In 2016, MARCHI will graduate specialist architects for the last time, then there will be only bachelors and masters. Students of the Department of Architectural Design of Residential Buildings, who entered the studio of the Project Meganom workshop, worked under the guidance of Yuri Grigoryan, Marko Mikich-Eftych, Yulia Ardabyevskaya and Artem Staborovsky's group. For their theses, topics were found that could express the contradictions of a modern city and become a starting point for professional discussion. In this way, the students tried to bring architecture back into the cultural context.
Marko Mihich-Eftic
partner of the "Done" project, teacher at Moscow Architectural Institute:
“As Wikipedia says:“An open city is a city that, during a war, due to its inevitable capture and destruction, is declared open.”Thus, the city declares that it refuses any defensive actions. The attacking army in this case will not storm, bomb or otherwise attack a city, but enter it without a fight. This action seeks to protect historical sites and civilians. The concept can be seen as a kind of tactical retreat. "This is a series of diplomas that comprehend the current situation, the status quo in urban conflicts In such a context, “defensive actions” are non-linear, their first step is to accept everything as it is: sprawl, neighborhoods, vacant lots, and hyperblocks. They do not try to take a defensive position, they take a step forward, showing how each topic can be turn into a dream."
Yuri Grigoryan
founder of the Meganom bureau, lecturer at Moscow Architectural Institute:
“Despite the fact that each project had an individual theme, it is a team effort. The working title of our topic is "Open City", New Moscow 2016. And the method that we decided to put into the process this year, unlike in previous years, is that students create individual projects, and all work begins with a general study. but also end together, making up a collection. Therefore, this is both a collective and an individual project - each student's answer to the question of what he considers to be the most important for himself in architecture at the moment, to define a set of values, and at the same time tries to open topics that are important for the city, but not quite “visible "In existing optics.
At the beginning of the work, the students analyzed the most acute local and world discussions, small and large, on a variety of topics, of their free choice. Thus, nine different directions were distinguished, some of which began to converge as we advanced. When choosing, we did not avoid "hackneyed" topics, such as "museification" or "public space", hoping to consider something else unexplored in them.
Did we succeed or not? Something yes, some no. We wanted the themes and our projects to be of interest not so much to the hermetic community of architects, but to many people, those who are interested in architecture and who are not at all. In this case, an important criterion for evaluating concepts has become, so to speak, "the clarity of goal-setting." For accurate transmission of information, students had to create not so much a project idea as a certain image, integral and very clear, which could provoke a reaction, an interesting conversation in society."
Continuation of the leader's story - below, after the projects.
The Kapotni effect. Relocation
Olga Tarasova
The Kapotnya area is isolated from the city by a river, an oil refinery and the Moscow Ring Road. Its territory is "invisible" to transport, political and economic influence of the center. Kapotnya naturally becomes an almost autonomous city within the city, which makes it possible to create an alternative development project and conduct an experiment. The structure of the microdistrict's fabric is very loose, there is a lot of empty, unused land in it. It belongs to no one and is in desolation, while the land is a valuable resource. In the project, the empty territory is divided into plots according to the number of apartments in the panel houses of Kapotnya and is distributed to residents with full use rights. People become the owners of the city, they leave the small apartments of panel high-rise buildings.
A different way of life is emerging in the city: neighborhoods, vegetable gardens and private workshops are returning. New plots are regulated by the area and height of the building. They are divided into several types: without building, where you can set up gardens and vegetable gardens; with limited, low-rise buildings and plots without restrictions. Together with the plots, residents receive basic typed modules of houses, which they can later complete on their own, depending on their needs. The high-rise buildings abandoned by residents are becoming public spaces. From the bulk of the microdistrict, they are transformed into stable elements of the new city. Such an experiment allows for a new look at the land of the city as a valuable resource and creates an alternative way of life.
Courtyard street
Alena Shlyakhovaya
The courtyard is a new type of urban space that combines the features of a lively city street and an inhabited courtyard. The courtyard is a network of new pedestrian routes that appears where it is necessary to increase the connectivity of urban areas, clearly define the boundaries of public and public spaces, and improve the quality and functional saturation of the environment. But where, due to various factors, radical urban planning changes are impossible and the creation of the usual noisy city street is inappropriate - in the existing residential environment of hyper and superblocks on the outskirts of the city. The courtyard street consists of spaces of varying degrees of publicity, it is full of various subjects and has a huge potential for use. This is a street, a courtyard, a house and a park - this is a combination in one place of all the social possibilities of city life.
Pnyx in Yasenevo
Anna Goga
The Yasenevo area has a linear center, that is, a boulevard. It was supposed to become the public nucleus of the entire microdistrict. Now this site can be called dead. It is surrounded by buildings, but does not have the originally intended function. To revitalize the boulevard, an architectural park is being set up on the site, consisting of various architectural forms that provoke a person to act. Forms create the possibility of filling, they take on the function of public spaces, their main purpose is to be interactive, create a platform for action and interact with a person. The main addressee of such architecture is man.
Stalls in Biryulevo
Christina Yegorushkina
The project involves the erection of an open shed on the site of a wasteland with an area of 2 hectares in the Biryulyovo area for placing public spaces under it: trade pavilions, cafes, baths. Within the extended roofed structure, two streets run and an area is organized, providing visibility and permeability of the architecture, as well as creating interaction with the green areas existing on the site. An indoor environment with skylights and meeting points is organized. The project is a network of temporary architecture objects that perform two main important functions: they stimulate the growth of small business in the periphery and organize the architectural appearance of the city streets of the district. The project draws attention to the potential growth area for timber temporary construction. It lies within the territory between the Third Transport Ring and the Moscow Ring Road - a territory characterized by a high population density and low quality of life, and where the free planning of neighborhoods does not facilitate the formation of social interactions. Temporary architecture becomes a kind of "parallel city" with its own life and openness to change, which ensures the creation of social and cultural life on the periphery and prevents chaotic infill development.
Belyaevo 2050
Vasily Goncharov, Svetlana Dudina
Proceeding from the problem of the expiration of the service life of panel series, an algorithm was developed for one of the first experimental panel districts "Belyaevo", which creates rules for regulating development in a situation where it is economically impossible to demolish all houses at the same time. The algorithm assumes the gradual replacement of panel series with an expired service life, it is subject to all currently existing building codes and regulations, and uses three tools that lay the foundations - temporary parceling, the degree of illumination, standard indents from residential facades. Areas subject to transformation are filled with a "linear block" - a chain of lots 15x25 meters. Each lot is a construction set, consisting of residential and public buildings, social services and even garden plots. The new master plan of the linear quarter is a unified system in which housing is harmoniously adjacent to public spaces.
City room
Vlad Kapustin
The city room is a type of open house found by the author of the project: a hybrid of a building and a city square. Its purpose is to demonstrate the openness of public space. This is a rectangular volume with a plan of 60x120 m and an average height of 40 m. The interior of the City Room is part of the public space. He is a kind of scene for various plots of the metropolis. People, of course, become both spectators and actors, and architecture becomes scenery.
Functionally, the City Room is a publicly available multifunctional cultural and educational center. Place for mass leisure: concerts, balls, rehearsals, lectures, meetings. All functions are located in the thickness of the "wall" along the perimeter of the rectangular volume. In the center of the City Room, there is a fireplace for heating the room during the cold season, symbolizing a common home, while, like the ancient Roman atrium, the central area of the room remains open-air.
Pavilion in the Kremlin
Azamat Nyrov
Working on the territory of the Moscow Kremlin is always a daring and provocative task. The main thesis of the author of this project sounds like “the loss of an architectural work entails the loss of a fragment of culture”. In the Moscow Kremlin, building 14 was dismantled, for the construction of which Miracles and the Ascension monasteries were demolished. In its place, fragments of the foundations of monasteries were discovered. The new project in its function becomes an archaeological park with a staircase for observation, 21 m high. The temporary structure itself is a spiral ramp raised on a lattice. The ground part of the object includes, first of all, an observation deck, which provides new vantage points for the perception of the Kremlin's monuments, including the preserved foundations of lost structures. The main material - wood - emphasizes the temporary nature of the object and at the same time integrates it organically into traditional architecture. The color, which coincides with the color of the Kremlin walls, visually inserts a kind of pavilion into the context.
Victory Park Pavilion
Ekaterina Nuzhdina
The main thesis of this project is “any building in the city is valuable”. But in every city there are places completely excluded from any processes, forgotten, devastated. One of these urban problems is unfinished construction. There is a similar place in Moscow between the unfinished building of the Oceanarium and the ceremonial, monumental Victory Park. There, urban planning tension is created, giving rise to a productive conflict. Now it is an abandoned foundation pit with an area of 3.6 hectares, half of which is occupied by a ruin. The concept of the project in the development of the site consists mainly in preserving the unfinished construction, preserving the existing situation. The project involves the construction of a cruciform bridge that covers the foundation pit and restores city connections between the metro, the Sortirovochnaya railway station, Victory Park and the residential area. The pit itself becomes a park with ruins as functional objects. Some of the ruins are completely preserved, some are being transformed. The park is organized according to the principle of a film strip - there is one route in it that sequentially passes through the zones: a park, swamps, a viewing balcony, an entrance pavilion with a restaurant and ticket offices, a courtyard filled with water and an exhibition pavilion.
Condominium (m) mind
Stas Kozin
The Condomini (M) Um Project explores a new type of housing, the predecessors of which can be considered coliving, hostels, hotels and even the ancient Roman insulas. "Condominium (m) mind" is a home with minimal housing. Thanks to the miniaturization and compact modern layout of living spaces, a full-fledged apartment in such a house was reduced to 10 m2… The house is divided into a private part (cell-apartments) and a public one. The individual part of the house consists of 65 cells, which are divided, in turn, into 35 double and 30 single cells. Each small apartment includes furniture made from recycled materials (sawdust, paper, wood). All cells consist of five necessary elements - a shower room, a wardrobe, an inversion cabinet, a workstation and a bed. The last two elements and their variations make up the facade of the house. The kitchen, dining room, living room and dry cleaning are taken out of the cell space and are public areas.
Construction company "Skazka"
Irina Mikhailova
The private housing market is now extremely extensive. Many firms and construction companies offer various projects of country houses. The way of life is dictated by the shape and appearance of the house, which, in fact, is the basis of competition in the market for individual housing. Villages with private houses also define the image of the countryside landscape. To search for a new form of an individual house, the author of the project developed a special method of "mistakes". The first stage of the method - "Laboratory of Form" - a series of experiments with images and methods of shaping, the purpose of which is to overcome the inertia of thinking and find as many "unique" forms as possible. After analyzing the resulting forms, one typical template was chosen, which formed the basis for the shape of the house and, accordingly, the individual "language" of the construction company, which will offer clients this housing. The houses of the Skazka construction company are assembled from modules, which allows them to be erected in a short time on any site. Modules are separate additional rooms that join the main block, which consists of an entrance hall with a bathroom, a living room with a kitchen and a bedroom. The modules differ in function: bedrooms, verandas and, for example, baths. The modular system allows houses to be rebuilt according to the preferences of the buyer, achieving individualization not in the external decor, but in the shape of the building.
City generator
Rustam Nasriddinov-Bitson
The result of this project is not an architectural form, but a computer program called by the author "Cute District". It is a procedural generator of urban space operating on five scales - city, district, microdistrict, block, house. For each scale, the program automatically generates a "formwork" - a three-dimensional model of the future city. The author was able to test the generator in the Moscow region, where several million square meters of housing are commissioned annually. For the Moscow agglomeration, within the boundaries of the Big Concrete Ring, a street and road network was generated, designed for a metropolis with a population of 127 million people. Then a plot with an area of 98 hectares was chosen, on which the author was able to demonstrate all the listed stages of generation on all five scales. The result of the program became a graduation project.
*** Yuri Grigoryan, Founder of the Meganom bureau, teacher of Moscow Architectural Institute: [back to top] “If we look more closely at the work of each student, I can say that in our collection there are a number of projects that address the topic of territory and land use, there are those that address the topics of conservation, heritage. There is a group of projects that touches on the topic of public space, there is a direction of temporary architecture, there is an attempt to project research on stereotypes and their impact on the private housing market. But we didn’t choose topics on the basis of only “relevance”, it is rather the principle of “interest” - is it interesting at all, and if interested, then to whom.
In this methodology, each student is the emperor of his topic, in which he has absolute power, and builds an "empire" from the project, as our colleague Marco called them, and is himself responsible for the result. At the same time, teamwork and general discussions and presentations made the whole group, including teachers, accomplices and employees of each project.
For our team, the most important thing is the student's personal development, his growth and inspiration. And it's not about the "quality" of the project. Sometimes it may turn out that a conditionally “bad” project is more valuable for the author, for his creative biography, than the one that seems “good”."
*** Students' projects were presented at the Moscow Urban Forum by Olga Tarasova and Alena Shlyakhova.
