A boathouse is such a large yacht garage, with a huge space in all respects without internal partitions. The upper half of one of the long walls is occupied by windows, so there is plenty of daylight, especially in the evening. A good place for a large exhibition, it looks like the Manezh, especially in the post-fire state with exposed beams, and in a way even better, because it looks more informal. Half a year ago, Yuri Avvakumov already arranged in the Pirogov boathouse an exhibition "The Lightness of Being" of Sotsartist paintings by Vinogradov and Dubossarsky, which hung in pavilions fenced off from wooden pallets in the inner space of the boathouse - a sort of mini-VDNKh made of scrap materials.
Now Yuri Avvakumov used the same pallets, but painted them blue and placed them along one of the long walls with a semi-oval, dividing the projects to be exhibited with protruding walls. The space, thus, remained almost untouched - and impresses with its integrity, scale and "watery" associations - the giant blue stand can be understood as a hint of a wave covered with ripples of individual stands. It is placed along the western wall, in which there are windows, so the sun has a chance to illuminate the exposure only with oblique rays before sunset, and the rest of the time there is enough light, but it is diffused and comfortable.
Along the opposite eastern wall stretches a bar-like structure with monitors displaying dance recordings directed by Dmitry Bulygin, filmed by American cameraman George O'Brien and accompanied by music from the Nuclear Elk band. Each clip is dedicated to one of the exhibited projects, they start with the name of the architectural project and end with plans and layouts - so that architecture and dance can be more conveniently juxtaposed. However, you can sit in front of the monitor at the "bar counter" and observe the exhibition from afar, or you can wander along the stands. At the opening, waiters drove along the counter on roller skates.
In dancing - all the salt of the curatorial idea, juxtaposing architecture and choreography, which we, says the curator, have not had since the days of Isadora Duncan. In the West, on the contrary, such cross-comparisons of different types of arts, originating in the practice of "Bauhaus", are very popular, they are even devoted to many dissertations.
So, on the one hand - an architectural exhibition, on the other hand - it is the same, but "danced". At the same time, Yuri Avvakumov clarifies, "girls dance" not just architecture, but the interior space of each house - it is it, not the facades, most importantly in a country house designed for one family to live in nature. It is even more important what views will open from the windows of houses that have not yet been built, therefore the third element of the exhibition is the views of the surroundings of future houses, made from the points indicated by the architects. The photographs form the third "layer" of the exhibition, being lined up with ribbons above the architectural plans and facades.
All together should be woven in the mind of the visitor to the exhibition in arabesque - which, as you know, means a floral ornament, geometrized to the point of turning into an abstract, usually very sophisticated and complex, pattern. The same word is often referred to dances (though oriental), and more broadly - to works of art, the plot of which is quite abstract or intertwined like an endless bizarre thread. In the concept of Yuri Avvakumov, the plant part of the arabesque is the nature and landscapes of Pirogov, the geometric part is architecture, and the dance is what helps to comprehend from interaction, turn the exhibition into a multidimensional study of the “Pirogov collection”.
The houses, the interpretation of the architecture of which is devoted to such a spectacular, thoughtful and artistic exposition, have not yet been built. They are planned to be built on the territory of the "Pirogovo resort" - a place for the Moscow region with a unique combination of expensive elite life and conceptual creativity. It hosted the "Art-Klyazma", and there is also a yacht club and golf courses.
The exhibition shows projects of 10 very large villas of approximately 2 thousand square meters. m each - they are planned to be built between golf courses. And also six small, 5 by 8 meters, yachtsmen's houses in the bay next to the pier. All the houses were commissioned by well-known, one might even say, iconic architects, and therefore should include among their many merits, among other things, the authorship of celebrities, in order to become a kind of encyclopedia of all the best that our and partly foreign architecture now possesses in the field of private country villas. It's not a pity to dance for the sake of such a collection …
Projects - both large and small houses - the latter, I must say, are two-story and you can easily spend the night in them, but compared to the giants-two-thousanders, they seem miniature, - all are very different, but if desired, they can be classified. There are, for example, curved - two horseshoe-shaped houses from Nikolai Lyzlov and the dragon house of Totan Kuzembaev; the house, designed by the curator of the exposition, Yuri Avvakumov, has, perhaps, the most original plan - a cruciform. And there are straight houses, with varying degrees of linearity - the apogee of the latter must be recognized as a rocket house from Art-Bla. Some houses protrude more from the ground, and some are buried in the ground; there are houses split into two equal blocks and vice versa, assembled into one compact volume. Two classicist houses interpret two opposite types of suburban housing - a villa (Ilya Utkin) and a dacha (Mikhail Belov). In a word, almost everything and for different tastes.
Pirogov's project has been repeatedly called unique - so far this is the only Russian precedent for collecting architecture from contemporary celebrities in one place. And the transformation of a commercial project into a partly artistic one. The scope and multi-layered conceptuality of the exhibition is in good agreement with the dual nature of the material shown - the first reflects the elite commercial component, the second - artistic and encyclopedic.
