As you know, last year the well-known exhibition "Arch-Moscow" made an attempt to expand and become a festival under the direction of curator Bart Goldhoorn. Non-commercial expositions were moved to the basements of the Central House of Artists, to the courtyard and to external exhibition areas - as a result, everyone who was used to seeing the main content of the exhibition inside the Central House of Artists came out with the conviction that Arch-Moscow was finally commercialized and there was no architecture left on it. The organizers, however, do not agree with this definition and the expansion of Arch-Moscow is planned further. Back in June, it was said that the next exhibition would no longer be held in the format of a festival, but as part of the first Moscow architecture biennale. Spring is approaching, and yesterday at a press conference, the organizers and participants of the new Biennale gave details.
The Biennale will run from May 27 to June 22, and the Arch-Moscow festival will take place within 5 days starting from May 28. The chairman of the organizing committee of the Biennale will be the director of the Central House of Artists and "Arch-Moscow" Vasily Bychkov, among its main organizers - the Central House of Artists, the Tretyakov Gallery and the Museum of Architecture. A. V. Shchusev (MUAR) - they will also become the main exhibition grounds. Boris Bernasconi is responsible for the design of the Biennale exhibitions. The Biennale is also going to host the famous Under the Roof Interior Festival and the Lifestyle commercial interior salon. The organizers will also include Moskomarkhitektura, the Art-Moscow Foundation, the Union of Artists and the Project Russia magazine. The editor-in-chief of which Bart Goldhoorn is now the curator of the new Biennale.
The theme set by Goldhoorn this time sounds biennially fashionable and ambiguous: two words "how to live" and without any punctuation mark. There is a sense of tradition - the theme of this year's Venice Biennale, for example, is not easy to translate from English, and if you think about it, it again calls on architects to distract themselves from their direct profession and look somewhere into the distance. The Moscow theme is also linguistically difficult. The question is here or the point? Will they explain how to live or vice versa, they ask? So it turns out that there is already a reason for discussion. But in fact, as the organizers explain, the two words are of course a secret, but strictly speaking the topic is housing, the housing issue, which Muscovites have continued to spoil for a long time.
“Architects can no longer serve an exclusively wealthy customer, we need to think about what a modern city, modern housing should look like, and where our children will live” - this is the appeal with which Bart Goldhoorn addresses the architectural community. “The middle class is growing, and with it the need for high-quality housing, which can no longer satisfy the remnants of the Soviet era, serial panel houses,” he explains and calls on foreign architects for help, who will have to show our people how to build social housing. Thus, within the framework of the festival, many master classes of the world's leading architects are promised (twenty-four people have already been invited). They are supposed to tell architects how to build mass housing, customers how to plan it, and residents how to live in it. Well, they will teach you how to live, in short.
The theme of the new Moscow Biennale, we note, is as socially oriented as the motto of the previous "Arch-Moscow", proposed by the same curator - then there was urban planning, now housing. They are interconnected, one grows out of the other, and all together add up to a call directed exactly opposite to what the architects and their clients in Moscow are used to. Roughly speaking, they got used to serving the luxury of primitive accumulation, and to appreciate the artistry of "pure" art. More can be said - at what point it was Arch-Moscow that became the main exhibition, where architects, who understand the aesthetic side of their profession, showed their works. This aesthetics, and the equally obvious artistry of the installations of the non-commercial part of the exhibition, constituted the meaning of the exhibition and distinguished what was shown there from that which was built around the "Moscow style".
Now curator Bart Goldhoorn seeks to turn the advanced architectural community away from medieval-Renaissance "craftsmanship" towards the ethical values of modern times and to instill in Moscow architects the concerns of their European colleagues for the city, environment, and people. The best way to describe this circle of ideas is the slogan of the Venice Biennale 2000 proposed by Maximiliano Fuksas: "more ethics, less aesthetics." Paradoxical enough for architecture as an art, but extremely socially responsible. It's another matter that in our Moscow situation, everything is far from so unambiguous, and to divide everything that is in two parts, putting on one side of the scales of luxury art for wealthy connoisseurs, and on the other the civic position of a socialist architect, and then choose between them - does not work. Frankly speaking, the European colleagues would not have succeeded either. But one can argue on this score indefinitely - the topic is important and confusing, downright painful. Therefore, for now, we propose to limit ourselves to seeing how Moscow will assess the second attempt to inculcate "theirs" pure as a teardrop socialism of creators and individuals into our post-socialist space.
So, the Moscow Architecture Biennale will consist of master classes and exhibitions held at different venues. The Tretyakov Gallery will host an exhibition of the recently adopted updated general plan of Moscow, several expositions are expected in the MUAR: an exhibition of new Russian cities (of which, as it turned out, today there are already about twenty), an exhibition dedicated to the "newly returned" communal houses, as well as the exhibition " Colors of Moscow Architecture ", which will consist of either new works by Moscow architects or a collective installation created by them. Together, these expositions are called the "Russian pavilion", although it is easy to see that there is no pavilion, there is only a common theme.
The conventional "pavilion" is adjoined by the "Russian House of the Future" competition dedicated to the design of affordable housing. According to its organizer Sergei Zhuravlev, developed countries have long since switched to the construction of modern mass housing and now their main problem is how to harmoniously integrate it into the changed structure of cities. In Russia, the housing stock is almost destroyed or primitive, which gives us (sic!) An advantage over the West, since all opportunities are open to us, and we may well become the world standard in the construction of economy-class housing. What should be understood apparently this way: nothing that we live in the aging ruins of the imperial insul, but we can (again!) Start everything from scratch.
In a word, the topic is a sore one, and how to make a turn towards ethics is difficult to decide, although it’s probably high time. But it is curious what can come out of such a rapid growth, the merger and association of exhibitions and festivals with a common thematic turn of 180 degrees.
