The Polytechnic Museum has always had an added emotional value. For Muscovites, he means a little more than his collection. Some people generally love Polytech not for its exhibits. And for an amazing building in the pseudo-Russian style, "floating" in the traffic flows from Kitay-gorod to Lubyanka. And also for the Large audience, where the meanings-manifestos of the epochs were born, be it the meetings of the Revolutionary Tribunal or the speeches of poets from the Symbolists to the sixties.
The more the role of Moscow as a metropolis competes with the role of Moscow as the center of the state, the more in demand is not only a hall where the audience as a single spectator watches what is happening in the department, but also a comfortable public space in which everyone is autonomous and can choose their own meanings or even from refuse them. Now the Polytech will have such a thing - the museum park under construction will become it. This is a rare case, by Moscow standards, when a new space appears not as a result of reconstruction of the old one and not as a result of expansion in breadth, but conquers the vertical. At the same time, it does not rise upward, to which both the climate and the "semi-hill" pattern are located, but will arise in the literal sense of the word out of the ground and will be located four meters below the sidewalk mark.
“From the outside, it looks like the sidewalk was cut with scissors,” says Mikhail Kozlov, lead architect at Wowhaus. - The new level will not try to repeat the exquisite facade, disguise itself as the fact that everything was so. It will become laconic and strict."
Wowhaus developed the concept of the museum park based on Junya Ishigami's project. He won the 2011 competition (see, in particular, the reasoning of Grigory Revzin about competition projects; and our short story about the first stage of the competition). With Japanese thrift in relation to every square centimeter, Ishigami proposed to excavate the basement floor of the Polytechnic along the perimeter and connect it with gentle green slopes to the square near the Solovetsky Stone, which is tightly clamped on four sides by the roadway and is empty most of the time.
However, as soon as the project appeared, it became obvious to many that it would not be possible to implement it in its original form.
“We were faced with the fact that it was necessary to revise the solutions proposed by Japanese architects. This is not due to the fact that someone did not like something or somehow did not aesthetically satisfy the needs of the customer. Everything was beautifully and well drawn. The only thing was that it did not take into account the context a little. The whole situation that is developing around this building. These are both existing squares and monuments of a nature conservation area. Plus the roadbed of Lubyanka Square and a huge number of different secret networks that run from the Lubyanka,”says Mikhail Kozlov.
It turned out to be impossible to create wide, gentle slopes under the building of the museum, as Ishigami assumed, their size was not tied to the limitation on the area allocated for design. In addition, it would have been necessary to cut down old lime trees in the park near the Solovetsky stone, which the mayor's office resolutely opposed. The designers of Wowhaus solved the problem by resorting to a more precise geometry: the slopes were replaced by terraces with trees, shrubs and flower beds of year-round flowering. An amphitheater will appear on the side of Lubyanskaya Square, which can serve as a summer platform for events and will organize the space in front of one of the main entrances from the lower level - Museum Square. The current basement floor will be transformed into a completely permeable ticket-free zone, where cafes, shops, galleries, info points, wardrobes and cash desks will be located.
They plan to make the lighting of the park multi-level: they want to add comfortable zones with low spotlights among the plants to the traditional lighting solution. The entire lower tier is going to be covered with very fine paving stones. The paving will accentuate the entrance lobbies and serve as navigation functions. The pillars of the main bridge running from the park near the Solovetsky stone, which will be made of a huge set of thin, visually weightless columns, will also distribute the flow of people.
The second large bridge will lead from the sidewalk to the main entrance from the side of New Square. Almost a dozen more small bridges will be thrown across the moat to the remaining doors, including those that are not used, but serve as escape routes. They are going to be made indistinguishable from the sidewalk from street level.
The main bridge has a complex configuration, and moreover, it will constantly change the slope. The building of the Polytechnic, as a designer, has been assembled for thirty years from buildings designed by different architects. Its cut resembles the field of an old computer game in which the hero has to endlessly climb up and jump down: the rooms are at different elevations, the foundation is built in steps, and the basement, which will be dug out, repeats these drops.
“All bridges will essentially become a projection of the situation with the relief that was there before. You won't be able to just take and cast a straight plate, it will have to be endlessly bent in different directions,”says Mikhail Kozlov. The retaining wall, which will flow from level to level, and the concrete amphitheater will also require maximum effort. The debate about whether to cast all these elements at the factory, or to manufacture them on site, has been going on for a very long time. The construction of the park will go in parallel with the reconstruction of the museum building. In fact, on the same territory there will be construction sites of two objects existing in different horizontal planes. Roy's foundation pit, the scaffolding behind which the facade has long disappeared will have to be hung out on a cantilever.
However, the biggest challenge is the transfer of communications. It will become unprecedented for the center of Moscow and will absorb more than a third of the budget. Until now, any plans for the construction of underground structures in this part of the city ended with the fact that investors found out the cost of work on the removal of communications. With the density of the capillary network, the area is permeated by re-layers of different years. And this is one of the main reasons why Ishigami's idea seemed unrealizable to skeptics.
The project was also called purely speculative in connection with the Moscow climate: precipitation would inevitably accumulate in the pit. Reinforced storm water drainage would have helped cope with the effects of the rain, but what to do with the snowfalls in Moscow was not clear. Wowhaus decided to equip the park cover with a heating system so that the snow melts and ice does not form. Moscow has such experience, albeit on a smaller scale. Warm water with additives is used to heat a section of the pavement in front of the mayor's office. The designers promise that the serious participation of utilities will be required only in the event of natural disasters.
Questions also raised whether the plants would be able to survive in the absence of sunlight. In addition to the fact that the park will be located at a depth, its longest side faces west, where there is very little sun. As a result, flowers and ground cover grasses had to choose only the numbers from the shade-loving ones, and all the trees will be on the trunk - their crowns will rise above the sidewalk. Trees will be planted along the facade, which will become a screen from dust and pollution, which are inevitable due to the proximity to the roadway.
The streams of cars that flow around the Polytechnic building from all sides have long turned it into a kind of island. The new ground crossing from the side of Ilyinskaya Square corrected the situation only in part, but now the situation should change radically.
It will be possible to get to the level of the museum park from Kitay-Gorod from the metro passage. On the opposite side, in order to unite the park with the public garden near the Solovetsky Stone, the order of public transport will be changed. Two stops of buses and trolleybuses, which are located on the territory of Polytechnichesky Proezd, will be relocated: some will be lowered closer to Ilyinka, the rest will be raised to a flowerbed on Lubyanskaya Square, on the left side of which they will organize a refueling. The upper and lower levels near the Polytechnic building will be intertwined with stairs and will create a comfortable route for transit pedestrians.
