MOSCOW, August 28 (Itar-Tass) — Innovativeness, ecological friendliness and transport availability are the main principles central to the project for developing the Moscow agglomeration, presented at the city’s Gorky Park. In their works both foreign and Russian architects put the emphasis on preserving Moscow’s historical roots.
The participants in the contest, announced at the end of last year, were asked to present a concept of territorial development of Greater Moscow and to propose various options of what a new federal center should look like. Nine teams of authors emerged the winner.
The architectural bureau Ostozhenka suggested leaving the parliamentary center of New Moscow in the historical center of the city on the bank of the Moskva River, in the neighborhood called Zaradye. “The parliamentary center is not just the place for meetings by people’s deputies, but also a combination of national symbols,” the architects say in their memo.
Central to the concept proposed by the Andrei Chernikhov Bureau of Architecture and Design is elimination of transit traffic through Moscow, a double circuit model of streets and creation of a natural framework and active ecological facilities inside urbanized territories. The government and parliamentary compounds would be located in the area of the Kommunarka community. Also, there is an alternative proposal for placing the government and financial center in Greater City, and the parliamentary one, in the zone of what is now the territory of the ZIL truck manufacturer.
French architects from Grumbach-Wilmotte in their concept focused on a combination of innovations and traditional identity. The Moskva River in their opinion should become the axis ecological development. The French authors suggested forming a series of ecological clusters – Kommunarka-Sosenki, Desna, Troitsk-Krasnaya Pakhra, Chirikovo and Ryzhovo.
Capital Cities Planning Group in its project makes the emphasis on ecology. This team of architects from Britain, the United States, Canada and Russia say “a city surrounded by the forest and a forest inside the city” is the gist of their concept. They urge greater attention to creating an ecological transport system through the upgrading of railway infrastructures and also the metro and streetcar lines.
“It is necessary to use the tight network of city streets instead of major routines for the sake of distributing traffic flows more rationally,” the authors of the concept said.
Italian specialists from the Bernardo Secchi studio believe that the aesthetic component and architectural monuments deserve far greater attention in the Greater Moscow development concept.
“Buildings in the center of Moscow can be transformed into hotels and cultural establishments and “smart” offices, giving a fresh flavor to the city’s historical center,” say Spanish architects from the Ricardo Bofill bureau. They offer to convert Moscow into a “smart” city, with new centers of urban activity spread evenly over its territory, and not just outside the MKAD belt highway.
A group of architects from Siemens, Project Meganom and Strelka presented an unexpected approach to developing Greater Moscow. “The project proceeds from the assumption the challenges facing Greater Moscow spread to far greater areas than the newly acquired territories,” the concept says. Under the latter project a government and infrastructural cluster will be located in the Southwest, a research cluster, in the Northwest, a defense-industrial cluster, in the northeast, and a business cluster in the Southeast.