Dear Sergey Olegovich!
I am sincerely grateful to you for your answer. For openness and tonality. I understand everything and just as sincerely sympathize with you and colleagues working in the current circumstances. But you have correctly noted that the architects are to blame for something. I will tell you an interesting parable that exactly corresponds to this plot.
In a certain kingdom, the architect received an order for the construction of a magnificent palace. The master got down to business and immediately faced with the fact that he could not step a single step without a royal letter to do so. No people to hire, no timber to knock down, no materials to buy. And every time he was stopped by the tsar's viziers - first the chief vizier, then the vizier-forester and again sent him to the sovereign for a letter. And the king either disappears on the hunt, or is busy with a wedding feast. And so half a term in anticipation of the letters was gone.
Finally, when the palace was already under the roof, the architect wished to purchase carpets from overseas merchants. And then the overseas vizier stopped him again. The master threw himself again at the feet of the king.
- What else do you want? The king asked discontentedly.
“I don’t know myself,” replied the architect.
The lord was furious:
- Then what do you want?
- Give me such a letter that everything would be allowed in advance. Anything you need.
- Do you want to be a king? The sovereign asked menacingly.
There were only two days left until the deadline, and the architect had nothing to lose. He answered fearlessly:
- I want to be a king in my business!
This was possible in Soviet times. The Soviet architect considered himself a representative of the interests of the state in his profession. And he could rely on the support of the professional authorities at all levels, including the union - the State Committee for Architecture and Architecture, the Union of Architects, which then had greater social weight than now, on professional solidarity, which does not exist today. And there was one more important circumstance - the customer did not pay out of pocket.
We were "kings", building the Palace of Pioneers, feeling in everything the trust of the customer, the Central Committee of the Komsomol. We were even allowed to break what turned out to be unsuccessful. We were “tsars” building the ensemble of the center of Zelenograd, relying on the support of the Minister of the Electronic Industry Alexander Shokin and the city authorities. The same situation was in other projects, in particular, Uzbek.
But there were also conflicts - with a member of the Politburo, the main communist of Moscow, Viktor Grishin on Turgenevskaya, who, fortunately, was promptly dismissed by Gorbachev. And everything would have been as it should be, if Luzhkov had not plastered the red granite facades and his colleague Dmitry Solopov had not disfigured the complex.
As a matter of fact, the Palace of Pioneers is still a state order. And he would have been, if not for one newfangled circumstance. I will allow myself to formulate it briefly. Now at all levels of management - from top to bottom - each manager considers himself the owner of what he controls.
One example is enough. The current circumstances forced the winner of the competition for the development of Sofiyskaya embankment, Sergei Skuratov, to transfer the design of the facades to another architect. His victory was "nulled".
18.07.2020
