In Moscow, on the Frunzenskaya embankment, they are clearing the area for the construction of a residential complex. Since the 1930s, a building complex of the All-Union Building Exhibition has been located on this site. A year ago, Rodina wrote how residents of the Khamovniki metropolitan area tried to defend their area from new development. Despite the beginning of the cleaning of the exhibition territory, they still hope to preserve the monuments of architecture.
Although now it is almost impossible to fight the construction lobby. Public hearings have been canceled and last year construction companies received maximum relief for their activities.
In 2021, the residents of Khamovniki, who protected the house with a portrait of Hesse on the Savvinskaya embankment from demolition, the Leo Tolstoy Museum of the development which is located nearby, also collected signatures against the new construction around the house- airplane – the constructivist pavilion of the All-Union Building Exhibition of the 1930s. But in the end, only the airplane house will remain. Now only the walls remain, everything else will be new.
This is what the display area looked like in the layout. Photo: Anna Romanovskaya
And the rest of the territory is being actively cleaned. Here the Moscow Council of Architecture agreed to the construction of a “multi-apartment residential complex with underground parking.” Now such LCDs are becoming monuments of the times. The old one is gradually being destroyed.
For example, the arch at the main entrance of the All-Union Building Exhibition built in 1952, as stated in the documents, “will be manually dismantled for relocation.” Where exactly they will be transferred is not entirely clear. But the transfer and even the demolition is possible, since the arch is not recognized as an architectural monument. The Moscow Department of Cultural Heritage refused to consider the application for recognition as a monument on formal grounds.
And since 2010, the Moscow Department of Cultural Heritage has also received an application for the establishment of a security zone for a building complex on Frunzenskaya Embankment. This area could protect both the arch and other pavilions from the exhibition. As a result, there is no security zone, because according to the law, only restoration work within its limits is possible, but not the construction of new fifty-meter-high capital buildings.
– As a rule, triumphal arches were erected in honor of military victories. And this arch is in honor of the triumph of civil engineering. But in general, there are not so many triumphal arches on the planet, says Anna Romanovskaya, a resident of Khamovniki and a defender of the city, who continues to fight to preserve the arch.
With them in Moscow and in Soviet times, they did not stand at the ceremony. The red gate, erected in honor of the victory of the Russian army over the Swedes near Poltava, was demolished. The triumphal arch in honor of the victory in the Patriotic War of 1812, which was originally placed on Tverskaya, was dismantled, and already in the middle of the 20th century it was installed again, but already on Kutuzovsky Prospekt.
So the same fate awaits the arc of the exhibition.
Moscow does not preserve the memory of itself for future generations. The new one does not remember the one that the old Muscovites remembered. If the historical districts of large European cities remain unchanged for many centuries, but Moscow does not succeed in this. If we talk about the area of the Frunzenskaya embankment, then it was built in the middle of the 20th century on the site of the former Khamovniki, where one-story houses stood. Now a modern residential complex in the style of the Soviet Empire is being added.
This is what the walls of the airplane house look like now. Photo: Anna Romanovskaya
The inhabitants of Khamovniki, however, continue to look for ways to save at least something.
“We want to apply for recognition of the arch as a cultural heritage object of federal importance, because it is impossible to do this at the city level,” Romanovskaya notes.
Why is it so difficult now to recognize the building as an architectural monument? A member of the Council of the President of Russia for the development of civil society and human rights, local writer and historian Konstantin Mikhailov, in an interview with Rodina, explained this as follows:
– Everything is done to alleviate the fate of the owners and clients of various works. They want to get rid of excessive control, it seems to them, and are trying to pass off historical and cultural experience as one of the administrative barriers that must be abolished. This leads to the loss of a significant number of monuments, their replacement with remakes, the loss of artistic features, thanks to which the monuments become objects of cultural heritage. This is the general opinion of both city defenders and experts.
In July 2021, the Council of Deputies of the Khamovniki municipal district supported the appeal of the residents of the district, who expressed a categorical protest against the construction “on the territory of the 465 quarter”, where the exhibition was located. At the same time, a copy of the decision was also sent to the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office, so that they could check the situation with the development of the quarter.
So we check what the opinion of the inhabitants means.
