Among the commercial expositions of the second floor of the Central House of Artists, where Arch Moscow is held, unexpectedly you come across a town of plywood skyscrapers with a height slightly less than human height. They are executed in the same technique - glued together from layers of plywood, painted in brown - perhaps to make it easier to appreciate the difference in concepts. This is perceived in two ways: on the one hand, being placed on a schematically drawn map of the city, the towers evoke thoughts about the dangers of infill development, and on the other hand, they demonstrate the scope of the conceptual thought of the participants in the competition.
The curatorial manifesto says that the skyscraper is the most ambitious statement of an architect in the city, and therefore it is easiest for the author to express his credo through its form. The aim of the competition was to present "the building as a sign" - which definitely succeeded. Generalized layered, sculpture-like models of the participants covered most of the known types of towers and added several more or less new options, of varying degrees of realizability.
The models are placed on the site with painted streets so that you can move freely between them, like in a city. The curator of the Arch of Moscow and member of the jury of the competition, Bart Goldhoorn, noted that this is a very correct approach, since architecture is always blueprints that are difficult to present spectacularly, but here there is both an idea and an object.
The jury of the competition turned out to be authoritative - Yuri Grigoryan, Sergey Skuratov, Irina Korobyina and Bart Goldhoorn, the curator of the festival. The projects were chosen “blindly” and as a result, the three best projects scored approximately the same number of points - and all three were announced as winners.
The first award was given to Ekaterina Golovatyuk for the "City" skyscraper, where a huge skyscraper hangs over a very small house. As the curator of the festival said, presenting the award, “the project contains a strong emotional experience that remains in the memory for a long time”.
The next winner was the less urban development project "Layered Skyscraper", which attracted the jury's attention because it combines parts made by different architects. As Bart Goldhoorn said, this is already a common technique when different architects work on different objects in a town-planning complex.
With the third project, everything turned out very funny - the winner was the organizer of the competition, Anton Kochurkin, who, as he later said, simply wanted to participate and make his own object. The Sun loop building project fascinated the jury with its ecological focus - diagonal gaps create a system of light wells inside the building, due to which the received energy is saved and insolation occurs.
After the presentation of the diplomas, Bart Goldhoorn thanked the organizers of the competition for their contribution to the development of conceptual architecture. And in the late afternoon Anton Kochurkin was awarded one more time - the Arch of Moscow diploma for the curatorial idea of the skyscraper competition.
