When I got my first look at Zaryadye Park, it was still a construction site. Workers were rolling out the green carpet—pallets of unnaturally thick sod—for dignitaries who would attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony the next morning. But a few tourists (and this writer) had already found their way into the 32-acre park, which slopes down to the Moskva River just a few hundred feet from the Kremlin. My curiosity about the park was piqued not only by its architectural provenance—its lead designers are Diller Scofidio + Renfro, known for their role in creating New York’s High Line—but also by the fact that, nearly 30 years ago, I had stayed in the Rossiya Hotel, a Soviet behemoth that occupied the site until its demolition in 2006.
For a time, it looked like a mixed-use development by Foster + Partners would replace the Rossiya, but ultimately the powers that be decided to give park-starved Muscovites a bit of open space. Six teams, including West 8 and MVRDV, participated in a 2012 competition organized by Moscow’s forward-looking Strelka Institute. DS+R, working with Mary Margaret Jones of Hargreaves Associates, urban planners Citymakers and a number of consultants, many from outside the United States, presented a scheme that to this writer seemed overly ambitious; it called for zones replicating archetypal Russian landscapes—tundra, steppe, forest, and marsh—with high-tech features that would actually change weather patterns. But pie-in-the-sky proposals tend to entice juries—sometimes leaving competition winners wishing they hadn’t made so many promises.
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