This is one of the key thematic exhibitions of the Biennale, designed to reveal the topic of mass housing construction. And in a sense, it is a logical addition and the "second half" of the "library" exhibition, which presented the international experience in the construction of inexpensive housing in the colonnade of the Central House of Artists. There were foreign examples, here - Russian residential quarters, collected in groups that can be understood as the past, present and, relatively speaking, the future.
The past is presented in the first two halls of the suite by projects of unrealized "new cities of the USSR" from the funds of the Museum of Architecture: "City of the Sun" by Ivan Leonidov and "Green City" by Ladovsky, competition projects for Stalingrad and the fantasy of Yakov Chernikhov, Magnitogorsk and Voronezh. A significant part of the shown projects falls mainly on the heyday of Stalinist architecture - the pre-war 1930s and post-war 1940s. Photocopies of original drawings and drawings are reduced, placed under glass and illuminated.
The second part is very small - these are photo panoramas of the panel areas made by Aleksey Naroditsky. Only six photographs with landscapes familiar to every Soviet person - the heroic format of the panorama gives them an unforgettable propaganda flavor. This is real.
The future is the main part of the exhibition, it occupies all subsequent halls, except for the last one (it contains the art project of Pavel Pepperstein "the city of Russia"). So, the main part is the projects of new quarters in the old city and projects of completely new cities that are planned to be built in a new place. The geography is very wide - from Moscow to Krasnoyarsk. Curators - Alexei Muratov and Elena Gonzalez (Project Russia) - even at the opening of the main exhibitions of the Biennale, admitted that this exposition is a consequence of the work on the next thematic issue of the magazine called “cities”. Collecting the material, the authors were surprised how many new cities are being designed in Russia - about twenty. Ten were selected for the exhibition.
All these are large settlements, but most of them are called "districts" and are under the jurisdiction of large cities - Zelenograd, Petersburg, Minvod, Kazan, Yekaterinburg, Krasnoyarsk. This makes the name "city" somewhat arbitrary. For the dreamers of the twenties, these are big cities; for the builders of the seventies, they are simply neighborhoods that could be quickly filled with panels. However, one of the principles by which the curators selected these city-districts for the exhibition is their innovativeness. Districts represent new approaches to urban planning. At the same time, in Russian conditions, it is difficult for them to be available, and even more so - cheap. So, in terms of the future, the exhibition is still showing elite quarters and districts. Islands of new life for (let's say) those who can afford it. And at the same time, the exhibition demonstrates that the islets - firstly, have spread almost to the entire country (again, with large and non-poor cities), and secondly - they have outgrown, at least at the design level, the scale of neighborhoods, and moved to the scale of districts …
The islands of good life are showing a trend towards dynamic growth - not everyone has time to get used to the fact that new housing is being built in neighborhoods, and the architects have already come close to the cities. This cannot but mean that there are more people who do not live well in Russia, which cannot but rejoice. It's a shame, of course, that only a few can afford innovative (to one degree or another) housing. Reasoning on this topic, the curator of the Biennale Bart Goldhorn made the following assumption - now people in Russia are ready to buy housing and invest in it, and the quality of the industry lags behind on average, is at the level of slightly improved panel construction. But elite housing is developing, and there are a lot of it. Both must finally converge, meet - in order to give impetus to the development of high-quality housing at an average cost. For this to happen, the main thing, as Bart Goldhorn is convinced, is knowledge about the available materials and about Western experience.“There is no need to build a factory for the production of standard buildings, it is necessary to build various buildings from typical parts made at the factory” - this formula expressed by the curator of the Biennale, a person who did a lot to educate the Russian audience with Western experience, seems more than correct.
But - a little idealistic, a little akin to the "cities of the sun". The basis of many utopias is the belief in the intrinsic value of education. While it is important what they are for, this knowledge is applied. You can learn how to build interesting housing from standard elements and then sell it at a very high price, making huge profits. I would not want to intrude into a complex area of the economy, but it is obvious that no education will interfere with building housing cheaply, and selling it is expensive (well, except perhaps for the strictest monastic education in the spirit of rejection of earthly values), until such a state of affairs becomes impossible in principle. But training and education are undoubtedly useful, especially when such textbook exhibitions, rich in various information, are made for it. On the other hand, some steps towards the cultural component of construction are made by developers of course - for example, the Mirax-group corporation sponsors exhibitions of the first Moscow architecture biennale.
The exhibition of cities in the “Russian pavilion” of the Biennale (this is the status of the MUAR exhibitions), just like its “couple” - the “international pavilion”, looks like a textbook or a library, but only there, in the colonnade, there was a simple, ordinary library, and here - media and dear.
To show the main part of the exhibition, Aleksey Kozyr built an installation: along the entire suite, a long structure stretches about a man's waist. Its "walls" are made of gray metal panels, and a large number of projectors are placed inside. The projectors shine onto the mirrors, the image is refracted and projected, finally, onto the horizontal frosted glass of the showcase. It looks like an international pavilion - you need to look not at the walls, but at the tables, but only there were static images on paper, and here are videos, each of which in its own way represents a project of one of the districts. The signatures are placed vertically on the square projections and also glow.
By the way, almost everything is lit at the exhibition - inscriptions, images, videos, photographs, and drawings. Obviously, in front of us is a semblance of a machine for showing an exposition. A sort of portable "showcase in itself", one of the features of which is its indifference to the environment. And for some reason, it also suggests the idea of a "black box", which was filled with data, providing for the possibility of viewing. Such a structure can then be installed somewhere else without loss - if only there is enough space in length. This is good, because it allows and even forces you to focus on the exhibition - and in order to master all the material, you just need to concentrate and watch each video. On the other hand, this is not very good, because the structure is very cold about the space of the suite, literally "crashes" into it - however, why the modernist expositions do not fit well into the suite of the museum at all. In addition, all the pictures (even Stalin's washings, some of which are huge) have become small and need to be examined. Although this also contributes to concentration.
In general, "cities" are one of the most integral, labor-intensive and expensive exhibitions of the Biennale. It is not surprising that it opened later than everyone else. On the other hand, this is one of the very informative expositions, a strict media "textbook".
