Invasion of foreigners
In 2003, a competition was held in St. Petersburg to design the second stage of the Mariinsky Theater. It was the first international competition in Russia after the Stalinist competition for the Palace of the Soviets. Dutchman Eric van Egerat, Swiss Mario Bott, Austrian Hans Hollein, Japanese Arat Isozaki, American Eric Moss and Frenchman Dominique Perrault were invited to participate. There were also Russian participants - Andrey Bokov and Oleg Romanov, Sergey Kiselev, Mark Reinberg and Andrey Sharov, Alexander Skokan, Yuri Zemtsov and Mikhail Kondiain. Dominique Perrault won.
It turned out to be a kind of Petersburg know-how - from that moment on, all large Petersburg projects were done according to the same scheme. At the same time, the participation of Russian architects was gradually reduced to zero, and Western stars always became the winners. The most notable are:
- competition for the construction of a 300-meter tower for Gazprom in St. Petersburg (2006). The participants were French Jean Nouvel, Dutch Rem Koolhaas, Swiss Herzog and de Meuron, Italian Massimiliano Fuksas, American Daniel Libeskind and British firm RMJM. The Russians were not invited, RMJM won.
- competition for the reconstruction of New Holland in St. Petersburg (2006). Briton Norman Foster, Erik van Egerat and Germans Jurgen Engel with Michael Zimmermann took part. Russian architects were not invited, Norman Foster won.
- competition for the Kirov stadium in St. Petersburg (2006). The German design bureau "Braun & Shlokermann Arcadis", the Japanese Kisho Kurokawa, the Portuguese Thomas Taveira and the German Meinhard von Gerkan took part. One of the Russian architects was invited to participate, Andrey Bokov. Defeated Kisho Kurokawa.
- competition for the reconstruction of Pulkovo airport (2007). The American bureau SOM, Meinhard von Gerkan (co-authored with Yuri Zemtsov and Mikhail Kondiain) and Briton Nicholas Grimshaw participated. He won
- competition for the presidential congress center in Strelna (2007). The participants were Mario Botta, Austrian bureau Koop Himmelblau, Spaniard Ricardo Bofill, Massimiliano Fuksas and Jean Nouvel. Ricardo Bofill defeated.
Competitions are only a small part of foreign orders in Russia. To characterize the current situation, suffice it to say that in 2006-2007. Norman Foster alone received orders in Russia for the design of about one and a half million square meters. In 1999, the author of this text, somewhat recklessly, compared what was happening with the end of the 17th century, during the reign of Queen Sophia. Masters of Naryshkin Baroque are still working, they are still trying to adapt the techniques of European Mannerism and Baroque to Old Russian traditions, but a year later Tsar Peter will appear, stop these unsuccessful experiments, and invite Western architects to build a new capital (see G. Revzin. Tyanitolkai. Project Russia N14, 1999). It seems that this forecast has begun to come true.
What happened? The appearance of Western architects in Russia is a kind of turning point, which makes us rethink the period of development of Russian architecture from the collapse of the USSR to the present day. Is the configuration of Russian architecture changing? What is the pattern of competition between Russian and Western architects in Russia today?
Moscow style
The main architectural act of Russia at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries in history will remain the reconstruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The temple, built in 1883 according to the project of Konstantin Ton (project 1832) was blown up by Stalin on December 5, 1931. In 1994, its reconstruction began; on January 6, 2000, the first Christmas liturgy was held there.
This building makes the central event of the entire period not only the significance of the temple itself. He is the model for the architecture of the entire period. Several features are defining here.
At first. The idea of rebuilding the temple was put forward and promoted by officials of the Moscow government, and, above all, personally by Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. The authorities began to shape the agenda of the post-Soviet architectural period.
In this way, she solved the problem of new legitimization through the revival of the pre-Bolshevik tradition. Note that although it was a democratic government elected on the wave of Russia's openness to the world in general and to Western European democracies in particular, it did not derive its legitimacy from any symbols of similarity to the West, but through an appeal to Russian history. For all the post-Soviet times, it never occurred to anyone to build either a parliamentary building or a presidential one. Instead, we started with the temple and continued with the restoration of the Grand Kremlin Imperial Palace.
Secondly. Russia was going through a difficult economic period at that moment, the state budget was catastrophically small. The temple was built on voluntary donations from Moscow business, but the degree of voluntariness of these donations was largely determined by the opportunity to do business in Moscow. In fact, it was a temple dues. The second defining feature of the construction of the temple was the subordination of business to the tasks of symbolic legitimization of power.
Thirdly. The very idea of rebuilding the temple did not take into account the positions of the architectural community. The Cathedral of Christ the Savior in the architectural community had a very low reputation, the so-called "Russian style" of Konstantin Ton was interpreted by five generations of architects as an example of bad taste and opportunistic mediocrity. The very idea of building a temple in 1994 could probably have aroused great enthusiasm among architects, Russia was experiencing a kind of religious revival. The competition for a new Cathedral of Christ the Savior could bring the current generation of Russian architects to a fundamentally new level, at once posing before them the problems of national tradition, today's attitude, metaphysics of architectural form - if the Russian architectural school could build a new temple, it could respect itself. Even the very possibility that architects might have any opinions of their own on this topic, even the assumption that they are able to build something comparable to a rather mediocre architectural solution of a rather artlessly mediocre era, was considered at that moment as blasphemy. Architects in this configuration turn out to be purely service figures who do not have their own views and are incapable of their own creativity.
All three features of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior became decisive for the direction that was called the "Moscow style". Monuments of this style are very numerous. Among the most notable are the underground complex on Manezhnaya Square (M. Posokhin, V. Shteller), the Opera Singing Center of Galina Vishnevskaya (M. Posokhin, A. Velikanov), the new building of the mayor's office on Tverskaya (P. Mandrygin), the Nautilus trading house "On Lubyanka (A. Vorontsov), office and cultural center" Red Hills "(Y. Gnedovsky, D. Solopov), a branch of the Bolshoi Theater (Y. Sheverdyaev, P. Andreev), Chinese Center on Novoslobodskaya (M. Posokhin), Business center on Novinsky Boulevard (M. Posokhin), High-rise building on Paveletsky railway station square (S. Tkachenko), Triumph Palace (A. Trofimov), etc.
There are about two hundred works of this style, they largely determined the image of Moscow at the turn of the 1990s - 2000s. They are quite diverse in function, type of property, and location. But they have similarities. All of them affirmed the idea of returning to historical Moscow. The very image of antiquity changed, if at the beginning of the reign of Yuri Luzhkov it was usually about the pre-revolutionary past, and the "Russian style" of eclecticism and modernity were used as stylistic prototypes, then Stalin's Moscow (skyscrapers) gradually began to acquire more and more importance. This was in line with a general shift in the ideology of state legitimacy under Vladimir Putin. But in any case, the style of the building turned out to be the initiative of the authorities, corresponded with its policy, and the building itself was interpreted as an act of the authorities in favor of citizens, regardless of the form of ownership. Private business paid for the legitimization of the authorities regardless of their desire or unwillingness to do so.
In almost all cases, the authors of the building were state officials, architects, employees in the system of state design institutes. In these projects, just as in the Temple, the role of the architect was supposed to be purely official - he was a figure who, according to the authorities' plan, did not have his own creative person. Hence the spread of Luzhkov's "reconstructions", when old buildings were demolished and rebuilt with the preservation of similarities with historical forms (the most notable examples are the Moskva Hotel and the Voentorg store, demolished and rebuilt based on the former). The customer here, as it were, eliminated the architect, he fully imagined in advance what would be built - the same as it was, but with a new functional content, other consumer qualities, a large number of areas. An exemplary work of the Moscow style turned out to be a fake, a fake of an old building, and as a result, an attempt to join the past as the source of its legitimacy led to falsification of the past and undermining legitimacy. But if Yuri Luzhkov could, he would probably build all the buildings the city needs on the model of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior - based on photographs of those lost or demolished on the spot by him. This was most in line with his architectural program.
Naturally, this was impossible. As soon as there was an order for the design of a new building, and there were no photographs from the archive, the architect began to draw something of his own, and did this until the customer gave up and did not accept what came out. The architecture of the "Moscow style" turned out to be an array of material with a creative face against its will - it was not expected, but arose. It has no leaders, its main monuments are determined not by creative, but by political considerations, but, at the same time, it is recognizable and stylistically definable.
The customer was sincerely convinced that it was enough for him to say that it was built like before the revolution, or like under Stalin, and everything will work out by itself. He pointed to the sample and waited for the result, but the result was different than he expected. The apparatus of Soviet architectural institutes was used as a tool for the implementation of this task, first of all - Mosproekt-2 under the leadership of Mikhail Posokhin. The bureaucratic architects who worked there were most suited to the role of obedient tools in the hands of the authorities from an administrative point of view, but least from the point of view of their ability to actually implement the order.
The older generation, brought up in line with the "marble modernism" of the Brezhnev era, had neither the experience nor the desire to design in the styles adopted in Moscow before the revolution. The idea was reinterpreted by them in a different way. A number of objects (such as the monument on Poklonnaya Hill, the new building of the Tretyakov Gallery in Lavrushensky Lane) simply continued the Brezhnev tradition. These traditions have even survived to our time, and as the last example of late Brezhnev modernism, we can name the building of the Moscow State University library on Vorobyovy Gory (Gleb Tsytovich, Alexander Kuzmin, Yuri Grigoriev), built already in 2005, but looking like the Brezhnev regional committee of the 70s.
More widespread, however, was the interpretation of the ideas of a return to the spirit of old Moscow in the spirit of American postmodernism of the 70s and 80s. - the time of youth of the middle generation of architects who embodied the order for the "Moscow style".
Architectural postmodernism in its American form (Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, Philip Johnson, Michael Graves, etc.) was based on a compromise between modern construction methods and historical details, dear to the heart of the layman. The very idea of following the plebeian tastes of the townsfolk evoked emotions in architects from a slight smile to fits of uncontrollable laughter, and it was in this sense that they interpreted historical quotations, creating versions of historical architecture that were more reminiscent of the experiences of pop art. The irony of the turn of the century in Russia was that the order of Yuri Mikhailovich Luzhkov was interpreted in the same spirit - as an undeveloped taste of the layman, over which one should play a joke. At the same time, the joke, instead of irony in relation to the layman, should denote a new state idea of Russia, which has returned to its pre-revolutionary roots. In its pure form, postmodernism of the American persuasion is rare in Moscow, an interesting example is the office center of Abdula Akhmedov on Novoslobodskaya Street, but more often we have some kind of cross between a joke with state significance. This is the special poetics of the monumental joke, which forms the basis of the Moscow style in all of the above examples. Among the most notable architects, let us name Leonid Vavakin, Mikhail Posokhin, Alexey Vorontsov, Yuri Gnedovsky, Vladlen Krasilnikov. The sculptural works of Zurab Konstantinovich Tsereteli brought the style to some perfection of the monumental vignette crowning this architecture. By the early 2000s, with the change in the nature of Russian society and Russian business, the style began to gradually fade away, although some of its relapses survive to this day. As an example, I will cite the Et Cetera theater (Andrey Bokov, Marina Balitsa), built in 2006.
Considering now this style as if in hindsight, on the one hand, one is amazed at its vulgarity, and on the other hand, you cannot but give it its due. After all, this is undoubtedly an original Russian direction, which has not been found anywhere else in the world. Probably, the very uniqueness of the situation can be assessed as a merit and somehow architecturally expressed. I think that this is exactly what happened in two works by Sergei Tkachenko, in which the poetics of mocking kitsch are carried out with rare consistency and ingenuity - the Faberge Egg house on Mashkov Street and the Patriarch house on Patriarch's Ponds. Along with these works, all other examples of "Luzhkov's style" look like some kind of dull replicas in the "it happened" genre. Sergei Tkachenko brought the absurdity of this poetics to the state of a ringing string, and something sublime even appeared in this. However, this is a marginal case that requires a separate analysis.
Probably, the problem of the Moscow style was that in principle (with the exception of the above-mentioned works by Tkachenko) there was no criterion of architectural quality. It was impossible to say why one work of the Moscow style is better than another, who is the leader of the direction, what to focus on. The best works and the most significant architects were determined here only on the basis of the volume of the order, which is natural, since the agenda of this architecture was determined by the customer. Perhaps, if there were no other next to this architecture, this flaw would not have been noticeable. However, it turned out to be, and in a rather specific quality.
Architectural quality as political opposition
The institutional model on which Moscow-style architecture arose was Soviet in genesis. Yuri Luzhkov acted as the chairman of the regional committee of the Communist Party, defining the image of the city in political terms, the Moscow-style architects - as party members, by definition not having their own opinion, but sharing the collective. However, in the late Soviet institutional model of the development of architecture (like all other arts), a dissident structure arose next to the official structure.
A feature of the dissident development model was the following. The people who realized themselves along this path were not political opposition, they had no intentions to change the structure of power. They only pretended to set the agenda in their professional field. Just as musicians strove to ensure that not party officials, but they themselves determined the state of affairs in music, writers - in literature, and actors and directors - in cinema and theater, architects of the late Soviet era strove to independently determine what should happen in architecture. However, since the late Soviet authorities categorically disagreed with this formulation of the question, purely professional issues acquired a political meaning. It turned out that the authorities did not allow artists, actors, writers and architects to professionally realize themselves, which pushed them into the field of political opposition.
With the end of Soviet power, this structure was completely destroyed in all areas of intellectual and artistic life. However, as Yuri Luzhkov restored the Soviet structure for managing architecture, the Soviet model of opposing it was also restored. He did not realize that one is an extension of the other.
The late Soviet architectural opposition was of two kinds. First, there are environmental architects. Second, the wallet architects.
The movement of environmental modernism is a paradoxical architectural expression of the ideas of the late Soviet intelligentsia. It is based on the combination of two alternatives at once to late Soviet architecture, which can be defined as socialist modernism. On the one hand, on the heightened attention to modern Western architecture, which, in fact, formed the agenda in a professional sense. Here the environment movement opposed socialist modernism as non-socialist. On the other hand, on the underlined, almost cultic piety to the legacy of old Moscow, which was consistently demolished in the process of creating the capital of the world's first socialist state, creating, say, New Arbat or the Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin. Although, in fact, the Soviet city planners of the 60s and 70s in these demolitions and clearing of the old city completely followed the ideas of Le Corbusier, these actions were perceived in the USSR as manifestations of purely communist barbarism, seeking to destroy the traces of the past. Here the movement opposed social modernism as non-modernism, anti-modernism, striving not to “throw the past off the ship of modernity,” but, on the contrary, to carefully preserve all its traces on this ship.
As a result, the idea arose of creating a version of modern architecture that would be modern Western, and at the same time would fully preserve the spirit of the old provincial Moscow of the last century. Environmental neomodernism arose.
The genesis of this direction goes back to the Advanced Research Department of the General Planning Institute of Alexei Gutnov, one of the few truly outstanding Soviet urban planners. His concept of the "environmental approach" is quite multifaceted. "Environmental neomodernism" is part of the environmental approach, for Gutnov it is not the most principled one. But, nevertheless, it is born from this very source. The bottom line is this. Analyzing the experience of the invasion of modern architecture in the historical center (Novy Arbat or the Palace of Congresses), the architects came to the conclusion that the reason for the negative reaction to these events lies not so much in the area of rejection of modern architecture in general, as in the failure to comply with the historically established laws of building a city. Simply put, the problem with the high-rise plates of Novy Arbat is not that this is modern architecture, but that in Moscow, in the city center, there have never been buildings of this size, with such a structure, rhythm, etc. If instead of this four-five-storey ultra-modern houses were built there, if the traditional structure of the Moscow street, etc., were preserved, then no one would call this architectural experiment barbaric.
In Soviet times, these ideas were practically not implemented. The only attempt is the reconstruction of the Arbat. The plan for the integral reconstruction of the area was carried out by a group from Mosproekt-2 and Gutnov's brigade under the patronage of Posokhin Sr. However, the project was curtailed, and the matter was limited to painting the facades and paving the Arbat Street itself - in fact, instead of the environmental model, the concept of an entertaining pedestrian street was implemented, which was quite relevant for Europe in the 80s, and not at all specifically Russian. Thus, environmental modernism turned out to be not realized, but a ready-made development plan, which, as it were, remained in reserve.
Another oppositional locus was the “paper architecture” of the 1980s. The movement, which arose from the victories of young Russian architects in conceptual architectural competitions, primarily in Japan, did not suggest alternative ideas of architecture, but a different type of profession existence. The most notable architects of the movement are Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, Mikhail Belov, Mikhail Filippov, Yuri Avvakumov, Alexey Bavykin, Totan Kuzembaev, Dmitry Bush, etc. - to the greatest extent corresponded to the dissident model of architecture development. They did not serve in Soviet design institutions, they saw the main way of implementation in being included in the global architectural context and to a greater extent worked like conceptual artists oriented towards the local intelligentsia and Western cultural institutions. This formed a special type of identity for these architects. They independently formed the agenda, they emphasized the author's nature of their architecture, they were focused on an architecture-attraction that could attract the attention of an international competition. It can be said that this was a model of "stellar" development of architecture in the darkened conditions of the absence of real construction, contact with society, and so on.
Both opposition groups in Soviet times had no serious prospects, and in the post-Soviet times the resources they controlled were insignificant compared to what Yuri Luzhkov and his team had at their disposal. However, they had one competitive advantage, which was initially underestimated, but in the end turned out to be decisive. They were able to formulate comparatively clear criteria for architectural quality. This is a) integration into modern Western architecture, b) preservation of historical heritage, c) architecture as an artistic attraction.
These criteria were relatively simple and easy for society to assimilate. In response, the architecture of the "Moscow style" could not present any of its quality criteria and therefore found itself under the jurisdiction of these very ones. During the ten years of the development of the "Moscow style", all his works were criticized for a) terrible provincialism, that is, inconsistency with the trends of modern Western architecture, b) total destruction of the historical heritage, c) inability to create a significant artistic event out of architecture, i.e. for artistic impotence. At the same time, as Yuri Luzhkov's power in Moscow strengthened and stagnated (he has remained in power for twenty years already), political opposition to him grew, which picked up the criticism that grew from opposition professional groups. Since the architecture of the "Moscow style" politically served to strengthen the legitimacy of the new government, it was extremely appropriate to point out that this is terribly provincial legitimacy, outwardly based on the appeal to heritage, but in fact it is destroying it, and at the same time extremely mediocre. By the early 2000s, almost any major architectural undertaking by Yuri Luzhkov was met by society either sharply critically or with loud laughter. The political criterion won out.
But, of course, this would not have happened if the competition was only in the field of PR. Despite the fact that we are faced with the revival of the Soviet model of confrontation between official and unofficial art, we must understand that economically there was no base for it, or rather, there was a base for another. Those dissident architects, who in Soviet times could declare themselves exclusively in the conceptual sphere, got their own economy in the 90s. First, they were able to create private architectural bureaus, that is, they ceased to depend on the government economically. Secondly, and most importantly, there was a demand for their ideas. A private business emerged.
There is a subtle point here. The fact is that business itself has no interest in the essence of the ideas expressed by dissident architects. It would be crazy to expect business to be interested in the problems of being included in the Western professional architectural context or preserving the spirit of old Moscow - these are not their problems. He is busy making a profit per square meter, and this is how the Moscow authorities thought of the process. They built relationships with business according to the scheme - you get your profit, we get the political and artistic image the city needs.
However, this scheme did not take into account one fundamental circumstance. Business is not interested in the specific content of professional programs, but it is vitally interested in quality criteria. This is the most important business tool, it allows you to diversify the product and build a pricing policy. The Moscow-style model did not provide him with such an opportunity - it is impossible to determine the price per square meter depending on how much he supports the legitimacy of the Moscow government. And the opposition model provided a mechanism understandable for business, which operates in almost all industries. You should take those products that their manufacturers consider the best, and then check these positions in the market. In fact, in most industries, all other things being equal, this test is successful.
Probably the most significant experience in the development of these processes was the development of Ostozhenka. Ostozhenka is a Moscow region with unique characteristics. According to the Soviet-era reconstruction plan for Moscow, this place was intended for complete demolition, so nothing was built here in Soviet times. It has preserved the pre-revolutionary town-planning structure, while being filled with dilapidated, unremarkable houses. They could be demolished and new ones built. The leader of environmental modernism was Alexander Skokan, one of the support brigadiers of A. Gutnov's department in the late 70s - early 80s, who created at the turn of the 1980s-1990s. the plan of the detailed planning of Ostozhenka, and also formed the architectural bureau "Ostozhenka", which began to consistently implement this program. The "Ostozhensky morphotype" was found - a house of 3-5 floors, with a street facade depicting a decent, urban, almost Petersburg architecture, and a walk-through arch into the courtyard, which suddenly turned out to be almost "rural" - open, with a large number of greenery and distant vistas. The new architecture had to not only follow the local morphotype, but also carefully "remember" the local irregularities of the city - street turns, the historical division of sites into "possessions", paths, passages, etc. The resulting building turned out to be a kind of chaotic overlap of various volumes, textures, scales, and each of these layers corresponded to some historical circumstances, was their reflection. At the same time, architecture with endless overlaps of compositional logics, volumes, angles, textures turned out to be to a certain extent consonant with the Western deconstruction of the 80-90s. Of course, the environmental architect broke the line of the facade not at all out of a desire to create a spatial explosion, as did Zaha Hadid or Daniel Libeskind, but out of a desire to mark the traces of those disappeared buildings that stood on this place before. But the viewer does not know that three breaks and three textures on the facade of the house mean the outbuilding, the wood-burning and carriage shed of the estate, which were on this site at the beginning of the 19th century, and it is in no way possible to understand this. Therefore, in principle, the Ostozhen buildings of the 1990s-2000s are quite imaginable in the line of deconstructivism as its restrained provincial versions, and, conversely, it is easy to imagine the "walk-through" buildings of Zaha Hadid in Berlin or Frank Gehry in the suburbs of Basel on Ostozhenka.
This was the actual architectural program. I repeat, businesses were of little interest to either the ideas of deconstruction or the woodshed of the 19th century. But Alexander Skokan's program turned out to be extremely successful in terms of business parameters. First, the location - the area was one kilometer from the Kremlin. Secondly, the "Ostozhensky morphotype" found by Alexander Skokan gave a building with an area of 5-7 thousand square meters, which ideally corresponded to the scale of Moscow's development business at the turn of the century. Professional criteria made it possible to position the resulting product as the highest level of architectural quality, and developers, with relatively limited costs, reached the “luxury” level, which was important for a business that had a very short reputation history. Almost all significant Russian development companies tried to either build something on Ostozhenka, or repeat the experience of Ostozhenka in other districts of the city center - this introduced them to the development business elite. Ostozhenka has become a standard of quality for Russian architecture at the turn of the century.
As for the wallet architects, their fate was somewhat less successful. In fact, they were focused on the model of attraction architecture, and this is a rather complex type of development, to which Russian architecture has grown only in the last five years. Their orders were not of a systemic nature - some decorated apartments, some private mansions, only a few managed to build large noticeable objects in the city (Mikhail Filippov, Mikhail Belov, Ilya Utkin), and then only when they were in the position of retrospectivism that somehow corresponded with the "Moscow style". But the degree of attention to their work on the part of society is much higher than that of everyone else, they invariably lead in the number of publications, they are invited to all exhibitions, they receive all possible awards. I suspect that the history of the Russian architecture of the turn of the century will remain, first of all, the "Roman House" by Mikhail Filippov and the "Pompeian House" by Mikhail Belov.
Considering the entire body of oppositional architecture, one is amazed at this. There is no general program here, here, in principle, there are all stylistic directions, here there are all those ideas that were used by the official architecture of Yuri Luzhkov. No one prevented him from calling these architects to fulfill his plans, there were no antagonistic contradictions between his desires and their capabilities. However, we know of only one case of such interaction, and this is exactly the case of Sergei Tkachenko. This architect, who initially adhered to both the media movement and the rather radical movement of avant-garde artists "Mitki", became one of the officials of the Moscow Committee for Architecture, thanks to which he was able to realize very extravagant ideas. The quality of his work is due to the fact that he applied his own artistic experience and quality criteria to the Moscow-style program, creating not so much symbols of the legitimacy of power as alarming symbols of mockery of it (a house in the shape of a Faberge egg, a court jewelry Easter gift from the Russian imperial family). The only exception proves the rule. A purely institutional inconsistency - architects from unofficial art who became the owners of private workshops, against the Soviet genesis of the management system - has led to the fact that neither the city itself nor the "court" development companies (the specificity of the Russian development business lies in its often very close connection with high-ranking government officials) did not order any buildings to these architects and in every possible way limited their presence in the city. The latent memory of social structures turned out to be stronger than both economic logic and political logic. To this day, there are two types of architecture in Russia - high-quality and official.
By itself, this configuration is determined by factors that lie outside the boundaries of architecture - it is a trace of social structures inherited from the Soviet era. Naturally, the architects tried to somehow change the situation - either bypass these structures, or break them.
The workaround is remarkable. There are four notable architects who succeeded in this - Mikhail Khazanov, Sergey Skuratov, Vladimir Plotkin and Andrey Bokov. Each of them has its own creative style, while they managed to implement very large projects by direct order of both the authorities and developers close to the authorities. Mikhail Khazanov is most focused on modern Western stellar architecture in the range from high-tech (Government House of the Moscow Region) to eco-tech (memorial complex in Katyn) and synthesis of one with the other (All-season sports center in Moscow). Next to him is Sergei Skuratov, for whom the values of modern Western architecture are also extremely relevant, however, unlike Khazanov, he is less focused on specific architectural prototypes and builds his things on the search for architectural expressiveness in the space of abstract sculpture of the classical avant-garde. In general, among the Moscow architects of the modernist wing, he is to the greatest extent an artist. Vladimir Plotkin builds his architecture on the development of the principles of classical modernism of the Corbusian or Misov style, which in today's situation can probably be regarded as an extremely original, even exotic position, partly looking like modernist classicism. Finally, Andrei Bokov is quite consistently trying to develop the ideas of Russian constructivism.
At the same time, Skuratov and Plotkin are private practicing architects, and Bokov and Khazanov are government officials, and the former is of a fairly high rank. It turns out that the basic scheme of opposition between official and unofficial architecture for some reason does not work on them, they somehow manage to bypass it. It would be impossible to explain it without taking into account one circumstance. None of them belonged to the wallet group or the media group. Despite rather productive contacts with these groups (Khazanova and Skuratova - with wallets, Bokova - with media workers), they always took some kind of their own, non-systemic position. I think this is what allowed them to bypass the existing system of oppositions. The specificity of this path is that only people without a “collective artistic biography” could walk along it - they were not part of any movement, without corporate quality criteria. This determines both his productivity and his limitations.
Authority's response
The second strategy for changing the situation was an attempt to change the rules of the game. The architects demanded the holding of competitions, open competitions, in which foreign architects could also participate. These demands arose in an atmosphere of harsh criticism of the "Moscow style", which in the situation of Yuri Luzhkov's struggle for the presidency of the Russian Federation in 2000 acquired an overtly political sound. The attempt to change the structure of the architectural market was interpreted as part of the general struggle for liberal values, the requirement to admit foreign architects to the Russian market - as a general struggle for rapprochement with the West. In this interpretation, the requirements were replicated in hundreds of publications over several years.
A certain paradox of the situation was that, in principle, the architects had very little interest in the program they put forward. The leading Russian architects did not need real competitions at all - the construction boom provides them with sufficient work. It could be more effective or prestigious, but the costs associated with competitive procedures, when most projects are sent to the basket (on the pages of architectural magazines), are not covered by the opportunity to receive a star order one day, especially since the specifics of design in Russia does not at all guarantee a winner. the project from subsequent radical interventions, nullifying all its stardom. It can, of course, be said that the experience of successful participation in Western concept competitions allowed architects with paper biographies to hope for some success, although the concept competition and the competition for a real building have little in common.
But the requirement to admit Western architects to Russia is completely incomprehensible. One way or another, the state provided local architects with some protection, and it was they who demanded to remove it. To the credit of Russian architects, it should be noted that the market logic was more or less unfamiliar to them, they were guided by purely idealistic considerations of architectural quality. It seemed to them that if their Western competitors appeared in Russia, it would improve the situation as a whole and, ultimately, help them too (this is correct, considering that the final score will come when the current generation of architects will already go down in history). This is one of the most successful examples of the impact of abstract liberal propaganda on professional consciousness.
One way or another, the essence of the architectural opposition to Yuri Luzhkov boiled down to two theses - competitions and foreigners. This happened at a time when the federal authorities began a struggle with the Moscow mayor's office, which continues to this day. Petersburg became the center in which federal construction programs were launched, and one should hardly be surprised at the parade of Western stars in the Petersburg sky, which I described at the beginning. The federal authorities have adopted the opposition's program - they began to hold competitions and invite foreigners to participate.
The Moscow authorities responded in their own way. Competitive procedures are built into a democratic decision-making system, which has never existed in Russia, and outside Russia they turn into PR. The cost of this PR is getting a project, which is very dubious from the point of view of the prospects for the implementation of the project, for much more money than a direct out-of-competition order would cost. The federal authorities, like those in St. Petersburg, had a very modest experience in real construction, so they did not realize this circumstance - the sad experience of the construction of the Mariinsky Theater demonstrated this with all the evidence. According to the competition, with great PR success, the star project of Dominique Perrault was selected, which is impossible to implement in Russian conditions. The Moscow authorities, who, on the contrary, had a lot of real experience, did not take this path, but they solved the issue in their own way. The circle of developers closest to the Moscow mayor's office - Shalva Chigirinsky, Inteko, Capital Group, Mirax, Krost - were invited to design Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Eric van Egerat, Jean Nouvel. This year, Moscow's chief architect, Alexander Kuzmin, announced that the Moscow government is beginning to directly invite Western architects to fulfill a municipal order.
In the structure of interaction with Western architects, it is important to highlight three fundamental features. First, they are initially more loyal than Russian architects who grew out of architectural opposition. They do not know the local cultural context and do not understand the boundaries of a possible architectural action, completely trusting the customer in this matter. None of the Russian architects would have thought of coming up with an initiative project for the demolition of the Central House of Artists, based only on the wishes of the customer - each of them would prefer to check how realistic the project is in principle. Lord Foster easily went for it, since he is not interested in reputational damage in Russia. Secondly, they have little idea of local legislation. The experience of Dominique Perrault, Eric van Egerat, the same Foster shows that, in principle, they do not understand when their projects acquire final status, after which changes are no longer possible - whether at the level of winning the competition, approval by the customer, approval by the state commission, etc. … Therefore, their projects are labile, open to interference from the customer - the project for the development of the territory on the site of the hotel "Russia" by Lord Foster shows that, at the request of the customer, even the style of buildings can easily change from high-tech to historicism. Finally, thirdly, work in Russia is not fundamental for them from the point of view of professional reputation; they tend to believe that the responsibility for the high-quality implementation of the project lies rather with the developing country, and not with them personally. Therefore, in the event of some radical changes in the project, they easily begin to treat it as a hack, which does not bring fame, but gives money. A typical example is the building of the Smolensky Passage, originally built according to the design of Ricardo Bofill. The architect did not refuse either authorship or royalties, but never includes this building in his portfolio.
These three features - the willingness to cooperate, the ease in making changes to the project, and the attitude to it as a hack, for which the customer must be responsible - makes Western architects a very convenient substitute for architects-officials. Paradoxically, in the essential characteristics of the design process, they behave in the same way.
It seems that the nature of this order is of fundamental importance for understanding the future fate of Russian architecture. We have seen how institutional oppositions determined the development of architecture in spite of architectural and even economic logic itself. Based on this, it can be assumed that these structures are important in themselves and tend to reproduce themselves. Hence, the niche in which the Western order falls is fundamentally important.
The analysis allows us to confidently assert that the appearance of Western architects in Russia is the government's response to the competitive challenge that was presented to it by the architectural opposition at the turn of the 1990s - 2000s. They responded to the quality criterion presented to them with imported quality, the authority of which should theoretically override any local developments. We can say that foreign architects have replaced the "Moscow style", and this is a very specific niche. They create a new image of the authorities, building their legitimacy no longer on familiarization with ancient Russian values, but in self-affirmation against the background of the West. We now have the same stars as theirs, and our buildings are even larger, higher and more expensive - this is the message that the authorities send by ordering buildings to Western architects.
Based on this analysis, we can draw a conclusion that is completely opposite to what was stated at the beginning. Nothing threatens the Russian school of architecture, and Western architects will not influence Russians in any way. Yes, the Russian architectural opposition should not count on an order from the authorities serving the purposes of its legitimation, and this is sad. But the niche in which they developed - a private order interested in quality criteria as a business tool - will remain with them. The most that can happen is Sergei Tkachenko will make some exquisite parody not of the Moscow style, but of Foster, a building, say, not in the shape of a Faberge egg, but in the shape of a Ferrari engine under a transparent hood or a Patek Philippe chronometer. Otherwise, the two architectures will not meet, and the main opposition will remain. We will have two architectures - high-quality and foreign.
Development prospects
There is more good than bad in this, but the costs of the conservation of Soviet oppositions are also extremely significant. The authorities are solving the problem of their symbolic legitimation. The architectural opposition is productively clarifying the relationship with history and the world architectural context. Meanwhile, there are some problems in Moscow that are critical for the state of the city as a whole. Experts identify five groups of such problems:
a) ecology - the environment (air, water, sunlight, noise level, etc.) of Moscow in a number of areas is critical for life;
b) energy - the energy structure of the city is close to the exhaustion of its capabilities, there are no backup systems, and it is not clear how to create them;
c) transport - we do not have a concept of what to do with Moscow transport, we eclectically combine all possible concepts developed in Europe and America in the 60s, 70s, 90s, that is, we treat the patient with all possible medicines at once sadly waiting for him to die;
d) heritage - our monuments of architecture are endlessly demolished, their copies are being built, and Moscow is turning from a historical city into Disneyland;
e) housing - Moscow housing has become an investment instrument, square meter is just a type of currency, which is why urban areas are turning into bank cells stretched for kilometers in space. No one lives in the houses, they have been unexploited for years. If someone settles in them, there will be a flood, a short circuit and an explosion of household gas at once. In the next ten years, we will have an amazing task - the reconstruction of a city that no one has had time to use.
The difficulty lies in the fact that there is no subject who would be interested in solving these problems. The authorities have lost touch with the voters, so they can solve these problems only for reasons of abstract good, and this is bad motivation. Experience shows that in everyday life the Russian government behaves like a business with state legitimation, that is, having solved the problems of legitimacy, it begins to be guided by the logic of business. Business, on the other hand, cannot solve them, since they do not show clear prospects for benefits.
It's a challenge, but it's also a virtue. In fact, the architectural opposition was born in Russia from the legacy of Soviet institutions. Such a genesis calls into question the reproduction of an architectural alternative - there are no significant grounds for it in today's economic and political reality. However, addressing any of the designated groups of problems allows architects to immediately seize the agenda - to pose questions to society and force the authorities and business to solve them. This cannot be done by foreign architects, since it is impossible to address these problems without being included in the situation. This can only be done by Russians, and this is a resource for the growth of the Russian school. Historically, we have had two schools of architectural opposition - mediumists and wallets. In the near future, they may be joined by environmental architects, power engineers, transport workers, inheritors and housing workers, and each of these groups can count on significant public support.
