River On The Parade Ground

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River On The Parade Ground
River On The Parade Ground

Video: River On The Parade Ground

Video: River On The Parade Ground
Video: parade ground - strange world 2024, March
Anonim

On Monday, it was announced the creation of the River Unites Committee, which included the communities of city defenders, architects, urbanists and active citizens: Urban Vologda, Real Vologda, Guardians of Vologda, as well as the Vologda branch of the Union of Architects of Russia (website; vk page). Anyone can join,”the statement says.

The unification took place after the rally on July 24 on the Kremlin Square, which was very crowded for Vologda, despite the rain, about a thousand people came. The meeting was dedicated to the protest against the strengthening of the banks of the Vologda River by the method of concreting, about which social networks have been buzzing for at least a month. At the rally, a resolution was adopted with the requirements: to stop work, dismantle concrete slabs, and adjust the project. It also says that the Federal Agency for Water Resources is ready for a dialogue on adjustments. It was proposed to change the method of strengthening to "backing up with stone with trowning and sowing grass", a demand was made to involve local experts: restorers, architects, hydrogeologists, landscape architects, and to consult with residents. The petition for a change in the coastal strengthening project has so far collected about 7,000 signatures.

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    1/4 Rally against the concreting of the Vologda embankment, 24.07.19 Photo © Alexander Zenkov. Credit: The River Unites

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    2/4 Rally against the concreting of the Vologda embankment, 24.07.19 Photo © Alexander Zenkov. Credit: The River Unites

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    3/4 Rally against the concreting of the Vologda embankment, 24.07.19 Photo © Alexander Zenkov. Credit: The River Unites

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    4/4 Rally against the concreting of the Vologda embankment, 24.07.19 Photo © Alexander Zenkov. Credit: The River Unites

Meanwhile, after the rally, work on the embankment did not stop, but only tripled, according to the 7x7 edition. The activists also planned a series of master classes, collecting the wishes of the townspeople and developing an alternative project. The first will be the open design workshop “What should the embankment of Vologda look like?”, On Saturday, August 3, in the building of the Vologda Union of Architects (44 Blagoveshchenskaya Street). [ UPD: Apparently trying to seize the initiative, the administration appointed another workshop an hour earlier, the activists postponed, now there are two workshops in the city at the same time]. In the network, residents of the city are invited to fill out a questionnaire, offering their vision of the embankment and defining their wishes and needs.

Supporters of the embankment, according to their feelings, are mainly people loyal to the city and regional administration, talk about landscaping, bike paths, a gift to townspeople and sloppy overgrown shores, a haven for drinking companies. Opponents - about hydrology, the secrecy of the authorities in relation to the project, unprofessional work and aesthetics. Let's try to understand the situation in a little more detail.

What's happening

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They began to fight the idea of concreting the embankment in Vologda in the fall of 2018, when the first works began. A resistance website has been created: https://vologdareka.rf. Now the left bank of the river, opposite to the Kremlin one, is being concreted, and not near the St. Sophia Cathedral, but slightly to the east, between the pedestrian Red Bridge and the automobile bridge of the 800th anniversary of the city. But it is planned to extend the work to 3 kilometers in the center, from one bend of the river to another. The photographs clearly show that concrete is poured into the formwork using metal reinforcement, concrete slabs are also visible, into which a cobblestone of "provincial" appearance is being built.

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    1/6 Vologda, 2019. Embankment of the 6th Army east of the pedestrian Red Bridge in the process of concreting Courtesy of: "The river unites"

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    2/6 Vologda, 2019.6th Army Embankment, Left Bank Courtesy: "The River Unites"

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    3/6 Bank Strengthening Works, 2019, reality Courtesy of: "The River Unites"

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    4/6 Bank strengthening works, 2019, reality Courtesy of: "The river unites"

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    5/6 Bank strengthening works, 2019, reality Courtesy of: "The river unites"

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    6/6 Bank strengthening works, 2019, reality Courtesy of: "The river unites"

Form

It turns out a very wide strip, not less than 3 meters, with a stumbling surface of round stones, which will not have a chance to go into the soil due to the solid concrete base. According to the mayor of the city Sergey Voropanov, “elements of a pre-revolutionary look” are possible in the future project: for some reason, imagine, for some reason, first of all, lamps made of similar to gas ones, but, apparently, the cobblestone is also designed to work here for a retrospective, imperial-nostalgic image … With at least a few amendments: the cobblestone "moved" from the road to the slope of the river, there was a kind of substitution of aesthetic concepts; the fortification strip is measured "along a ruler" and levels all the banks; in pre-revolutionary times, the banks were not reinforced with either concrete or cobblestones, but reinforced with piles. If we look at the photographs of the banks of Vologda at the beginning of the century, we will see that the river at that time was used mainly pragmatically: the banks are filled with fused forest, many paths and wooden stairs lead to the river, there are many piers and boats on it. That is, if we talk about a new image of the river, then it is possible that we are waiting for a certain modern fantasy on the theme of the provincial city, a retrospective fake, not like a city a hundred years ago, but most like a costume movie, or rather even a poorly remembered picture from some film "About the poor hussar".

Project (s)

Why do I say "not excluded"? - because the project "nobody saw", neither pre-revolutionary elements, nor small forms. It is best known for what the mayor said about bike paths, a one-way car street, and river slopes. Also mentioned are a wooden pedestrian bridge "in the alignment of the St. Sophia Cathedral", "the project of which won first place in one of the architectural competitions in Russia" and a ring of walking routes from the Red Bridge to Red Square. In what kind of competition it was not yet possible to understand.

Meanwhile, the publication newsvo.ru, which owns the most frequent and detailed reports on the problem, managed to find on the public procurement website the project “Improvement of the Embankment of the VI Army from the 800th anniversary bridge to st. Gogol. 1 start-up complex , 2011-2013, worth 2.8 million rubles from the city budget, and to prove the connection between the project developer Vologodavtodor OJSC and the contractor who is currently implementing the bank strengthening, Magistral LLC. In the same publication we find information about the incorrect execution of even an approved project.

With the assertion of the authors of the article that “in the approved project there was no continuous concreting, the plan shows green areas of the non-flooded part of the coast”, however, one can argue that the plan just shows a solid gray strip of bank protection, and the green parts are located higher, so it is possible that this is the same project that the former chief architect of Vologda, Nikolai Mayorov, speaks about, who, in an interview with city rights activists, explaining where the concrete came from: when the project was brought for examination, the hydrologist announced the need for a concrete wall to a height of 1.8 m - the flood level “once every hundred years. " After disputes, the wall was removed, since we are talking about only 3 km of the river and such a wall cannot save the city from flooding. But the authors proposed to strengthen the coast with a rubber gabion, to which the hydrologists objected that it would be washed away in the first spring, and the fortification turned into a "concrete bed with paving stones." Prior to the examination, according to Mayorov, there was no concrete in the terms of reference. The former chief architect, however, takes an ambivalent position: he told the city defenders that he would make the banks green, since this corresponds to the scale of the city and the river, but the position of the Vologda regional expertise does not depend on him. But at the public council on February 19, 2019, he spoke in favor of the implementation of the current concreting project, and spoke evasively in the press, generally moved away from the topic of concrete banks and started talking about the restoration of buildings on the embankment.

The mayor shifts the emphasis in his comments to the two-part nature of the project: now the banks are being strengthened, then the improvement project will appear. Although the project found by newsvo journalists is called, despite its extremely technical appearance, an improvement project.

In the spring of 2019, the Vologda branch of the SAR held a competition for a project for the improvement of the embankment in the city center. Four finalists were selected, but after the administration categorically refused to change the concrete bank protection plan, the finalists refused to participate and the results of the competition were lost in vain. I must say that for a start, the union decided not to pay bonuses, referring to the poor development of the projects.

Flooding, floodingand the history of coastal strengthening

Now it is not a weak possibility of flooding that is more important, but the constant danger of flooding, - explains Anatoly Trufanov, Candidate of Geological Sciences: the groundwater level on the left bank of the Vologda River is high, and the concrete bank will prevent them from going into the river in a natural way, water can begin to accumulate: the left bank of the reinforced concrete monolithic slab is in fact the creation of a barrage for groundwater discharging into the river. This will naturally lead to groundwater backwater, and as a consequence to the activation of suffusion and subsequent landslide processes. There is one more danger: not a pedestrian road is being designed along the coast. With a high level of groundwater and dynamic loads on water-saturated soil from road transport, dispersed water-saturated soils can turn into a quicksand state. " In other words, if you "lock up" the coastal groundwater, and then shake the ground there by car traffic, it can turn into a kind of unstable jelly, already dangerous for the foundations of historical buildings on the embankment.

Among the arguments of the supporters of the project of concrete banks - the facts of strengthening the banks in the 30s and 80s: "along the coast along the architectural monuments, special piles were driven." This argument, we note, is easily refuted - it was said above that the activists demand not to abandon the strengthening in general, but to carry it out by the method of stone filling, capable of letting water through and malleable for landscaping. The head of Magistral LLC, a concrete reinforcement contractor, Pavel Volkov, gave an interview in which he stated that “The photographs of the 60s of the last century clearly show that the banks of the Vologda River are lined with slabs. It's just that over time they went underground, overgrown with forbs, so the coast acquired a "primitive" look. " The fortified shore can be seen in a photograph of the 1960s, and, by the way, it can be seen that a stone fortification approaches the water, apparently permeable, but already in the early 1970s it was noticeable that the plates were overgrown. According to city defenders, attempts to strengthen the coast with slabs were made on steep slopes, never on gentle ones.

On the money: it was reported about 265 million rubles, in whole or in part from the federal budget, but again on the day of the rally on 24.07, the governor of the region, Oleg Kuvshinnikov, said that the regional budget would cover the costs if the mayor's office agreed on the final version with the residents.

Veliky Ustyug Governor

The same Vologda governor has already made two extremely careless statements in the polemics: first, he called his opponents “couch critics”, of whom only 10% and whose opinion, as follows from the governor's statement, does not matter. But, perhaps, the idea of the governor to make the embankment of Vologda on the model of Veliky Ustyug sounds worse, which was immediately noticed. Veliky Ustyug, as you know, is a city of the Vologda region and is included in the circle of interests of the governor. Its banks are strengthened (2012, 2017), but Ustyug is a completely different matter, the width of the river opposite the cathedral is 500 meters, three large rivers meet here, Ustyug suffers from severe floods, the banks of the Sukhona withstand a rather terrible ice drift in spring with giant plates of broken ice.

Vologda, on the contrary, is a calm and small river, its width in the center is 90 meters, five times less than the Sukhona. It is impossible to approach the quiet landscape Vologda as to the Sukhona demanding taming; it is strange for the governor not to understand this.

Society, power and money

It is interesting in itself that people come to the square for the sake of the aesthetics of the embankment. However, in Vologda this is understandable and understandable, nevertheless Vologda is one of the first regional capitals in our country, where the movement of participation has developed - involving the townspeople in the development of improvement ideas. Vologda hosted the Days of Architecture festival, during which the city received new and fashionable, large and wooden benches and amphitheaters. In Vologda, there is Project Group 8, its architects have written a book on co-designing, and co-founder of the group Nadezhda Snigireva has already asked President Putin about the concreting of the river embankment. But nothing has changed.

In general, it is quite obvious that the administration has taken a "tough stance" intending to do everything in its own way, without listening to the "couch critics". Why, I wonder? The first thought comes to mind - about the manifestation of the so-called firmness and inflexibility, after all, some kind of opposition to the "festival" and participatory improvement in the city has been felt for a long time, for example, when the "Red Beach", built at the Red Bridge by the "group of 8", was dismantled. Perhaps, the administration perceives this direction as external, alien and metropolitan? It is not excluded. In publications "for-concrete" from time to time there are remarks about the "excess of nonresident experts."

However, one of the demands of the city rights activists is to attract local experts, not strangers, not from Moscow. And the administration is behaving exactly the opposite: here is another message that the Vologda specialists were not invited to the mayor's meeting: “Today a team of architects from St. Petersburg, Yaroslavl and other cities is working in the city. The guys were gathered by my architecture advisor Alexey Komov,”the mayor wrote in his blog on 15.07.2019 (it is possible that now we can guess who will work with the improvement project). So one must think that the problem is precisely not to change the decision made in a significant way. Work accelerated, according to Vaska's principle, immediately after the rally, with the hope of crossing the line, after which it would be pointless to break. Against this background, the mayor's statements about dialogue with the townspeople sound somehow … demagogic, at best - as an attempt to organize an alternative movement, to oppose it to critics. That is, to manipulate the opinion of residents, and not to investigate it. What can we say about the statements of the regional governor. It’s even interesting, they will help to split the townspeople into “couch” and loyal, or vice versa, consolidate.

But if we talk about the dismantling of structures: money can be no less important argument than the unwillingness to yield to the public as such. A certain amount of concrete has already been "rolled" into the embankment. It is very long and difficult to break it open with jackhammers - it is not surprising that even with a prescription, contractors do not disassemble the excess concrete entirely. In a word, in addition to the ambitions of the authorities, it may simply be offensive to disassemble the concrete.

Aesthetics

They are asking and asking us not to write about aesthetics, but we are again.

For me, the main thing in this story is that the Vologda embankment overgrown with grass and bushes is very beautiful, it just takes your breath away. The height of its banks is moderate, the river is small, it seems, just a stone's throw from the other side. It is unexpected and strange to see such a quiet and pastoral river, in the very center, in a rather historical, but rather large regional city. I will say more: perhaps in some historical city the river is so good, it is not visible from above from above, so it is difficult to approach, as, say, in Ryazan, Romanov-Borisoglebsk or Kaluga (Alexey, you are more careful with Kaluga there, huh?) - but so, in the green. Except that the Kostroma River in Soligalich looks similar, but Soligalich is much smaller than Vologda, and according to the feelings of a capital resident it looks like a village. So, this feeling of nature in the city is not so easy to "catch", but in Vologda it developed by itself: the river is somehow tamed by itself, does not require granite banks, and the palaces and churches placed along the banks are so good in few places. They have been romanticized for a long time, since the sixties - even if you look at pasvu.com, you can find a lot of paintings and graphics.

You can see how everything will turn out after the implementation of the project on these photo structures:

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    1/3 What the banks of Vologda are supposed to look like after concreting. Courtesy: "The river unites"

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    2/3 What the banks of Vologda are supposed to look like after concreting Courtesy: "The river unites"

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    3/3 What the banks of Vologda are supposed to look like after concreting Courtesy: "The river unites"

It is clear that the modern impression of the river is not that long ago, and references to what it looked like in 1913 or 1965 are actually not that important. We are not currently reconstructing the view of the river for a certain period of time, and there is no point in doing this. It would seem obvious that modern landscaping should proceed from modern aesthetics. This admiring the bushes on the shore is an obvious part of it. In order not to go far for examples, take Zaryadye Park, where artificial ponds are planted with willow trees. Or the Tula embankment, where the Wowhaus architects planted trees on the opposite side of the river, where you cannot walk yet, but even now they decorate the river well, it will be better when they grow. Or Yuri Grigoryan's project for the Moskva River, which won the 2014 competition - he assumed pastoral landscapes right in front of the Moscow Kremlin. Yes, such a living and natural greenery in the city is a modern trend, it allows you to form a change of impressions, from stone to greenery, from strict regulation to some wildness, from a French park to an English one, finally. Therefore, there is a feeling that the project is outdated, has not yet been implemented - so for fifty years. It's just that in the seventies, when the banks were paved with slabs, which then briskly slid into the river, there were fewer opportunities to fill everything with concrete. On the other hand, one can also recall the eighties and nineties, when an acute desire arose to go back literally 70 years ago, to saturate our life with "pre-revolutionary elements." That, we admit, is also good about absolutely outdated.

And here's another free analogy: activists found similarities between the new version of the Vologda embankment and the canal in Los Angeles. To me, it reminds me of the smooth stone banks of the Moscow-Volga canal. Maybe the channel was inspired.

The desire for a variety of emotions is characteristic of post-industrial society. The desire to draw everything along a ruler and pour it into concrete, constant and almost impossible to disassemble, is a property of an industrial society, that is, an obsolete formation. In this case, we observe a collision of these two formations. On the one hand, society is still new for the country - discussing, analyzing, attuned to self-setting tasks and solving problems; he is close to the aesthetics of embankments with bushes, as, say, the Decembrists were dear to the beauty of English parks with overgrown islands and Gothic ruins. On the other hand, the society is tough, hierarchical, strong-willed. It seems that one of them belongs to the present, the other - to 1970 or 1930. But it's amazing how well these two formations resonate with historical prototypes: one with the romanticism of the beginning of the 19th century and the passeism of the beginning of the 20th century, the other with the Nikolaev squares. Two tendencies in our country exist in parallel with different success, but the first, alas, wins only by being supported from above (see stories from Catherine II to Zaryadye Park), while the second is supported by the authorities more often according to statistics. The ruler is easier to measure. And what remains for us? Only now, sing to the governor.

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