For the first time, the Moscow architectural school is presented in Venice, in which your place is exclusively …
You know, I wanted to refuse to participate. Alexey Dobashin, the customer of the Ostozhenka bureau, persuaded me.
Why refuse?
I don't like collective action. And then - here you are exhibiting Russian architecture and opposing it to foreign architects who work in Russia. Tell me, does it happen, say, French architecture? In my opinion, no. It happens just Jean Nouvel, Christian Portzampark, someone else. It seems to me that national architectures no longer exist, they have disintegrated into individualities. Such a division - into ours and not ours - can arise only in Russia. It can be and is, this opposition is topical and topical. This is my market that they are invading. But I think that the very opposition “we are not us” - this is some kind of provincialism, weakness. We should be above this and not notice, and not at all try to oppose ourselves to them as a national school.
Those twenty architects who make up the elite of Moscow today are united by obvious common principles. Rather problematic is the definition of the individual handwriting of each of them, and the features of one school are striking. And from you it is especially interesting to hear that there is no school. After all, you are, in fact, her head. And how would you define this school?
Environmental modernism. And the school has a number of features. Precisely Russian. Respect for the historical context, not for monuments, but for ordinary buildings, combined with respect for modern Western architecture. The tendency to look for certain rules that must be obeyed. The architects of the Moscow secondary school do not like a creative gesture in itself, it must be motivated by something - not only by function, but by the spirit of the place, by some non-existent memories. The architect says “I have to do this”, not “I want to do this”. At the same time, there is a relatively weak determination by pragmatic considerations. That is, "I must follow the local morphotype" is always stronger than "I must get so many square meters." A high assessment of restraint, good breeding, the ability to be invisible. In general, to a certain extent, this is an expression of the program of the late Soviet intelligentsia in architecture.
Probably, some of this really is. We are really trying to work, not because it came to mind and I did it, but because there is some kind of determination. But you know that before me, this is a common feature of the generation. Because I grew up in an environment where you were, in general, determined, one way or another. Well, there were some anomalies, some eccentrics, visionaries, but if you accepted this position, you immediately became a marginal. No matter how I pulled myself out of this, there is probably still some kind of craving for determinism. But this is not an architectural school. School of life, I would say. But this is also embodied in architecture.
Yes, it can be somehow embodied. How interesting is it from the point of view of opposition to Western architecture?
Well, the Moscow school of architecture has some pretty features. They can be attractive. Yes, there are even amateurs, Russophiles in the West. They love developing nations, Zimbabwe, for example. And here we are.
It seems to me that the environmental approach is still not Zimbabwe. Let's get back to it. Do you acknowledge yourself as the author of this approach?
Not. Of course not by the author. I can tell my personal biography. When I was fourteen years old, my brother, and he was going to VGIK for the camera, met a photographer. The end of the 50s, his name was Yurik, I don't remember his last name. It was the end of winter, February, the time was so wonderful, the snow, the sun, and he took me and my brother to some fantastic places. How to show my brother nature. Krutitskoye courtyard, Simonov Monastery, Novospassky, where Moscow ended by the end of the 50s, there was no longer an embankment, it was not at all an urban place. Then there was the Donskoy Monastery, there were reliefs from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. In Moscow, no one did such things, with the exception of rare eccentrics like this photographer. And I was amazed and carried away by it. Then I had several such exotic friends at the institute. It was considered good form in our country to love walkways - who knows better, who can lead in more strange ways. Well, such a special urban subculture. And then I became friends with Alexey Gutnov, who is considered to be the author of the environmental approach. In the 60s he was engaged in the cities of the future, then there was the NER project, and then suddenly the "time machine" broke down. It happened somewhere in the early 70s. Before that, everyone was interested in the future, but then suddenly the past went. We kind of continued about the future, but somehow we decided that we needed to go back into the past, study it deeper, and that's when we … And two years later, it suddenly turned out that we were already drawing not the cities of the future, but some strange things in historical Moscow. It was interesting purely artistic. In contrast - some kind of old fabric and new forms on it. By the mid-80s, when the Arbat was already completed, it became a common place. Then the society "Memory" pulled up. It is amazing even how everyone began to turn in this direction, although at the end of the 60s it seemed heresy. Those who shouted: "Now we will destroy this rubbish" became the main zealots of antiquity. In Russia, however, it is customary to sincerely, with soul follow the main line, no matter how it loops - not only in architecture. It’s the same now.
That is, several people around Gutnov took and came up with this turn
Several people. For me, apart from Gutnov, such people were Sergei Telyatnikov, Andrei Bokov, Andrei Baburov. If we talk about Gutnov, he was an intellectual leader. He was the first to pronounce the main words.
You said that you were interested in the contrast between old fabric and new inclusions. That is, it was based on a completely artistic, plastic image - a collision of two temporary textures. This is a purely plastic image
I, of course, understand how majestic the figure of Gutnov is, he is a genius of urbanism. But when you read it, you involuntarily get the feeling that it doesn't really matter to him what it looks like.
Structures, flows, nodes, framework, fabric, plasma - all these are metaphors of some kind of internal processes that can take different external forms. And you are talking about plastic
Yes. I will even say more, Gutnov was not artistically gifted. He was a leader, he had a flair, and he declared this direction of the search to be the main one. He could be a leader anywhere. In politics, in science. We were lucky that it turned out to be exactly architecture.
But in what emerged in the 90s, on Ostozhenka, this plastic aspect was important
Probably. The essence of the idea is always expressed first, then it becomes clear, then a commonplace, then it is vulgarized and becomes something rather repulsive.
Wait, wait. It's kind of too fast. Let's talk a bit more about the essence of the approach, it's too early to talk about trivialization. After all, Ostozhenka, made by you, was on the way from declaration to vulgarization
No, that cannot be said, this is complete nonsense. I am totally against it, I have never done Ostozhenka. What have we done? In the late 1980s, we wrote some rules for how to behave in this area. Well, simple rules, like when entering, dry your feet, wash your hands before eating. And these rules were enough to introduce some reasonable principle into the development, although they were observed at best by a third. And this place became "an exhibition of the achievements of Russian capitalism." But nothing more. But the fact that Skokan came up with it, the Ostozhenka bureau is not even a myth. It's just bullshit.
I always try to say that translating an idea into real architectural forms is quite difficult. After all, the old fabric and the new architecture - they have a certain incommensurability. And you have found the measure
They were looking for. We proceeded from the assumption that the historical environment is valuable in that it consists of strata. This is a given. The plan for the development of the territory, which we made in the late 80s, was based on the fact that we restored all the historical borders of the possessions. Then everyone laughed at us: "Are you going to restore the property?" We didn't, but for us this parceling is a kind of dimensionality of space, a local grid. This is the main thing that we did then. Then it turned out that if a plan is drawn that picks up a random, but already existing outline, a line, then everything fits. A grid appeared, something like graph paper - but only for this area. You could draw anything on this grid. We ordered housing - we are going along one lines, we ordered a pedestrian zone - along the others. But no matter how you go, you always pick up what already existed. And that was the method. Which can be learned, repeated, which, in fact, is the specificity of environmental modernism. Nothing random, each line follows some kind of historical trail.
There is another aspect here. This is an excellent illustration of the thesis about the transition from quantity to quality. When in the 1920s some constructivist structures appeared in this archaic Moscow, like Gostorg of Velikovsky on Myasnitskaya and Tsentrosoyuz Corbusier, it was gorgeous. Because there was a lot of old build-up, and the contrast worked hard. And gradually the very fabric into which it was all inserted became quite rare. And at some point, it suddenly turned out that that's enough, stop. Once, relatively recently, I was asked to design at the beginning of Ostozhenka some kind of object on the site of a burnt-out dispensary. I refused because I realized that I do not want to see any modern architecture there. Neither my own, nor Skuratova's, a draw, and I do not know how to do the old one. Before our eyes, there was a depletion of tissue, nothing remained. Even strange. I’m thinking - from the point of view of good architecture, there are indecent things that cannot be done: stylization or classicism.
But, on the other hand, the fabric is already so dilapidated that one does not want to see any modern forms. Wednesday can't stand it anymore. Or could not stand it anymore. So much has happened in Moscow that talking about the environment seems somewhat belated, there is nothing to talk about. What a Wednesday!
This sounds very disappointing. A school has been created, and you cross it out
I speak honestly. To say that I like something on this Ostozhenka, ours, not ours - no. We recently made a film. We went with Andrey Gozak, put cameras on our heads and walked all over Ostozhenka. Ghetto. There are no people. Some guards in black suits with wires in their ears - only they can be seen. Rich people buy real estate just to make a profitable investment and put up security, but they don't live. This is not a city, this is a variant of bank cells where money is protected from inflation. Why then all this architecture? Instead of a district that had its own face, its own characteristics, its own life - nothing. An empty place that costs a lot. You know, there are two people in me. One - who was born more than 60 years ago in Moscow, on Tverskoy Boulevard, and the second is an architect who works in this Moscow. And I often disagree with myself. As a man in the street, as a resident - I don't like it. I don't like everything at all, here! It's almost a dangerous condition. As an architect, I can be happy about something, but from the point of view of city life, what is happening is a disaster. The city disappears. And I don't want to talk about architectural problems against the backdrop of such urban life. It turns out that we have destroyed life, and against this background, we learned to make the formwork more or less evenly, put stones there. This is incommensurable. But one is not so directly related to the other.
I do not know. The very essence of the environmental approach was once that the environment is more than architecture. Wednesday is life, social life in the city. Without it, the environment architecture is by definition incomplete. We did not create monuments of architecture, which should then stand empty and inspire architects. We tried to create space for life, and as a result, everything died. But then what am I talking about?
Why do I work?
Okay. We will assume that the environmental approach is over
It is not over. It was reborn into the ideology of the architectural bureaucracy, into a system of approvals and is used today as the basis for corruption schemes. When we came up with all this, it was difficult to imagine such a turn.
But anyway, the environmental approach was the last big idea in our architecture. Now what?
Instead of an environmental approach? One could probably say that there is some kind of individualization going on. There is no common theme. As for me, I will continue to do what I did. Well, I’ll call this not an environmental, but a contextual approach. Personally, in any situation, I still need points of support. I have to cling to something, set some benchmarks for myself, the dimensionality of space, the configuration of what to create in. But the other person may not need it. For some, the world system is always with them, they get it out of their heads and do it. There are such happy people, I am not one of them. But earlier it was a general approach, a technique, from which they started in one way or another, but now it turns out to be, well, let's say, a consequence of my psychophysics. This is individualization.
But this also leads to loneliness. And by the way, the time of the formation of the environmental approach, Gutnov's group is a rather acute intellectual context. Don't you feel a certain rarefaction of the intellectual atmosphere now?
Oh yes of course. That atmosphere of the early 70s, when we were post-graduate students of TsNITIA - me, Andrey Bokov, Vladimir Yudintsev - it was such a tangle! There were Vyacheslav Glazychev, Andrei Baburov, Gutnov came in, there were Slavophiles, Mikhail Kudryavtsev and Gennady Mokeev, all this was boiled in one pot, and it, of course, was very strong. I don't know, maybe my pessimism is related to age. But, on the other hand, indeed, we no longer have intellectual centers. Neither the Academy of Architecture, nor the Union - they do not fulfill this role. Then it was generally accepted that a person works for some other reason. In addition to everyday work, there is still some kind. This, by the way, is still preserved in the West. Let's say I was recently giving a lecture in Bolzano. A tiny city, 100 thousand inhabitants, but it has its own architecture of the fascist time. Very interesting. And so there I met a local architect, Oswald Zoeggeler, he is about my age, maybe a little older. He published a huge monograph on this architecture. Or, say, Paul Shemetov, I once talked with him. He has a monograph on Parisian industrial architecture - this is in addition to his main urban planning theme. Why did they do it? Why did we do this then? I dont know. Because there was a feeling that you still owe something. And it was gone. What can I say? Intellectually, I don't interact with anyone today. There is no one in the shop. This is a pit.
Tell me, what else would you like to build?
I would like to build something in some other situations. Not in the city, everything is very subjective here, but in nature. For example, in the mountains. I love mountains, I have euphoria there. I know how it seems to me how to build in the mountains. They need horizontals. In general, I want to achieve, well, harmony, if you like. If you build in the mountains, I want to do this so that it doesn't offend anyone's eyes. The word “relevance” is very important to me, and I would like to be appropriate there.
Do you design in Sochi? For the Olympics?
No, I decided not to participate there. Everything is wrong there, it will not end well. I'm not a young man. I don't want to participate in this.
