The exhibition is part of the annual festival Cities of the Future / Future of Cities, organized by Project Baltia magazine in cooperation with the Committee for Urban Planning and Architecture of St. Petersburg. The place alone - the New Stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater - is worth visiting the exhibition: its bright hall, where old and new architecture amicably meet, is very well suited for such chamber events. However, only the exhibition itself can be called chamber - six wooden stands, on the one hand, they have an idea of the ideal, and on the other - the norm, the routine, what we are dealing with today. The media hall could not accommodate the conference - the audience stood, sat on the stairs and folding chairs, as at some lecture by an eminent professor at the Sorbonne. After the first performances, however, breathing became freer, but still - such an interest in urban futurology is remarkable in its own way.
Ideas on the stands range from familiar and understandable things to beautiful-minded searches for the absolute. So, Sergei Tchoban has a pair of opposites - a modern and traditional city, presented in the form of architectural graphics. And Stepan Lipgart has an antithesis to the earthly city - striving upward
space constructions in the spirit of Calatrava, which were also shown at the conference under the "Poem of Ecstasy" by Scriabin.
Between them are more specific questions: the ideal plan of the city, district and house.
The tablet and the presentation of the architects of the St. Petersburg office of MLA + caused excitement: they suggested that the city be denser as much as possible. According to their calculations, in the current urbanized environment of St. Petersburg, it is possible to build about 77 million more apartments, which allows not to expand for another ten years.
Seal, however, is not a very suitable term. Rather, the improvement of the existing environment through the targeted and precise introduction of new multifunctional buildings, which will help to form streets and quarters where they do not exist, and, in general, to use this or that area more efficiently.
The city was disassembled into districts (about 300), and the development into morphotypes: the historical center, the gray belt, "Stalin" M and "Stalinka" S, "Khrushchev", "Brezhnevka", post-Soviet buildings and the private sector. The architects believe that there is almost no need to condense "Stalinkas" - they are already comfortable for life, I want to keep them as they are. But the gray belt, "Khrushchev" and "Brezhnevkas" must be compacted, because there the index of efficiency of use of the territory can be increased from 1.44 to 2. The absence of large spots for building is solved simply - by grinding the typology of "injections". Architects studied predecessors (from
Christopher Alexander to Alexander Vysokovsky) and created something like a manual for working with each morphotype.
"Studio-44" showed the project of an ideal micro-city, which remained on paper: residential development for the alluvial territory near the village of Gorskaya, "the model of New Amsterdam", which Peter tried to create. You can come here by car or by boat, and different types of buildings, from high-rise buildings to low-rise buildings and villas, create a living structure and a "new level of comfort", promote communication. According to Nikita Yavein, all norms have been violated in this project, but it is necessary to live in such and such a city. In addition, he also has a "great development future", "but Peter's idea cannot be realized without Peter."
Reality -
the project of a residential complex on the embankment of the alluvial territories of Vasilievsky Island, where the approved land-surveying project and all kinds of norms "left no room for planning maneuver", and the work of the architects turned into "endless mathematical fuss". At the same time, compliance with the rules does not guarantee a good result, more often the opposite: the project of its predecessors, for example, met all the standards, but instead of a park on the embankment, it turned out to be a four-lane road.
At the conference, Nikita Yavein also showed
the project of a microdistrict in Pushkin, inspired by the bosquet layout of a regular park - a compromise, “normal quarters within our norms”.
At the stand of the Swedish bureau Semrén & Månsson, the ideal / norm pair came out somewhat offensive: the ideal represented the project of a residential complex in Gothenburg, and the norm was represented by Skandy Klubb, implemented in St. Petersburg. On the other hand, I am glad that all the Swedish principles of good housing are not uncommon in our country for a long time: detailed various facades, a hierarchy of private and public spaces, the versatility of the latter. The owner of the bureau, Magnus Monsson, admitted that although there was a conflict with Russian norms, it turned out to realize almost everything that was conceived. The norms, in his opinion, are binding, but are doomed to constant lag.
Slightly off to the side is the KGA stand, listing the achievements: the program for preserving the historical center and transforming the "gray belt", coordinating the architectural and urban planning appearance of new buildings and improving their quality, joint development of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region. To achieve the ideal, it seems that it is enough to adjust the high-rise buildings and thereby "replenish the system of the city's skyline."
The theme set by the exhibition was developed by the experts invited to the conference.
Vsevolod Glazunov, Marketing Director of LEGENDA Intelligent Development, said that we will become closer to the ideal when the level of the municipal environment rises to the level of progressive developers. Now we get a "twisted city" - there is a successful urban environment, but often it is closed from other citizens. So far, it has not even been possible to create a barrier-free environment, because by the beginning of development, the city often cannot even communicate the value of the level of future streets.
Architect Miya-Liina Tommila, who works in three bureaus at once: Tommila Architects, Kaleidoscope and Uusikaupunki, spoke about the project of ideal residential areas in 2100, which her team did for the Helsinki municipality in cooperation with futuristic scientists. It turned out to be a utopia without possible threats and difficulties - this is exactly what the customer wanted.
The city of the future consists of mobile “branded” areas: people who now have more free time, and work is not tied to a point in space, choose them depending on their tastes and lifestyle. The central square is closed by a cloud-bubble of nano-particles, which maintains a constant comfortable climate. All new buildings are living organisms that exist in symbiosis with their inhabitants. They react to changes in the environment, control the consumption of water and energy, can, if necessary, "grow" a balcony or tell a lonely person where to find a company. The traffic is vertical, the elderly move on flyboards, and deer walk in the vacated parking lots.
In reality, Uusikaupunki architects practice "design sprints" - intensive workshops, where they invite caring experts and residents related to the future construction. After discussions, architects create visualizations, shape ideas. In this process, the ideal is constructed with the participation of the townspeople, and the architects are "chosen from the ivory tower."
The speech of Elena Krom, editor-in-chief of RBC Petersburg, was consonant: in a city of common sense, the opinion of social activists (ideal townspeople like Alexander Karpov) is welcomed, on whose behalf “cooks” can run the city. Public opinion is demand, and developers provide supply.
Alina Chereyskaya, architect and partner of SA Lab, presented the concept of an adaptive city, in which architecture also reacts to external information. According to the architect, there is no longer any need to build buildings "for centuries", they must be able to quickly adapt to the needs of the townspeople: grow and "collapse", do not affect the landscape, change their purpose and appearance
Knight Frank's general director Nikolai Pashkov proposed “radical architectural futurism” to solve the problem of urban extensiveness, as the conference moderator Vladimir Frolov described it: a sphere with a diameter of 1.5 km. Everything will fit on it, and there is only one point of contact with the plane.
The director of the ECOM Center of Expertise Alexander Karpov was surprised that all the speakers create an ideal city for a person, but this picture did not find a place for waste disposal and industry. Its eco-friendly city is one that consumes few resources and territory. This means that it is compact and so comfortable that people do not want to leave it and destroy nature. Which exists separately as a biological shell that supports human existence.
It seems that only the chief architect of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Grigoriev, spoke unequivocally for the norms: "the ideal and the norm do not contradict each other, when the norm is the basis, in skillful hands everything turns into an ideal."
A separate part of the exposition - the best landscaping projects for the competition of young architects "Northern Valley - the future of the Vyborg region", organized by the magazine "Project Baltia" and the company "Glavstroy-SPb".
The exhibition will run until August 29.
