Nizhny Novgorod hosted the Eco-Shore festival, invented by the Union of Architects of Russia in 2010. Every year, during the velvet season (or Indian summer), friends of the Union gather by the water, discuss the shores, read reports to each other, get to know the area, communicate a lot and closely. One could not even mention this - and so everyone understands! - but the competition under the flag of the festival is important. This time - a competition for the Nizhny Novgorod Arrow, the fate of which in the city is the most fiercely debated. The port was removed from Strelka, now they are preparing for the 2018 World Cup, what will happen after football is unknown, but, according to the organizers of the competition, 56 projects from six countries (Russia, Lithuania, Italy, Germany, Serbia, China) can clarify the situation.
And besides this competition, projects for Strelka have been accumulating for decades. After the liquidation of the Nizhny Novgorod fair at the end of the 20s of the last century, the marinas along the Oka and Volga were emptied, and the temple of Alexander Nevsky, built by merchants who came to Nizhny during the fair season, also became dilapidated. In the early 30s, the temple was proposed to be used as a base for a giant statue of Lenin. They built a port. Since the 1970s, new microdistricts have complicated the port's communication with the railroad, it was decided to move it to another location, a fair, a business center, and a park were again painted on Strelka. But now the stadium is being completed, and all the neighborhoods will be filled with roads and fences, and places with the best panoramic views of the city have been allocated for parking.
However, all these projects on Strelka did not make the weather. The territory was closed for 70 years, the townspeople got used to it and were not surprised that the design was also carried out behind closed doors, and the result would one day be shown in the media. However, in 2015, during an excursion to the former port, an inquisitive public made an important discovery (subsequently confirmed by archival documents), which aroused the widest interest in this area and showed that standard solutions are not suitable here. And what is good? There is no quick answer. And it can't be. The public organization "Open Strelka" together with the CPA held several workshops, organized archival research of objects on Strelka, with friends and allies of all ranks held a scientific conference "Strelka's Cultural Codes", exhibitions, actions, with sociologists - polls of townspeople. And when I found out about an architectural competition within the framework of Eco-Shore, I knocked at the Union of Architects (fortunately, among the “scapegoats” there are members of the SA) with a proposal for cooperation.
But it seems that the issue of interaction with the public is not provided by Eco-coast - only with sponsors, and the local CA is generally scary - so the cooperation did not take place. All introductory materials for the competition were prepared by the Department of Urban Development, probably proceeding from the consideration that architects, mainly living far from Nizhny Novgorod, on the basis of norms, rules and historical information, can better come up with what we need on Strelka. On the basis of their ideas, one of the smartest Nizhny Novgorod architect will compile a project suitable for procedural discussions. Or the smartest one will choose, appoint, agree with the one who will “summarize” the results of the competition. There is no irony about an extraordinary intelligence: if modern urbanists argue that a city is a complex, multi-layered system that requires the joint efforts of specialists from different fields, then the one who is ready to take responsibility for making a decision is superman. Has an accurate understanding of the professional content of the conversion and territory development project.
If the Eco-Shore participants don't come up with it, it's okay: no one promised anything to anyone, and during the competition at Strelka, reinforced concrete warehouses along the Oka were urgently demolished, although the contestants could decide their fate at their own discretion. However, the word “fate” is not entirely appropriate when it comes to Eco-Bereg: projects older than a year are not saved on its website at all.
Not destiny - so the sum: a certain amount of architectural visions - of varying degrees of elaboration, with a different planning horizon - came out of Eco-Bereg. There is a practical sense: by the sum of these visions (although the number is still not enough for a representative indicator), one can judge the proportions of the new filling of the space, accents, zones. Or, as they said on the sidelines of the festival, “to finally see what we definitely don’t need”.
However, this sum is incomplete without a scenario of living space, an accurate idea of who and why it is important to get there and what to do there, except for the usual functioning as an idle public. Approach one:
in Zaryadye, in Strelka. In the projects - some kind of architectural design of the space, models of possible behavior and an idea of the urgent needs of the townspeople - remained outside the scope of the competition. Of course, they are difficult to calculate, which is partly why in many cities where investors are fatter than Nizhny Novgorod, they pass such territories through gentrification, spinning up the value of the territory due to the activity of creative industries. Let the townspeople know this is their place.
The jury of the competition is Sergey Skuratov (President of the company "Sergey Skuratov Architects"), Boris Bernaskoni (Head of the Bernaskoni architectural bureau), Nikolay Lyzlov (Head of AM Lyzlova), Oleg Romanov (President of the St. Petersburg Union of Architects), Nikolos Abashidze (Deputy Chairman of the Board of the Union architects of Georgia), Alexander Korbut (President of the Union of Architects of the Republic of Belarus), Alexander Bodrievsky (Director of the Department of Urban Development of the Territory of the Nizhny Novgorod Region)
Second prize
Ass Architects
Evgeny Ass, Olga Aistova, Ekaterina Demina, Ekaterina Tinyakova, Alisa Bunyatova
In the opinion of the public organization "Open Strelka", this is the best project of the competition: it is supposed to preserve all the port facilities and, consequently, a gradual, evolutionary development of the territory, with the inclusion of minimal but effective attractive innovations.
A red balloon filled with helium, with a diameter of 50 meters, raises the platform with the audience to a height of 300 meters, from where a fantastic panorama of the Volga and Oka distances opens. Thus, the ball becomes not only a monumental symbol of the place, but also a cognitive tool, as well as the main attraction in Nizhny Novgorod, visible from anywhere in the city.
The descent to the water is being completed to the existing embankments, forming the tip of the Arrow. The triangular staircase tapering downwards allows, alone or together, to approach the very edge of the water and stand at the point of direct closure of the great rivers.
Arrangement of a walking tram route in the park. A circular tram line is laid through the entire territory of the park, connected with the routes of public transport. The tram in the park is not only a means of transportation, but also a part of the exhibition of art and technology, an element of an excursion educational program and, at the same time, an attraction.
Sergey Tumanin's project not marked in the competition. The problem is that it assumes housing on the Strelka. According to the terms of the competition, they do not live here! How, then, can we talk about a “new urban sub-center” (the wording from the Eco-Shore website) if there’s no one here in the evening and at night? The theme of housing is one of the pitfalls of the Eco-Shore competition. Nobody gave any justification for the effective use of the territory.
There are a lot of quotes on 56 projects. From Zaha Hadid to the Chapel of Silence in Helsinki.
Third Prize
Design Bureau "BADR 5"
Authors: Sergei Michurin, Petr Vasiliev, with the participation of
Natalia Nosova, Ekaterina Kapatun
Volga Museum.
By the way, why is the Volga Museum? The arrow is the confluence of two great rivers: the Oka and the Volga.
First Prize
Architectural bureau "Archslon"
Authors: Tatiana Osetskaya, Alexander Salov, Ksenia Vauchskaya, Tatiana Yudina
First place in the competition. The authors decided to return Strelka to its original natural appearance - with a sandy shore. But how can this be done if the port is a hydraulic structure designed to lift the water of the Volga reservoirs, and the retaining walls are part of this complex?
Diploma
Team of authors: Massimo Bellotti, Mikhail Dutsev, Claudio Fazzini, Pier Feredico Cagliari, Carola Gentilini, Alice Bottelli, Giuseppe Donati, Ida Lia Russo, Florin Dan Andresan (Italy - Russia - Romania)
