Big House: European Center like Moscow 2007

To build a public square, to hammer in its space with a “building mass” is a crime against the city. Not so much before today's citizens (many of them are more likely to welcome new opportunities for consumption - for that, the city lacunae is now filled), as in front of the city as a historical subject. The desire of the current owners of Moscow to withdraw from her "surplus space" is comparable, perhaps, with the post-revolutionary consolidation of the lordly apartments ... So it happened at Kursk railway station ¹ , to a certain extent - at Manezh Square, perhaps it threatens squares at Paveletsky and Belorussky railway stations.
Kievsky has a different case. The European Shopping and Entertainment Center, currently the largest in Moscow (180,000 m2), appeared on the site of two historic city blocks. Back in the early 1950s, a tram line ran along a street parallel to Bryansk and B. Dorogomilovskaya streets, and more than 60 pre-revolutionary 1-2-3-storey buildings remained in the blocks themselves ² .
So, formally, the authors-architects can justify the appearance on this place of a huge building with the idea of ​​restoring historical “quarterness”, and explain applicative facades with high-tech inclusions with the task of recreating the image of a complex historically developed urban environment.
But do not forget: the historical buildings on this site have long been destroyed, and the site, long occupied by the tent market and the public garden, was perceived as a kind of continuation of the station square, not yet called Europe Square. And quite organic, leaving the spatial pause from its long, side, city side, which is so much needed by the huge station building.
However, the current developers, supported by the Moscow authorities, do not consider urban “emptiness” from the standpoint of their environmental value or urban planning composition: “... The advantages of creating large shopping complexes in the station square that are ineptly used or even empty are quite obvious” ³ . All arguments are, as a rule, only about the degree of profitability of such an investment compared to other opportunities.
And there were opportunities. Yes, according to statistics, Moscow lacks retail space per m ² per person - but even more it lacks greenery and open spaces, especially in the center. In place of the mall could appear square, even a park. But if this is so unprofitable - a piece of dense modern urban environment, with streets-passages belonging to the city (and not shop) space, a small area in the middle, open to the sky - say, like on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. However, such a complex object, formed as a part of the city, arises only as a result of developed urban thinking - Berlin, London, and New York.
Here, instead of the so-called. urban building ⁴ turned out to be just the Big House - the result of Moscow’s thinking, reflected, for example, in the characteristic statement of one of the leading metropolitan city planners: “... Moscow is one big object that needs to be designed exactly as one house”.
And it is not by chance that, according to the internal structure, this house is associated with that Soviet communal apartment, and very large — endless shops along the corridors, “there is only one latrine for 48 rooms”, in the sense of atrium (and there are only a few latrines two on a huge floor). Our “Europe” model turned out to be very much adapted and simplified. As if the city - but a city like a colonial military camp - trading cells along perpendicular passes ... a city of goods.
The creative energy of the architects went to the facades and to the most successful part of the interior - a semicircular atrium at the main entrance, connecting the house with the station square and the famous neoclassical I.Rerberg tower. Then everything is somehow not very clear. Ceilings too low. Interiors are too monotonous. Too difficult to navigate in them. It is difficult to read the structure, the clarity of which is necessary for such a large floor space, the main communication axes are not articulated, there is no - at least for now - any navigation system (signs, arrows, scoreboard). Perhaps this was done on purpose, so that the visitor gets lost and, without finding the right way out ... bought something? The mystery of disorientation becomes clearer when considering the plan: the main axes of the building turn out to be of secondary importance for a pedestrian to 2nd Bryansky Lane (hence the convenient access to the built-in parking for 2500 cars) and in the absence of an unconsciously expected - at least by the author of these lines - the inner "street" that runs along the building of the Kiev railway station. After all, it is from there, from the metro - the main entrances. In this plan neither past (lost) nor current lines of force of the place show through. The building reflects the front, but not structural and environmental, attitude to the city.
And inside the main thing - the function: trade. (The entertainment part of the building, which is still represented by a cinema on the third floor, will soon be complemented by a fitness center, a family leisure center, a swimming pool). Muscovites and few visiting shopaholics (the incompatibility of the “station” and “boutique” contingents remains the unsolved problem of all the station shopping centers) are being bought, and Moscow as a city is being replaced by similar simulacra of the city - by artificial, intentionally skating urbanist pseudo-town environments. House-machines for consumption. Moscow is now composed of such houses.
The city splits into high-yielding tidbits (for shopping and entertainment centers, luxury housing, multi-star hotels, business centers, there is an active life of new citizens) for interesting investors and authorities, and everything else.
These two cities are already quite parallel. Their inhabitants and their spaces do not overlap much. And ok. But this new Moscow is very aggressive, swallowing up all the big pieces of the “old”.
Consumerism became the main reason for the architectural development of Moscow and has already found its own stylistic embodiment: consumerism, which extended the influence of both commercial and office buildings.
But this is, after all, the style of our life today - at least in Moscow 2007, the “big (trading) house”.
Magazine: Architectural Herald 1 Atrium Center, which ate the Kursk Railway Station Square, is perhaps the most significant object of the Bazaar-Station train genre: deaf facades of the American mole, complete dissonance with the surrounding buildings, a sharp complication of the traffic situation in the adjacent sections of the Garden Ring ...
2 The author thanks archit. O. Gusev (workshop No. 20 of “Mosproekt-2” named after MV Posokhin) for providing historical plans.
3 Kuzmenko V. Shopping ... to the train station // M & D.Business. 2006. №10. C.60.
4 See, for example: Ensure that Contemporary Architecture Creates Urban Buildings // www.pps.org/info/newsletter/new_york_city_commentary/ways_to_transform_new_york .