Please keep in mind that these ideas are not set in stone but I thought I would put them out there anyway.  I wrote this before I read the comment on my last post, so my ideas are still set within the context of the site. I will get away from the site now and work on my ideas about containment. I know, I really have to define them before they become the elephant in the room...hmm..maybe they already are.

  A Container for the Urban Artefact

“Thus the union between the past and the future exists in the very idea of the city that it flows through in the same way that memory flows through the life of a person; and always in order to be realised, this idea must not only shape but be shaped by reality. This shaping is a permanent aspect of the city’s unique artefacts, monuments and the idea we have of it.”

Moscow

The Moscow city administration has been widely criticized for heavy destruction that has affected many historical buildings. As much as a third of historic Moscow has been destroyed in the past few years to make space for luxury apartments and hotels. Other historical buildings have been razed and reconstructed a new, with the inevitable loss of every historical value. Critics of the government blame it for not applying conservation laws: in the last 12 years more than 50 buildings with monument status were torn down, several of those dating back to the seventeenth century.

This erasure and falsification of the historic is set to continue over the next years as old Moscow is slowly eradicated and replaced. In this environment the architecture of the city has become a disposable commodity. The urban artefact is no longer protected as the Moscow metropolis is consumed and destroyed by its own expansion.

The Kremlin and Moscow II

At the centre of the city, in the Central Administrative Okrug, is the Moscow Kremlin, which houses the home of the President of Russia as well as many of the facilities for the national government. The city faces an empty site. Where a colossal structure should stand there is an urban oddity, a cloned cathedral. The city crystallizes around an opulent urban folly.

The Kremlin, being the destructive antagonist of urban artefacts declares its intention to expand over the grounds between its historic complex and the Cathedral Christ our Saviour.  

The marshy banks of the Moskova River require a vision of horizontal expansion. The first slabs are laid to create a new urban plateau penetrated by courtyards allowing for light and orientation within the complex. The intricate networks of courtyards are typical of Russian urban planning.  Unlike their European counterparts these are not private domains but rather passageways and points of connection, where the building, submerged within its self becomes apparent.

The deep plan of the new container stretches into the city. Its depth is unquantifiable. With no clear beginning or end it takes on the characteristics of the everlasting.  The slab preserves indiscriminately, freezing a part of the city in horizontal layers.   The new container is constructed as a representation of the consciences of the city.  A focal point, it functions as a device that defines and destroys. It embalms the bodies of existing buildings connecting the individual artefact to the collective memory. The mummified sections of the city cause a split between history and memory. ‘The new type of architecture is thus that of memory and history. With the introduction of memory into the object, the object begins to embody both an idea of its self and the memory of its former self.’