As part of the Open City festival of architectural education, which is currently underway, the ASADOV bureau is holding a workshop called Live-Work-Play City. The participants are faced with a large-scale task - to come up with a city of a new format that would meet the realities of our noticeably changing world. We talked with Andrey Asadov about what a full-fledged city is and how it can be invented from scratch.
Archi.ru:
Andrey, tell us why you decided to tackle the problem of finding an “ideal city”?
Andrey Asadov:
The idea of creating a city of a new, time-relevant format has been of interest to me for many years. For 30 years of practice, we have solved a variety of problems. We have probably already made all the elements of the city: residential areas, educational, administrative, cultural, transport, sports facilities, and more and more we want to work with a complex environment. The idea "stuck" in my head, and for the last few years, while working on a new object, I wondered what its place could be in the new integral space of an ideal city - a compact, autonomous, human scale, where everything is within walking distance. What could be a modern cozy microtown?
That is, we are not talking about rebuilding old cities for a new format, but about the idea of a fundamentally new city?
Yes, and this is a special and interesting challenge. Of course, it is not new, if you look back at history, the idea of creating small but full-fledged cities from scratch existed at different times. There are examples both from antiquity and from modern times, when some ruler felt enough strength and scope to take and build a city from scratch and on a turnkey basis. All these cities have very different destinies, but they are all the perfect reflection of the time.
And what ideas did you have?
One of the projects that we developed with colleagues in 2011 was called
Peshkograd is the first pedestrian city where there is no car transport at all, where people move on foot, by bike or by electric car. This is a model of a city that, if necessary, can close itself off from the “unfriendly” outside world.
Then we drew ourselves protection from fires, floods, global warming. But today you can add a pandemic - the city is compact, self-sufficient and, if necessary, can reduce its contacts with the outside world to a minimum.
Are your thoughts a pure concept, or were there any real orders that spurred your research?
Rather, a concept. I myself set myself the task of comprehending this idea more specifically, we can say that I myself acted as a customer. Although there were concepts behind which there was an order. For example, the resort town of Dmitrov Alps, created in 2014, or
a city of new IL standards in 2016, created by order of the Government of the Udmurt Republic and the national initiative "Living Cities" and which at one time became a contender for the World Expo 2025.
What is your ideal city?
A city that has everything for a person to live, grow and develop, in which there are opportunities for communication and self-realization, places of employment (online and offline) and various infrastructure. Any city is needed so that its inhabitants unite to realize a better future for themselves and all mankind. And the "ideal city" is a city that provides its residents with such an opportunity. At the same time, he does not have to be large, on the contrary - compact, cozy and human. At a workshop with students, we design cities on an area of 50 hectares.
It turns out that you invited the workshop participants to reflect on a topic that worries you too?
Yes, and this is a guarantee of something that will be interesting to everyone. Against the background of our own research project, we are interested in what young architects think about this. And they are also interested, because we are seriously thinking about this topic. So we will have a full-fledged interchange!
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The workshop of the architectural bureau ASADOV is held within the framework of the annual festival "Open City", organized by the Moscow Architecture Committee. Open City is the largest non-profit project in the field of architecture and urban planning education and careers. For 5 years, about 8000 people from more than 10 cities of Russia took part in it. The most important goal of the event is to involve students of architectural universities in the real architectural process with the participation of leading specialists from the architectural and development environment.
The theme of the festival this year is "Sustainable architecture and urban planning in an unstable world, natural disasters and growing megacities."
The events that take place within the Open City this season are an attempt to answer the main question: how to reconfigure the city from a consumer of resources to a system of circular economy, sustainable connections and processes.
Future architects formulate their vision of solving this problem at workshops curated by the Institute of the General Plan of Moscow, architectural bureaus ABD Architects, ARTEZA, ASADOV, Kleinewelt Architekten, Wowhaus.
The results of the workshops will be presented at the final exhibition of the festival.
