The idea of holding the competition was born from the desire of the revived Bauhaus to rebuild the once close cultural ties with Russia, interrupted for almost 70 years, during which the leading architectural school in Germany experienced a long period of oblivion. The history of cultural interaction between the two schools began in the 1920s, when the Soviet VKHUTEMAS and the German Bauhaus were united by a common desire to make avant-garde architecture. In those days, the USSR seemed to Europeans a unique springboard for the embodiment of radical functionalist ideas - Bruno Taut, Hans Mayer, Ernst May came to us. At the first exhibition of Modern Architecture in 1927, the projects of the Soviet constructivists were shown together with the projects of the Bauhaus, their buildings in Dessau, built according to the designs of Walter Gropius. But already in the early 1930s, a change in the stylistic course was outlined in the USSR, while the National Socialists came to power in Germany - both put an end to free creative searches and both schools soon ceased to exist.
According to the rector of the current school of Dessau, Alfred Jacobi, one of the inspirers of the ZEPPELINSTATION competition, today, when the Bauhaus has again begun accepting students from different countries, it seems important to them to establish contacts with young Russian architects. It looks like a continuation of the historical continuity. Therefore, it is not surprising that the "avant-garde" theme of the competition was proposed by the teacher of the Moscow Architectural Institute, Alexander Ryabsky. To quote the program, the task of the competition is “to turn an abstract bridge between two cultures into a real, aerial one, between two capitals. The launch of the Moscow-Berlin zeppelin is proposed as a kind of vehicle.
The topic is very attractive and non-standard, one might even say that it sends us to the field of romantic futurology. At one time, this topic became the basis for many beautiful "paper" projects. However, the idea of a zeppelin station implied not only a look into the future, but at the same time a look into the past, into the origins of the avant-garde, one of the symbols of which at one time was the airship. In English grammar there is such a tense "future in the past" - so designing a modern zeppelin station (which in itself sounds rather strange) is something similar. You won't find zepellins today, but the idea of mastering the air is still urgent. It turns out that the participants in the competition designed the future by first looking into it from the past - a kind of complicated time travel. It is rather difficult to imagine the communication between Moscow and Berlin by means of airships, although it would be fun to fly that way.
When trying to imagine the image of a zeppelin station, fantasy projects of “flying architecture” by avant-garde masters come to mind. Zeppelin, balloon, airplane - they were all symbols of their time. Suffice it to recall the balloon-like ferry in the project of the Institute of Library Science named after V. I. Lenin Ivan Leonidov or the project of I. Josefovich (Nikolai Ladovsky's workshop), in which the flying conference hall of the House of Soviets, similar to a giant zeppellin, was supposed to moor to towers in different republics of the country of the Soviets. Designing a club of a new social type, Leonidov makes a mooring tower for airships in it, and Heinrich Ludwig, in the project of the Palace of Labor, a round landing area for aircraft.
To be honest, the rich tradition of classical avant-garde projects was to some extent dangerous for the current contestants. It was not difficult to slip into quoting well-known things, and a number of projects did not escape this. This is why the topic was complicated, that with complete freedom of creative thought, the participants had to "build a bridge" not only between the two countries, but also between the 1920s and the present, convey a sense of history, and at the same time not "get stuck" in the past.
According to the terms of the competition, the project was supposed to include a quay mast, a passenger pavilion and an exhibition hall dedicated to Russian culture - in order to designate the "Russian cultural space" in Berlin, which again gave ample room for interpretation. But for some reason, for many of the contestants, the "Russianness" of the project invariably boiled down to quoting the recognizable architectural form of the avant-garde masters - so, on one tablet, the Tatlin tower of the III International is drawn, on the other - the exhibition pavilion of Konstantin Melnikov. Many people quote Malevich's Suprematist compositions and his own architects.
It is interesting, nevertheless, how the “collective consciousness” of young architects gives out similar images - among the projects there were several that interpret the shape of the flower. One of them wittily compares a zeppelin with a bee flying up to an inflorescence. Project No. 2, on the contrary, is an example of "technogenic romanticism" in the spirit of the early 1920s, this is a machine building that recalls the projects of the Palace of Labor in 1925 by G. Ludwig, K. Melnikov, I. Golosov and others. under number 1, also marked by the jury, he found the original architectural form of the poem by V. Mayakovsky. Its station dynamically, like a verse stanza, is twisted by a spiral characteristic of the avant-garde, at the end of which there is a fantastic "balloon" - or maybe not a balloon, but some composition of balloons rushing into the sky.
The jury awarded 6 honorable mentions - one semester of free tuition at the Dessau school and the Swiss institute CIA, as well as first and second places with the right to study for 4 and 2 semesters, respectively.
The winner was project # 4, proposed by Georgy Zagorsky from Minsk. Against the general background, he was definitely noticeable. While most of the participants either copied the avant-garde, or came up with "real" buildings, Georgy Zagorsky proposed pure futurology. It is an intricately organized structure - a form in the spirit of modern nonlinearity, similar to clouds or mushrooms, but most of all to fantastic flowers inflated with air. Colored clouds work as docking nodes for airships - the zeppelins, according to the author's plan, should stick into these flowers approximately like fighters in a Boeing refueling hose. This is utopia in a modern way - the title says ‘you still believe in utopia’ - as well as the task itself.
A similar idea is present in project No. 14, which the jury also awarded with an honorable mention - but giant holes were made there in the volume of the cylindrical tower, into which the zeppelins enter like a thread in a needle. This option looks more like a pipe pierced by unexploded shells.
Project No. 5 by Aleksandr Kalachev from Moscow, which received 2nd place, is perhaps the only one that interpreted the process of landing a zeppellin as a smooth descent over the airfield. The station building is positioned across the movement of the zeppelin, its undulating roof is spread over the ground, and the airships land in the roof recesses.
Announcing the winners, the chairman of the jury and the dean of the Dessau School, Johannes Kister, was delighted that the youth competition attracted many participants and assessed the overall level of the projects as generally good. However, not everyone passed this test for freedom of imagination, which in such futuristic creativity is more important than the technical side of the matter. Probably, young people have lost the habit of utopian design. We often remember the heyday of avant-garde form-making, but we do it with a kind of doomed feeling, as if today we cannot invent anything similar in scope of fantasy. Probably, this feeling also touched many contestants, who became dependent on what Melnikov and Tatlin had already invented, without trying to come up with their own.
But the flying cities of the 1920s, being adequate to their time, today look somewhat naive, and their repetition is pure retrospectivism. It is curious how the avant-garde “flying forward steam locomotive” (in this case an airship, but the meaning is the same), once proud of its primacy, becomes an object of repeated copying and looping on the past, instead of pushing the next generation forward to the future. That is why, probably, Mr. Kister liked the utopia project so much, directed not towards 2000, which dreamers of the 1920s dreamed for themselves, but, say, 2100 or even further.
LIST OF WINNERS OF THE COMPETITION Zeppelin Station
1st Prize: Master's Program Certificate <three semesters at DIA / Dessau International Architecture school <один architecture=""><перелет>
110375 Georgy Zaborsky / Minsk, Belarus /
2nd Prize: Certificate of Study <three semesters at DIA / Dessau. International Architecture school <one semester at CIA / Chur Institute of Architecture.
310898 Alexander Kalachev / Moscow, Russia /
6 special awards: Certificate of Study <one semester at DIA / Dessau International Architecture School.
664431 Kirill Gubernatorov / Moscow, Russia /
696891 Daria Kovaleva / Moscow, Russia /
314159 Alexander Kudimov / Moscow, Russia /
133122 Vsevolod Petrushin / Kazan, Russia /
136032 Alexey Sabirullov / Yekaterinburg, Russia /
280780 Anastasia Shibanova / Moscow, Russia /
TYPE. A mistake was made in this text - it was said that the idea of the competition was proposed by the teacher of the Moscow Architectural Institute Alexander Savitsky. In fact, the name of the author of the idea of the competition is Alexander Ryabsky. The editors apologize to the esteemed Alexander Ryabsky.
