Purpose – Production of Ideas
A competition directed on development of a concept Big Moscow verges to a close. Fifth seminar has been carried out; nine architectural teams offered their variants where to place a federal government centre in territories added to the capital. A management of “EPI Mosproject-5”Ltd. Sergey Tkachenko, taking place in a work from the Russian party, related our reporter what conception for development of Moscow agglomeration a French team has, headed by an urbanist Antoine Grumbach and architect Jean Michel Wilmotte.
- Sergey Borisovich, does a participation of foreign architects, urban planning specialist help to look at today’s situation and possible result?
- Cooperation with foreign specialist in developing the conception Big Moscow mainly depends on, firstly, no man is a prophet in his own country and secondly they get ahead of us, progress step by step when we often mark time. People sincerely respected by me are in our team: Jean Michel Wilmotte, we cooperated with him in Moscow projects and famous urbanist Antoine Grumbach being an author of the concept Big Paris. The transport and engineering company “Egis International”, realizing huge projects all round the world and being famous by its ecological subdivision, is a part of our team.
It is impossible to create a concept of territory development without having a strategy of its social and economic development so we drawn in leading specialists from the Highest Economic School and young people from the Financial University under the government of the Russian Federation. Analyzing a situation in geographic, economic, social terms, we are keeping thanks to these aces...
Some initial data for these territories was given us, but it was long ago, in winter. So many thinks have been changed: an approach to new Moscow, approach to old Moscow, as the situation is moving ahead and developing. It makes me happy but our foreign participants don’t understand why the initial data changes. We need to explain some real situations from our life and convince them it doesn’t mean that they do anything incorrectly.
- But the competition was organized to obtain teams’ ideas and not specific developments...
- Undoubtedly, our task is to generate ideas, even fantastic which will be realized in further General plan for developing added territories. A work on General plan for Big Paris was organized like this: ten groups generated ideas which fed the working shop of Big Paris developing official urban design documents. It was found that ten working groups weren’t enough so we added five groups... We need to have a spread of ideas, sometimes absolutely differently directed, for a discussion and then a decision taking.
- Are ideas, even quite rational, always realizable taking into account differences in our and foreign normative bases, technical requirements, etc.?
- I work a lot with foreign architects who often win competitions for designing buildings or they are invited by investors but in such cases a Russian design organization is obligatory to participate and carry out a technical maintenance in concordance with our legislation and rules. So I see my task as to unit a strategy of social and economic development created by the Highest Economic School for our version of the concept for Big Moscow and our French colleagues’ flight of thought that water flows on a wheel of mill and meal is obtained to bake cake.
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interviewed by Elena Golubeva