Translated material
Moscow
Well, should I make you a video review of a healthy person’s yard?
What a bus stop should look like in the 21st century:
- illuminated
- transparent
— with navigation
— with a comfortable anti-homeless bench
- clean
- with a beautiful, convenient font
- with phone charger
- with Wi-Fi
To design one, you don’t need to be a genius. No need to come up with fancy shapes.
You take a time-tested format and brand it your own way!
A bench in the yard can be as close to nature as possible.
And it’s a pleasure for kids to climb on this one:
In Moscow, they finally learned how to design paths without sharp or right angles. In front of you is the usual inter-yard area in the center.
It is clear that the designers took into account the negative experience and remembered the peculiarities of human gait.
This is not a park or a square, it’s just the organization of space between houses! (yes, it can be not only a parking lot)
We send you and Yuri big greetings from Moscow from the seminar on the urban environment.
We're both performing today. Yuri is about the right lawn, and I am about you and me and our projects.
Yuri is now telling me why he never wants to go into government or politics :)
The best courtyard in Moscow, according to some version.
Completely car-free. All entrances face both sides, so you can drive your car from the street.
You can safely run and jump on the grass, there are a lot of shrubs and mature trees planted, and there is not a single front garden with flowers.
The main thing: not a single side or fence was noticed in the yard (was that even possible?)
Enjoy:
Everything went great!
After the presentation, we talked with Andrei Chibis, Deputy Minister for Construction and Housing and Communal Services of the Russian Federation (left).
I asked him to make a legislative ban on the construction of panels and designs of houses with entrances above ground level.
But in general it’s positive, people are ready to hear. Several deputy governors invited me to visit them in the region and tell local officials what needs to be changed in their approach to managing the city.
The Ministry of Construction promised to put a little pressure on the local authorities, to help us lobby for our urban ideas in the city.
He spoke at the Sberbank corporate university in front of the Ministry of Construction of the Russian Federation: ministers, deputy governors and chief architects of the regions.
He told me why active people don’t want to become officials, why GOST standards are killing cities and how developers are cunning?
I started blogging about city problems in July, 4 months ago. And yesterday I spoke at a seminar in front of top officials.
With this example I want to show that if you hit one point for some time, you can give a quick boost to any of your ideas.
I think you just have to really want it. But this is not certain. I'll be watching :)
I would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who helps me, to those who support and repost the group’s records, and take part in projects. They learned about us only thanks to your support! I believe that together we are a huge force.
Yards without cars have come to Russia. And this is magical.
I made a video review of a new residential complex in the west of Moscow:
In Moscow, I met the guys from the transport department who are engaged in separating tram lines and creating dedicated lanes.
As a result of the “My Street” project, the space in front of the Belorussky railway station was reorganized. Look how cool it turned out:
I really like how they lower the curbs at crossings in Moscow. A junction made from a single piece of granite will last for centuries!
By the way, granite for Moscow sidewalks is brought from the Chelyabinsk region ;)
As promised, I made a review of the best courtyard in Moscow according to some version.
I walked around the yard, looked at the playgrounds, sidewalks, lawns, benches, lanterns and horizontal bars.
The video was filmed in mid-November. It's cool there:
In Moscow, swings for adults are installed on the streets, and there are always more people wanting to swing than there are empty seats:
I found a cool stop. Made with love.
It’s not a hassle to wait for this one!
A couple of tips for Chelyabinsk developers. A couple of photos - a couple of tips:
This is what the entrance to every Khrushchev building should look like! Transparent doors, good lighting. Nothing complicated, just a desire for beauty.
I believe that beauty and grooming influence a person’s mood and lifestyle. A good environment will lead to good deeds and economic growth.
What do you think? They’ll break it anyway, so it’s better that “they” don’t get anything?
Children need space to take risks. If you build them a boring playground, they will run and climb around garages and construction sites.
Forget about refined designs. It's not interesting. Let children choose what to do: cling, crawl, jump, pull up, run or climb.
Moscow has already begun to understand this:
This is what buyers of apartments in panels from the right developer see from the window.
Here is housing from PIK, which has developed its own standard panel designs and is riveting excellent neighborhoods one after another. Large windows, barrier-free environment, courtyards without cars, mature trees, hidden air conditioners, active facades, grace.
Soon similar housing will appear all over Russia, and the demand for courtyard parking lots will subside. What you see cannot be unseen, and no one likes to lower the bar.
Winter in Moscow today is completely European:
I love it when municipal authorities communicate in human language and generally show concern.
I really like what the Moscow Department of Transport team is doing. You walk around the city like this, and the city communicates with you in a friendly manner:
The best stop has already been made - no need to invent anything and “be creative”!
The key to excellent design:
- Transparent (+ for safety)
- Rectangular (practical)
- Black (neutral to architecture)
Took a photo in Moscow. Look, the bus number is always visible.
Show it to your administration. Otherwise, they will again pile up creative spherical polycarbonate in “patriotic colors” ;)
Do you think all officials are gloomy and gloomy people who don’t need anything?
Meet Ira, Ira and Sasha. They are improving and reforming the housing and communal services sector in the Ministry of Construction in Moscow. They are also working on the Urban Environment program and are very concerned about Russian cities.
Girls really want to do a lot of good and useful things. They care. Getting to know them can completely change your perception of the word “official”.
Unnoticed, fresh minds are entering ministries and administrations. When there are many of them, labor synergy will begin - the efficiency of the devices will increase significantly. And then we will see a completely different Russia.
Quite by accident, I fit in at a meeting of the Ministry of Construction on the “smart city” in Moscow.
There are Rosatom, Rostelecom and banks. Everyone wants to come up with something, but they don’t yet know what exactly: everyone is thinking about where to get the money for development.
I also managed to speak out: I said that there are a lot of great developers and activists in the cities, but they lack political leverage to promote their ideas at the city or regional level.
I met Alexander Shepilov, the head of the representative office of the Chelyabinsk region under the Government of the Russian Federation (marked with an arrow). This was the first time I knew about such a position. I don’t know what they do there specifically, but they exchanged business cards.
In any case, he reminded officials that somewhere out there, in an unknown outback, there are normal initiatives and bureaucratic obstacles.
The trouble is that inside the Garden Ring they don’t think about people’s safety at all! There are no fences!
What if a child jumps onto the road?
“He can jump to the right and to the left.”
What if the car hits the sidewalk? She will suppress everyone. There, Tverskaya, the busiest street in Russia.
Do GOSTs have a special relationship with the center of Moscow?
Imagine: in the center of a hot metropolis, go out in a swimsuit, sunbathe on the sand, swim... mmm.
Muscovites don’t need any introduction! The beach in Gorky Park was spoiled for them!
A great idea that can be implemented in any Russian park for reasonable money.
And maintenance will be cheaper than a fountain: you need to clean the water and remove the sand.
Yesterday I posted an excerpt from an interview with landscape architect Anna Andreeva.
But her work is landscaping the Crimean embankment in Moscow.
In the summer, when I was in the capital, I took pictures on my phone. Look how cool it is there. It turns out that without bright flower beds it can be very good:
I talked with Skye Duncan, director of NACTO. They created a book that should be on every mayor's desk - "A Guide to Street Design":
This is the same association of transport experts and specialists in a safe and comfortable urban environment from the USA and Canada.
They create a fundamental work where they describe the best universal examples of street reconstruction. They show how to make streets that you want to be on and that have good traffic capacity.
Time passes, technologies and regulations will change, but the principles laid down in this book live and will live. There is a translation of the first edition online, entitled “Designing City Streets.”
Today Sky presented a new, greatly expanded edition. There is so much goodness there that there will be enough posts for 2 years ahead.
One day we will get rid of the dinosaurs who write GOSTs for Russian roads, and we will introduce adequate safety standards based on the best world practices. Thanks to them, we will reduce the death rate on city roads by about 5 times.
And the enjoyment of the streets and the overall speed of movement around the city will increase.
What I learned about lawns while walking around the center of Moscow.
They are not made at the same level as the sidewalk! Basically, their level is raised so that no one even has the idea of walking on them.
And there are seats on the retaining wall of the lawn. It is ergonomic and neat looking.
That's it, no fences needed. And there are no problems with open ground and trampled grass.
And simply short grass is boring and requires care. Instead, they try to plant shrubs or herbs. They withstand the hot sun better, are durable and give a good volumetric landscaping effect.
As a result, I didn’t see any dirt at all inside the Garden Ring. All roads and cars are clean. There is no open ground and unnecessary pieces of earth - no dirt and dust.
Briefly:
- Lawns need to be made so that it is completely impossible to walk on them.
- Sometimes it’s better not to make a lawn, just a lattice around a tree.
- Make seats on retaining walls near the lawn.
- Instead of just grass, plant shrubs or forbs. This requires a landscape designer, this is an art.
Clean streets and good thoughts to you!
Ahahaha! In Moscow, the traffic police have caught obscurantism and are making acid frames on the signs of descent into the underground passage!
Moreover, they are made everywhere, both on the outskirts and in the center. Now the photos look cool!
The delusional corruption GOST is sweeping the country:
Let's look at the children's playground in the new Moscow space.
There are no complex structures here. There are no bright, unpleasant colors.
But there is a non-obvious game scenario - several simple forms that can be played with in different ways: trampoline, climbing wall, sandbox king, carousels, columns.
There are even just pipes here - and this is one of the children’s favorite structures. Well, kids love crawling through pipes!
The site has no clear boundaries and no fences. It is zoned by the color of the coating. By the way, the coating is very pleasant and soft.
The key to the success of this site is the artificial terrain. Children love slides, and the atmosphere of such a playground is completely different.
Remember: children need to be simple and very active. They won't fit into a plastic house. They want to jump, run, climb, feel gravity and take risks.
This is their healthy development program, laid down genetically.
In Gorky Park they made a cool platform for water battle with three guns. In the heat you can shower yourself as much as you like!
A playground is the world's best way to liven up a space.
The largest playground in Russia was recently opened in Gorky Park. I was there, I'm inspired, I'm happy. Let's go see what they did there!
For the first time I found myself there late in the evening - until nightfall it was full of people, children, everyone was having fun and frolicking. Bliss!
I'm posting the first part of the photos. I show you what cool things you can do instead of dull fountains, which usually cost the entire budget when the mayor’s office of a regional town wants to “beautify the park.”
ps There are no people in the photos, because when I arrived, the administration of Gorky Park exclaimed, “Oh, this is the Chelyabinsk urbanist coming!” and cordoned off the area so that I could take normal photos:
Steel side instead of curb
Good landscapers like to use steel edging instead of dull curbstone. It looks cool, is not conspicuous and does not chip.
It is made from Corten steel. This is a special alloy that does not oxidize (does not rust) and almost does not wrinkle.
Thanks to the properties of steel, it is possible to make a side of any shape without ugly joints through which dirt pours out.
I was initially skeptical about this type of vegetation fencing due to the sharp, unsafe edge. Well, like, you slip and fall head first on the side.
But then my architect friend told me that this is nonsense and with such logic it is better not to leave the house at all. We need to cast aside doubts and design the sides from Corten steel.
I will do so. Design steel sides!
ps There is rust on the surface. This is normal, it is technical, it is a protective layer.
Oh! One of the best parks in Moscow was made from “rusty iron”! And a week ago everyone admired his playground!
Yesterday there was a massive insult to the sense of aesthetics among Chelyabinsk residents - they were told that rusty metal can be used in architecture!
Someone caught the deception! “How is it that Corten steel does not corrode? THAT'S RUST ))00))0)"
I was struck by how few of us are inquisitive. There are so few people who really want to understand and dig into the topic. After all, in a couple of seconds you can find that “the rust that forms on its surface closes all the pores in the metal, and subsequently the corrosion processes stop. Having changed color and texture, the material retains them for a long time without losing strength.”
Tyufeleva Roshcha Park was designed by a Dutch bureau. They made a continuous pergola as a symbol of the conveyor belt in memory of the ZIL plant, which was on this site. In the first photo there is a building that has not yet been demolished in the background.
The pergola is made of Corten steel. This material is becoming very popular among architects. Over the course of several years, it changes color to a noble red color, which is no longer washed off.
Yellow stripes in a white zebra are just a budget cut.
We have studied all the regulations. Yellow stripes are optional. The guest guide says that this can be done (with which we do not agree).
Although the road workers like it, because the zebra crossing is starting to cost twice as much. You can request more budget money.
Residents feel bad: zebras have not appeared at many crossings in the city. But on the central streets they are uselessly double.
A good space lives all year round. Look how many happy eyes there are on the beautiful playground in a residential area in the south of Moscow.
Whisper in the ears of the mayors: money can be spent not only on interchanges and “megaprojects.” Make good, expensive playgrounds in every district of the city.
This is difficult: you need to bother, invite foreign specialists, discuss with residents, choose places. But such efforts pay off a hundredfold: thousands of children and parents will rejoice every day.
Walking around Moscow, I came across a museum sign, which was made with incredible love:
Look how organically a pre-revolutionary antique font looks on a modern façade. And how carefully the color of the substrate was chosen!
We can say that “dimensional letters” without a backing would be better - they would not cover architectural elements. But this is not entirely true: you can remember that the building was built in an era when almost all signs had inscriptions on the backing. And if you look closely at the building, you can see a double cornice of protruding bricks that form a frieze. And the frieze is exactly the place where the signs were supposed to be placed when designing the building.
Now imagine on this facade a white plastic door and a banner that hangs on a fruit stall next to your house. It will hurt.
Good architecture and good design are expensive. In Russia, people don’t understand this yet, and customers always try to save money on projects. Architects are dismayed to discover that interior design is more profitable than designing buildings. As a result, signs are drawn by “familiar photographers”, and windows and entrances are made by companies producing plastic windows with a “girl designer” on a salary of 20 thousand (or a boy).
To live in beautiful cities, we must formulate society’s demand for this very beauty. When customers feel that aesthetics is important to the consumer, excellent architects and designers and their equally excellent work will appear on the market again.
How many intersections are there in your city that you can comfortably be at? Talk?
In Moscow, these appeared thanks to the reconstruction of the streets of the center. I caught myself thinking that I had forgotten the last time I could sit on a clean bench under a tree in a well-groomed environment in my hometown.
It's so wonderful when the streets are given back to people. Today people are in too much of a hurry to realize what an ass we have turned our streets and yards into, how inefficiently we move around the city and how we poison ourselves every day. But I believe that there will be more people with their eyes opened, and we will create healthy cities for happy people.
I'm sitting in the parking lot. I feel good. There are people nearby. They feel good too. They smile:
At the site of this triangle there used to be a wide road and a couple of parking spaces:
A few years ago, Eliseevsky Lane in Moscow looked like this:
Now there are people here. Parents walk comfortably with their children, and cars cannot accelerate much. It's safe here:
I visited Moscow City. As expected, against the background of the most expensive landscape there should be the ugliest inscription in the world.
An example of how bad sign design can kill the entire composition:
The best skatepark I have seen in Russia so far is in the new park in Moscow on Khodynskoye Pole.
The most important thing is a beautiful, smooth concrete surface with perfect joints and abutments. I googled it: they did it a year ago, one and a half thousand squares, in forty days.
They use a special technology: concrete is applied under pressure to avoid voids in the surface. Durable frost-resistant concrete → hydraulic. Thanks to the quality of the concrete, smooth joints can be achieved and polished to perfection.
I am writing this post without much enthusiasm - in my childhood there was no such thing in Chelyabinsk, although I dreamed about it while driving around the city looking for “smooth asphalt” on the sidewalk. There is no such thing today.
Dinosaurs annually drain 33 billion of the city budget somewhere, but a skatepark has never appeared in a city of a million people. There are only temporary structures made of plywood on the asphalt, which are being installed by the company building the mining and processing plant under the city.
That's how it is for now.
There are thousands of public gardens in Russian cities, designed not for people, but for a beautiful picture from a helicopter.
One of the notable elements of such a park is the flowerbed in the center of the sidewalk, which must be walked around. People tend to optimize their efforts, so they always trample where it is convenient. This is normal - thanks to optimization, humanity survived the process of evolution.
In Moscow, I found a good solution to the problem of a trampled flowerbed. Take it to the park:
See how you can quickly secure a pedestrian crossing without expensive street reconstruction.
In Moscow they are making buses travel faster than private cars. This is called giving “priority to public transport.” This is a difficult and interesting task. Just so you know: this topic is being driven by a small group of active officials in the Department of Transport, who often encounter resistance from various government services and departments.
In the photos I show the intersection on Butyrsky Val, where they made a dedicated lane for turning left. Thanks to this, it was possible to narrow the roadway and create a safety island. This is a temporary solution - soon there will be physical barriers there.
This is a good example of how an unregulated four-lane crossing can be secured. I asked the creator of the markup: “What about in winter? The markings won’t be visible!”
— Well, that’s a maximum of five days a year. “We clean everything right down to the asphalt, so there is no such problem,” they told me.
This is a narrowing of the road in front of a pedestrian crossing without a traffic light. Temporary but effective solution:
Initially, the narrowing was made to divert traffic from the oncoming lane dedicated to buses:
Previously there were two lanes in each direction, but here they made it 3+1. And we got a safety island:
This is what a buffer of markings looks like, which narrows the road. Soon this street will be reconstructed and made even better:
In Moscow, the Khodynskoye Pole park was built on the site of a former airfield. I visited there and now I can’t forget it.
It is impossible to describe everything that is there in one post - an area of 25 hectares cannot be covered with ten photos. The capital has once again proven that the concentration of money and brains can produce excellent results in the form of a public good - a luxurious park where you can engage in any activity you can imagine.
For landscaping:
— most materials do not need to be painted or repaired. They are durable, frost-resistant and do not corrode;
— there are no annual flower beds, only perennials, they look great;
— an artificial landscape has been created, thanks to which there are good vantage points and cozy places for a picnic on the lawn;
— a completely barrier-free environment accessible to everyone;
— good free toilets;
— many playgrounds for all ages;
The architects found a good solution: the non-demountable runway was turned into a wide central square with a fountain. And the main disadvantage of the space, in my opinion, is the huge gray wall of the shopping center, turned backwards towards the park. When it was built, no one knew that there would be a park behind it. And today, from almost any point in the park on the northern side, a solid wall with the word “Auchan” rises. It's not easy to choose an angle for a photo!
And of course, the thought never left me for a minute that such projects, in a sense, are being built at the expense of all Russians. Previously, I looked at the improvement of Moscow and simply rejoiced, but now through the polished granite I see the devastation of the rest of the cities of colonial Russia.
I have found a replacement for the Chelyabinsk Vice-Mayor for Transport!
Meet Alexander Egorov, he is making buses and trams in Moscow faster than cars. Sasha works for Mosgortrans, advises Russian cities on creating dedicated lanes, runs a channel about transport priority and makes ratings of Russian cities.
In the video, Sasha talks about his work and explains what is wrong with the transport management system in Chelyabinsk. I highly recommend that officials and deputies watch it. The video is slow so that you can better understand the topic. At the end - a bonus for Chelyabinsk residents!