The competition, held this fall, was initiated by the Presidential Property Management Department, and the announcement of the results was timed to coincide with the birthday of Vladimir Putin - the high official level of the event is quite obvious and the organizers made efforts to ensure that the scandalous reputation of past St. Petersburg competitions did not affect this event. However, what happened to the competition as a result of these efforts is no less strange and surprising.
First of all, instead of one competition, two were held in parallel. One closed among Western architects, the second - at the same time, open, among Russian. This simply means that foreign "stars" must be paid for the competition project, and the participation of Russian architects in a side event on the same topic is voluntary and only the winners will receive a monetary prize. "I consider such an organization to be a violation of all the accepted rules for holding competitions and a gross violation of the rights of Russian architects," one of the jury members of both competitions (open and closed), a well-known Russian architect, professor of Moscow Architectural Institute Evgeny Ass, said in an interview with the correspondent of the Agency for Architectural News. “In addition, foreign participants in the closed competition had the opportunity to start work 3 months earlier than their Russian counterparts.” A similar position, albeit in more streamlined terms, was also voiced by the president of the Moscow Union of Architects, Viktor Logvinov, at a press conference held by the union on October 1.
Indeed, from the outside, everything looks more than strange - the architects seemed to be divided into “local” and “non-local”, and the latter were given a clear preference, inviting them to a “serious competition”, and for their own they arranged another one, either additionally, then whether - so as not to be offended. Here it is difficult to refrain from remarking that only ours are valued so low in our country, even from the time of Lefty and from earlier ones too.
An inexperienced outside observer may have many questions - usually people are used to thinking that architectural competitions are held in order to choose a winner and then entrust him with the design of an object. Why then the second competition?
And why the open Russian competition was open to the press and all curious people - on the website of the organizer, the Committee for Architecture and Urban Planning of St. Petersburg, all the conditions and works accepted for the competition were published - and the foreign one was held not only in secret, but to see the projects, who participated in it is difficult even now. According to the information reported in the Kommersant newspaper, a completely closed exhibition was held in the Kremlin, to which the press was not allowed.
And the last question - why did you choose Riccardo Bofill's project? Inexperienced lovers of modern architecture know that it was precisely the fascination with Bofill's postmodernism that became the basis for the rather annoying "Moscow style" that flourished in the capital in the 1990s. It would seem that now architects could have a persistent allergy to the work of this master. In addition, the choice was quite large - in addition to Bofill, Jean Nouvel, Maximilian Fuksas, Erik van Egeraat, Mario Botta and Wolf Prix participated in the competition.
Probably, the choice of Riccardo Bofill's project is a decision of the customers, who also participated in the work of the jury, says Evgeny Ass: “… during the open discussion of the jury among professional architects, no one expressed particular sympathy for Bofill's project, but he could well have attracted the customers because of his“palace "Pomp, which was not observed in other projects."
The voting was closed, so no one can know who voted and how, but the final choice may seem somewhat strange, not only “from the inside,” but also from the outside. Riccardo Bofill's project looks like a giant glass greenhouse, decorated with rare likenesses of equally large Doric columns. The columns are widely spaced, between them are large glass planes, at the top there is a glass pediment, squat and flattened, like the whole structure. As if a cataclysm had occurred inside a small Doric temple and it began to grow and spread in breadth, filling the gaps in a modern way - with glass. This is probably an example of exquisite architectural irony provided directly by one of the gurus of postmodernism - it's hard to judge. But it seems obvious that although this project was most likely the only example of "historicism" in the competition, it is difficult to take it for a contextual, that is, sparing historical environment, object.
The second, Russian competition, as already mentioned, turned out to be more open to the public and easier to evaluate. At first glance (if you look at what is available for viewing), it seems that the literally dual open-closed Russian-foreign competition for the congress center in Strelna presents us with an interesting example of how ours and foreigners have reversed roles. Among the "Western stars", Bofill, the source and component of Russian postmodernism, won. He, in the absence of an open exhibition, turns out to be in the eyes of amazed spectators the main representative of this (whatever one may say, the most solid) part of the competition.
But Russian architects - although they were not promised anything, not even further participation in the design - brought very modern projects to the competition. I just want to say that "our guys are already five times ahead for the same salary."
The winner of the open competition was a very young, recently created workshop of Alexander Kuptsov and Sergei Gikalo. The Congress Center is delicately hidden under the grass cover of an artificial hill about 25 meters high with a small reservoir in the center. In the panorama of the Strelna ensemble, it is almost invisible - the modern building is made according to the principles of park pavilions of the 18th century and in this sense is very logical in the palace park.
It would be an extremely subtle and beautiful decision if the government's convention center turned out to be just that. Firstly, it practically does not spoil the historical ensemble, and secondly, the ecological and cultural ideology of this project not only corresponds to modern European trends, but even seems to overtake them a little, in any case, the construction of an official building according to a similar plan is probably, could have a very positive effect on the country's image. This is the complete opposite of the corn skyscraper, which was cursed in the Russian and foreign press.
And without a doubt this project is both thinner and more modern than Bofill's project that bypassed it along a parallel route.
Two second places went to: the Moscow workshop of Dmitry Alexandrov, whose project is also very natural - all the roofs are covered with grass, the surface of the site is actively understood and used for various structures and landscape forms, and the St. Petersburg team (Nikolai Bodrov, Maxim Boyko, Vladimir Merkushov) whose project is also very green and natural and consists of broken straight lines laid in paths approaching curves.
Among the five honorable mentions is a project by Mikhail Khazanov's workshop, again park and green, with exploited roofs, but with a more specific - a spiral-circular volume of the congress center itself.
The priorities of the open Russian competition, therefore, are quite obvious - among the winners were projects that in one way or another relate to the natural park theme. It was as if they were selected according to the principle of increasing natural parks - the more landscape, the higher the reward. So, the theme of Russian projects is a park, and they are subordinated to the historical palace ensemble.
Not that - the project of Riccardo Bofill, it rather suggests that they want to build a second Strelna palace here, although to the inexperienced eye of an architecture lover it will still be difficult for him to compete with Michetti. Thus, the two contests differ not only in different rules of conduct, different degrees of openness to the press, but also in results - diametrically.
Interestingly, somewhere during the announcement of the results, the organizers announced their desire to now unite the efforts of the winners of the foreign and Russian competitions. How this will happen will be announced separately, but it is already obvious that it will be very, very difficult to do this.
