The Farnborough Air Show is taking place this time without the Russian Knights aerobatic team, which, due to bureaucratic delays associated with the overload of the UK visa center in Moscow, have not received the necessary documents.

The Zoological Museum of Moscow University has been operating in the building on Bolshaya Nikitskaya since 1911. It contains more than ten thousand exhibits, and in terms of the volume of scientific funds it is one of the largest collections in the world. Photographer Miroslav Robka wandered through the cool halls of the Zoological Museum especially for Friday.

The new borders of the Russian capital include not only a huge cluster of lands in the southwest of Moscow from the Moscow Ring Road to the Kaluga region, but also several enclaves in the Moscow region - in the Kommunarka state farm, where an administrative center is being built for officials, in the floodplain of the Moscow River near the village of Zakharkovo, where the International Financial Center will be located, and in the Odintsovo district - surrounded by the rural settlements of Uspenskoye and Ershovskoye (read more in the special investigation).

When the house swells in all directions like wayward dough, you see only one ingredient behind it - greed

I'm afraid of delicious things

Nikolai Malinin

15.10.2010, 40 (223)

Friends are agitating to create a kind of Committee of Good Taste. To tell the new mayor what to do in the field of architecture. It is already obvious that he will have problems with taste, but let this remain his wife’s problem. We do not know what François Mitterrand's taste was, although the brightest period of Parisian architecture bears his name. It’s just that the Louvre pyramid, the La Defense arch, and the National Library are all the result of competitions. Here, of course, it can also turn out to be crap ( as with the Opera Bastille), but you won’t feel like you’ve been cheated. Because the competition ( and any democratic procedure) determines the minimum: restrictions, acceptable parameters, filling. And whatever form there will be - it will in any way be a reflection of the time.

And Luzhkov’s architecture would not be so terrible if it were built in acceptable dimensions. If only Moscow's usual parcellation and regularity were observed. When the house swells in all directions, like wayward dough, you see only one ingredient behind it - greed. And only facades are discussed - beautiful, ugly... I would like to rely not on taste, but on something more objective. For example, as an ordinary person, I categorically do not want to see a monument to Peter the Great in my city. But I don’t think that my philistine opinion should be listened to. I want everything to be decided according to the law. Installation is through a competition, removal through a referendum.

You never know what I don't like. I don't like the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. But I can talk about this without fear that it will be blown up again. But it’s scary to even mention “ Children’s World”. Although I don't think it's a masterpiece either. " Not a masterpiece, not a masterpiece!" - the echo will respond joyfully. And only the façade will remain of the house. The opposition between acquisition and non-acquisition makes objective conversation impossible. Any statement of taste, any doubt about the value of the next house will be a point in “ their” favor.

They already write in the textbook for the Architectural Institute that the ratio of retail and auxiliary space in Detsky Mir is 50 to 50 - and this, they say, is a nightmare. In today's logic, squeezing maximum profit from every meter is probably a nightmare. But why is this logic decisive? Where are the childhood memories of millions of Soviet people in it? Where is that magical feeling of travel-adventure? And why can the owners of “ children’s worlds” build villas with the same ratio of areas, but this house must be demolished? Why should a historical store in the city center be subject to the same logic by which a modern shopping and entertainment center is built on the outskirts? We didn’t love Detsky Mir for its effectiveness . And for uniqueness.

But this is precisely what there is no taste for authenticity. But there is a craving for historicity. What a paradox: we don’t have enough of the “ abroad” label on our jeans; we need it to be a branded product. Why do we know how to take care of our butts, but not the city? Stop breaking it already. Let's get on with the reconstruction. So that later you don’t have to demolish and build again. Yes, this word is compromised. You see it on the fence and you know that this is “ demolition and reconstruction,” that is, a lie. Luzhkov generally changed his attitude towards various good things. Here, for example, is the beginning of “ Pokrovsky Gates,” where Shar-Baba destroys an old house to Utesov’s song. Previously, it seemed that this is how we had to part with the past, like Mikhail Kozakov - smiling wisely, philosophically. And now it looks like a vile varnish.

What was the natural passage of time has been put on fast forward. The guns are firing, the muses are screaming, you can’t hear a damn thing. I know that I have poor hearing, and, admittedly, bad taste too. So I'm not sure I'm needed on that committee. And I'm afraid of people with excellent taste. There is some kind of authority, repressiveness in them. But good taste cannot be legitimized. It can only be formed. Educate, discuss, think. Moreover, it is the existence of bad taste that reveals good taste. Without Tsereteli, we would not have felt the beauty of Opekushin so keenly.

“Not everyone immediately accepted the Eiffel Tower either!” — Vladimir Resin told me 10 years ago. It was he, as you might guess, who defended Peter.

I'm afraid of delicious things

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