Moscow and its residents: how a new environment is born (interview, part 1 of 7)

Interview transcript. Part 1

Osetskaya.Salov is a modern architectural bureau founded in 2013. The workshop’s founders, architects Tatyana Osetskaya and Alexander Salov, have worked as a creative duo since 2007. In this part of the interview, we touch on issues of the temporary and the eternal, the old and the new, discuss the mutual influence of city architecture on its residents, the key role of architecture in shaping cities’ design codes, and the global scope of ethical and economic questions in the logic of creating urban environments.

The first pressing question. Before our eyes, the city’s face is changing drastically and being formed in a new way, making Moscow unrecognizable and often faceless and alienated. What mechanisms shape the city’s face, and how?

A.S.: This is an interesting question for us — how the city’s face is being shaped now. In the Soviet period, everything was clear, and the world community envied our architects, looked with admiration at the State Planning Committee system, when institutes under M. Posokhin’s leadership could create a unified urban development policy, forming the design code of the urban environment — how we should perceive the city, how it should look, and how its individual fragments should exist. It was a powerful urban planning layer in the history of the entire world architectural school. Now we live in a different reality, with no unified plan, and everything changes very quickly.

T.O.: It is starting to form, but a lot of time has been lost from the perspective of architecture. For a long time, it was ignored, as society had entirely different problems — problems of survival. This happened in the 1990s, when people had to find their place, and only later could they pay attention to architecture and engage with it. In the period Alexander refers to, architecture was an instrument — including for the authorities and the city — a political tool. It developed according to scenarios allowed to it, but nevertheless we have the avant-garde, we have many outstanding architects and projects that could not have emerged without support and attention from their surroundings.

A.S.: Now, of course, it is much harder, because market mechanisms determine the construction of buildings that make up the urban environment. Whereas before there was a holistic perception, now it is a collection of objects shaped by the needs of each individual plot and building owner. The task of Moskomarchitecture, in particular, is to tie all this together into some kind of unified architectural image of Moscow, which we see every day. This is a huge amount of work that is difficult to systematize. At present, the standard for what should be has not yet been fully developed.

T.O.: And it is not a standard for how it should be perceived and look, but more for how it should not look, because constraints impose excessively unstable formats that need to be cut away. Development must follow more elevated concerns than technical parameters, estimates, and developers’ or owners’ demands.

A.S.: In terms of today’s discussion about the psychology of creativity and decision-making, we have to use an unpleasant word — ideology. In a broader sense, more like an idea. The presence of such a general idea leads to countless individual decisions blending into a single stream. For a long time in the 1990s and after, we collapsed into a state where either the idea was not formulated or was entirely absent. Therefore, it is hard to speak now of a single character for the Moscow that exists. It is a fragmentation, a patchwork, countless manifestations of different directions — like the above-mentioned City, which is more like an unusual patch on the fabric of Moscow than an organic expression of it.

How can residents influence this?

T.O.: Now participatory design is developing. But this is a double-edged concept, because it is often seen as receiving a technical assignment and regulations from residents. In reality, it should be a form of feedback, where residents talk about missing functions, not about execution.

And who controls this process?

T.O.: The architects themselves.

A.S.: This could be considered in the correct ideal scenario, where resident communities or their representatives, within one specific task, interact with architects at the stage of formulating not even a technical assignment but a brief for the concept, describing their problems. Then architects, urban planners, urbanists, technologists, and others find the keys and methods to solve these problems. Our closest experience of this was when we worked on reconstructing Lilac Boulevard in the town of Troitsk. The task was built in just this way. Since the boulevard replaced the core and center of the urban environment and it was important to address it competently from all sides, residents were buffered into the role of identifying problems and needs without intruding into aesthetics. In other words, don’t tell us what color the bench should be — tell us whether you need it at all. The task was solved comprehensively, correctly, and well. This is a promising way to address urban planning challenges.

And what did the boulevard ultimately become? What functions appeared there?

T.O.: For example, there was an old Soviet-era children’s playground in this area that residents loved dearly. They were attached to it and did not want to change its image, but its function needed to be expanded. It is important to understand that it made up perhaps 1/30 of the entire boulevard. We devised a visual solution that emphasized the image of that old brick playground while introducing new functionality and modern play structures. We managed to keep a balance between the existing design code, dear to residents, and the required modern functions. But to implement this, we had to work on the mental picture residents had of “demolish everything and rebuild anew,” so as to reveal their true demand for functional and emotional renewal of the space.

Indeed, a boulevard is a multifunctional, multi-stream environment, with different groups of pedestrians intersecting, plus tasks of landscaping…

T.O.: Yes, separation of flows, separation of zones — quiet and noisy zones, zones in front of shops and parks… It is a very diverse boulevard. In many ways, it is unique because it is not a classic boulevard with traffic lanes, but a purely pedestrian boulevard leading from a vast park into the city’s heart. It is entirely pedestrian and was to be transformed through local interventions united into a single stylistic bouquet.