Liz Diller and Charles Renfro talk about their latest high-profile commission, a weather-bending (and politically charged) city park ....
At their hangar-like office in Manhattan, the architects Liz Diller and Charles Renfro click through a slideshow displaying enormous, fantastically shaped structures embedded into a hilly landscape. The renderings depict 32-acre Zaryadye Park in Moscow, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), the studio they lead with partner Ricardo Scofidio. The celebrated architects enthusiastically describe the various cultural and civic amenities now under construction, which will include a large glass concert hall for the city’s philharmonic, an open-air museum that will feature multimedia displays of Moscow’s history, and a grassy outdoor amphitheater capable of seating 5,000 people.
Zaryadye is the first major new park built in Moscow in the past 50 years; with a price tag reported to land between $390 million and $480 million, it will be one of the most expensive city parks in the world. It’s also a pet project of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. When his name is mentioned, it’s as though a chilly Moscow breeze blows across the large wood conference table. Asked about rumors that the site is under consideration as a location for Putin to announce his 2018 presidential campaign this coming September, when the park is slated to be finished, Renfro says, “We have heard that…. Yep.”
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The design for Zaryadye Park pays tribute to Mother Russia with an aesthetic that might be called “Eco Nationalism.” Native flora from all over Russia will be incorporated into four artificial microclimates that represent the country’s main landscape archetypes: steppe, tundra, wetland, and forest. One can imagine the new park serving as a convenient backdrop for photoshoots of the autocrat, who styles himself as a rugged outdoorsman and has been famously photographed bare-chested hunting with a rifle in Siberia.
Renfro says that Zaryadye will fill a missing link in a network of pedestrian-oriented open spaces and formally landscaped green spaces in central Moscow. With its futuristic approach to displaying the natural world, the DS+R’s design is a marked departure from Red Square or the 19th-century Aleksandrovsky Gardens, brimming with statuary of Russian heroes. Much like New York City’s famous High Line, which DS+R co-designed with James Corner Field Operations, this new park aims for something novel and extraordinary.
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But with Putin as its godfather and the Kremlin looming nearby, how public and free can such a space really be? Diller and Renfro acknowledge that the Zaryadye was a challenging commission for their firm, which has a reputation for provocative work that seeks to deconstruct hierarchies; this design, too, will question Moscow’s status quo. “We want to empower people to enjoy their city and to take it over,” says Diller.
“It is completely a permeable site,” adds Renfro, who was in Moscow inspecting the park’s construction in early April. “[The authorities] couldn’t lock it down even if they wanted to. We brought that to the table.”
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There’s a broader political context to the park, however. Some observers see Zaryadye as the extravagant crown jewel of an urban beautification campaign in Moscow that’s intended to mask deteriorating economic conditions and to assuage restive middle-class Muscovites who demonstrated in 2011 and 2012 against Putin’s consolidation of power. It is the latest in a series of flashy projects that include the overhaul of the city’s massive VDNKh exhibition center and the revamping and commercialization of the Soviet-era Gorky Park with chichi cafes, free Wi-Fi, and an enormous new modern art museum run by Dusha Zhukova, wife of billionaire oligarch Roman Abramovich.
“[Zaryadye] park was undoubtedly a gesture by Putin to have a conspicuous ‘cake’ to give to the masses,” Harvard University Director of Cold War Studies Mark Kramer writes in an email. “It got under way just as he was preparing to return to the presidency, at a time when protests had briefly caught the regime off-guard. Putin wanted a sop to give to his minions.”