The topic of verticality in the city, and especially in Moscow, is one of the key ones for architects - to design a skyscraper, as the exhibition curator Anton Kochurkin noted, means to express their greatest ambitions. All the presented "towers" demonstrate very different approaches to shaping: here there are allusions to Malevich's architectons, and an appeal to biomorphic forms, and atectonic constructions with removed pieces of mass, speckled with ornaments and resembling a cast sculpture. It is interesting that some of the project participants reacted to the skyscraper theme by going to seemingly non-architectural areas. In a number of "towers", the primary form-generating one is, for example, a hurricane, a whirlwind, a tornado that twists its body into a kind of funnel, like the Tornado-Tower of the AK_Reflection group, or a swaying vortex column, which is similar to the Power Tower of the architectural bureau PANACOM.
Strictly speaking, this is no longer architecture as such, but some self-valuable sculptural objects that concentrate the conceptual foundations of designing an imaginary skyscraper for each of the participants. They are devoid of detail and focus on volumetric and imaginative qualities. The transfer of the symbolic form into the material became possible with the help of a special technique - each of the 150 sections of the tower was laser cut along the contour on the plywood, and when they were folded, a three-dimensional figure was obtained.
I must say that the idea of these skyscrapers was born much earlier than the current exhibition. All of them have already been demonstrated to the public within the framework of the project, which was done by the same curator Anton Kochurkin for last year's ARCH-Moscow. Anton did not come up with the design of the stand, not knowing what works on it would be exhibited. Instead, he turned to the architects with a proposal for a specific topic - "vertical in the city", which they could fantasize about at a given scale - 30x30 in cross-section and not exceeding 1.80 meters. So during the implementation of the stand design project, the idea of an atypical presentation of works with large, human-sized models was born.
Deciding to show them again, Anton Kochurkin decided to make the towers part of the installation, creating with the help of light and music a kind of special space that recreates the feeling of a heterogeneous urban fabric and combines with associations from the world of fashion shows. As in the continuous sound of a musical composition written specifically for the project by the Exit Project group, pieces of different urban sketches, live samples and melodic consonances intrude, so the city itself as an architectural organism is divided into some fragments, fragments, which can be put together and see the whole city never succeeds.
The “urban” theme is superimposed on another, expressed by the name of the exhibition, the theme of fashion or the fashion industry. Anton Kochurkin was going to illustrate this idea by creating in the hall the atmosphere of a fashionable fashion show, accompanied by light and musical compositions. Instead of fragile living models, towers participate in the defile, which, ceasing to be architecture, retire to a lighter, according to Anton Kochurkin, art form - the world of fashion. The special technique with which the layouts were created revealed approaches that more closely resemble the work of fashion designers than architects. All 15 towers are very different and at the same time they are the same in their almost anthropomorphic scale - and this similarity of the model in a man (or a mannequin?) Supports the theme of the defile laid down in the name of the exhibition and turns it into a performance.
The viewer passes between skyscrapers, and, being almost the same height with them, falls into the sphere of influence of the "live" exposition. If at ARCH-Moscow the towers were shown without the accompaniment of light and embodied only different author's approaches to the theme of a high-rise building, then, becoming participants in the installation, they acquired another level of meaning. Here, in the space of the gallery, all external factors, such as light, music, cinema, work to embody the idea of changing architectural fashion, in which the skyscrapers themselves, breaking away from architecture, have turned into fashion objects.
The WACOM company, known for its graphic tablets and interactive displays, helped Anton Kochurkin and the VKHUTEMAS gallery realize their long-standing idea of an exposition in contact with the viewer. Within the framework of the exhibition, they decided to jointly hold a sketch tournament, during which those who wish could work on such interactive tablets, which for modern architects and designers are increasingly replacing the usual tools. The organizers of the tournament urge to fight imaginary feathers in a creative competition - well, the atmosphere of the exhibition only contributes to this.
