polissky Hadron Collider, like the image of a technogenic symbol in deliberately inappropriate material.
Meanwhile, the similarity with the mini-VDNKh does not negate another prototype - the wooden buildings of the farm resemble the first exhibition, the handicraft All-Union Agricultural Exhibition on the site of Gorky Park (in the arrangement of which WOWhaus invested a lot of effort, which is also important). A lot is recognizable: a tendency towards lattice and half-timbered (or similar) structures, a discrepancy of the author's handwritings, and some very conventional wooden classicism. The inevitably grand barn, the largest and warmest room, with two asymmetrical roof pegs and a metal spiral staircase leading to the balcony, resembles a basilica. Rescue tower - "Makhorku". The cafe's rhombic canopy looks like a Chipperfield-style peripter from the side of the river (this theme is not uncommon in parks, and WOWhaus has already had to build such things), and from the side of the pond, due to the high angle of the roof, it looks like a water reflected one, and at the same time very much in the spirit of VSKhV-VDNKh portico - it is visible only from one angle and when moving soon disappears, disintegrates. But the white color of the outer contour of the supports with the natural wood of the internal supports helps a lot to emphasize the classic theme - a kind of wooden marble is obtained. The proximity of the Stalinist transformer booth to the real, in contrast to the light canopy of the cafe, dense and fluted Doric columns, also painted white, also helps.
The view is formed not only as an exhibition, but also as a conditional estate, especially thanks to the pond and islands. A canopy portico is a palace, a pencil is an obelisk. Flowers in tubs - the backs of benches, are located at eye level, as in the British pavilion of the Expo - they are also country-house, large and bright, and not lavender and not fashionable cereals. The topic has been caught, yet we are in an urban village. However, imagery does not overstep the boundaries, does not turn into stylization of either the avant-garde or anything else, but remains, as already mentioned, within the framework of modern park style.
It turns out that the farm is also a very meaningful undertaking, or rather filled with meanings that line up in a chain from the cows of Marie Antoinette - to the agricultural accent of Soviet expo - and to modern urban farms, children's educational fun and eco-searches of our time, presented now in Milan. … The idea is obtained repeatedly in a trend. Architecturally, the authors bring the somewhat pompous image of VDNKh to its wooden, semi-avant-garde, semi-neoclassical historical prototype - VSHV, along the way stringing their important Moscow works into one chain. You can even understand it this way: the first exhibition of 1923 was in a still Neman and agricultural country, it was wooden and cheerful, almost a fair; then most of the children were peasants. Since then, there have been children of workers, children of MAEs, children of office collars … And the exhibition, having moved, became more magnificent and pretentious, pushing the "rural industry" to the margins, and then completely forgetting. "Urban farm" - grafting the theme in the format of urban entertainment, loops the story in a playful way. However, where and how the story will close - we, fortunately, do not yet know for sure. And it's nice to take a walk. And in the evening everything glows very beautifully.
