What is the main thing for you in architecture?
The presence of a reception in it. I learned this word from childhood, from the conversations of my father, architect Igor Georgievich Yavein, with his colleagues. They did not seek to give this term a scientific definition, but in their mouths it could sound both as the highest praise and as a sentence: "Voices are just a decorator, he has no reception." And everything became clear without further ado.
Your father belonged to the constructivist generation. Reception for them was as key a concept as for their contemporaries-writers - Shklovsky, Eichenbaum, Tynyanov. Shklovsky's manifesto "Art as a device" was published in 1919. Subsequently, the official Soviet ideology branded both of them as formalists … But let us return to our time. Where do you get your technique or architectural idea from?
Out of context. I would even say - from different contexts. But this word should not be taken literally - only as a situation, as the environment of the future building. The context for me is both the history of the place, and some kind of mythology associated with it, and the evolution of this or that type of structure, and the reflection of all this in literature. An analysis of a functional program can also be a starting point. Although for us, function, as a rule, is not the only source of shaping. This is not enough for true depth.
And what is needed for this?
It is necessary that the reception works simultaneously in several planes. For example, Ladozhsky railway station. He has several motivations, several sources. The first is functional: the projection of traffic flows in plan and in space. This layer is embodied in such a modern technogenic aesthetics. For me, rootless hi-tech is a good thing, but I wanted more. I wanted to build our station into a long line of predecessors, to stretch a thread to the stations of the 19th century and, through them, to the Roman baths and basilicas, which served as a source of inspiration for the authors of those first stations. This is, so to speak, world history. But there are also regional roots: the motives of the Kronstadt forts, the competition project of the Nikolaevsky railway station by Ivan Fomin - a "brand thing" of St. Petersburg neoclassicism.
But the layman may not know these "branded things". Accordingly, his associations are not those that you programmed. You meant the Basilica of Maxentius, but people see "proletarian Gothic" in the main interior. You are talking about the Kronstadt forts, and they are about inhabited bridges. Do not such discrepancies confuse you?
Not at all. On the contrary, the more categorically someone claims that it looks like a Gothic cathedral, the better. This means that architecture has begun to live a full life. After all, the form is revived by those cultural meanings that it acquires in the course of its reincarnations in history. For example, a pyramid: it is not perceived as a pure abstraction, only as a geometric figure. It is a symbol of stability, peace, greatness - from Egypt to the Empire style and beyond.
As far as I understand, this is one of your favorite figures, it is present in many projects - skyscrapers near the Ladozhsky railway station, the campus of the Higher School of Management in Mikhailovka, the building of the administration of the Leningrad region, etc
The so-called geometric primary elements, in particular the ideal Platonic solids, interest me much more than all the latest delights of nonlinear architecture. Their potential was explored by Ledoux, Lvov, Stirling, the Russian avant-garde. It can be said that the richest subsoil has been explored, but not completely uncovered.
Doesn't this kind of architecture become vulnerable if it is not read, but perceived as such a "constructor" of geometric details?
I agree that here we are balancing a little on the edge, because we are constantly striving to clean up the form, squeeze out a certain geometric or spatial extract from it, and at the same time make our associative moves intelligible for the viewer. And here the question of spectator erudition arises … Although, I think, our spectator is an ordinary person living in any cultural space, and the meanings embedded in architecture are obvious to him - at least the main ones.
Maybe you shouldn't overload architecture with meanings? Peter Zumthor, for example, wrote that the message or symbol is not primary to architecture. That it needs to be cleansed of the imported meanings with which it has become covered like a patina, and it will again become "shiny and alive"
Zumthor's things, for all their outward simplicity, are endowed with metaphysics and almost transcendental meanings. And unlike the “globalists”, he proceeds from the specifics of the place, and does not replicate a formal device once found around the world. Another thing is that in the presentation of his philosophy, he grounds excessive pathos. The same was done by Konstantin Melnikov, whom no one has yet surpassed in the polysemy of images, the originality of ideas, the uninhibited flight of fantasy. For example, the origin of the form of the Club. He explained Rusakov as follows: "The site was very small, we had to make consoles." And now we find in this spatial drama a lot of plot lines: here you both materialize the processes of looking, and turn the form inside out, and variations on the theme of the triangle, and architecture as a sculpture, and "mouthpieces of communism" … So he always has at least four or five possible readings, each thing carries four or five meanings. And at the same time - tightly packed plans, a virtuoso organization of the internal space, the maximum output of useful areas while minimizing the volume of structures. In general, Melnikov is the quintessence of what I am striving for.
And yet the main thing for Melnikov was the invention of new forms. They say he just did not understand how you can use something found before him. And you, it seems to me, gravitate more towards interpretation, appeal to the architecture of previous eras
Wait, it's not that simple with Melnikov. First of all, he is a deep and original thinker, and only then - the inventor of forms. Here's what else he himself told about Rusakov's club: he said that before theaters had tiers, boxes, etc. And he was ordered a hall with one amphitheater - supposedly, this was demanded by democracy, social equality. He wanted to get away from such spatial simplification, and he divided part of the amphitheater into three boxes, as it were. As a result, there is a division in the hall, and a community of spectators, and spatial richness with a single parterre. So was it innovation or interpretation?
By the way, my father once invented the “amphitheater of boxes” - a synthesis of the antique amphitheater and the tiered theater of boxes. My brother and I have used this invention in a number of competitive projects. It hasn't come to implementation yet, but I have no doubt that it will happen. Modern architecture owes a lot to that generation of constructivists. During the years of Stalin's persecution, they went into the creative underground, but did not renounce their ideas, they passed them on to their students. Personally, from the 1920s, I had a craving for the separation of functions by levels. In the Peterhof "Quarter behind the coat of arms" we create a micro-relief with two levels - private and public. We are reconstructing Apraksin Yard into a three-level city: the lower one for cars, the middle one for pedestrians, the upper one for office workers, etc. In Ladozhsky railway station, the suburban part is underground, the long-distance railway station is above it, and on the ground there is only public transport and railways. Sometimes there is even some kind of redundancy in this technique. Leveling up. But this is already like a crime scene, to which you return against your will. The function is, as it were, forced up for the sake of reaching complex spatial structures in the spirit of Piranesi.
But at the same time, the plans are almost classical, sometimes almost completely symmetrical. Is it from the classicizing constructivism?
So after all, spatial complexity is possible only with simple, clear plans. Well, like Escher: puzzling compositions are drawn from elementary geometric particles. And classicizing constructivism is a very Petersburg theme. Classical Petersburg is such a powerful tuning fork that any direction was revered for the good of coming into resonance with it. Here the peaks of styles, their momentary bursts seem to be smoothed out. This city melted everything into a single artistic whole. It is generally accepted that the St. Petersburg school is conservatism or even passéism. But that's not her nerve. In Petrograd, then in Leningrad, there was an intensive search at the junction of such seemingly heterogeneous phenomena as the classics and the avant-garde. Bringing them to a common denominator, to a single root, to the primary essence of architecture. Alexander Nikolsky said that the bath is round, the pool is round, because the drop of water is round … Therefore, when you work on the Petrogradskaya side, in the area of Soviet streets, wherever neoclassicism and constructivism are in a borderline state, you want to once again comprehend the experience of your predecessors, to continue what you started them line. In general, it is correct when architecture is grown from within, and not invented, not introduced from the outside. It's important to understand what the place itself wants.
I.e?
A place can carry a hidden impulse for transformation, which you try to guess, identify, and realize. This was the case with five high-rise buildings near the Ladozhsky railway station. An unformed, chaotic situation in a tense knot of all kinds of activity simply required intervention, an adequate response to the urban planning challenge. In fact, it was our initiative - the customer imagined one skyscraper, maximum two. The Linkor business center is a reaction to the anonymous mediocrity of the development of an important section of the embankment. Here we allowed ourselves an energetic form and a little literal imagery. But again, not one-dimensional: the "bottom" of the ship forms a canopy over the parking lot, and its outline is not quite shiplike - rather, an allusion to Corbusier's "pulling in" porticos. And finally, the "Linkor" would never have arisen, had it not been for the river, the cruiser "Aurora", the Nakhimov military school.
Do you allow yourself such radical gestures only in new construction or in reconstruction projects too?
Linkor is the reconstruction of two industrial buildings. Skyscrapers can also be considered a reconstruction, but on the scale of a large fragment of the urban environment. Almost all of Studio 44's work is, to one degree or another, reconstruction, because we are not building new cities in an open field. But to the point of your question, I will answer as follows: I am not a supporter of contrasting contrasts when working in the historical center and on monuments of architecture. To some, this seems effective, but to me it reminds me of the conflicts between children and their parents during the period of self-determination. Working with monuments is somewhat more difficult than new construction, as it requires a colossal amount of special knowledge. And when they are, it is somewhat easier, because you are dealing with an already formed organism. It does not need to be grown from an embryo, you just need to correct something without harming it, and add something, but with the same DNA. At "Nevsky 38" we tried to preserve as much as possible everything valuable that makes up the soul of the building, without introducing any new depiction, except for the arcades. The ideology of the reconstruction of the General Staff building was grown from the archetypes of the historical Hermitage and St. Petersburg space - enfilades, hanging gardens, exhibition halls with overhead lights, endless perspectives.
On the General Staff project, you interacted with Rem Koolhaas. What did he bring to this project?
Rem Koolhaas' Bureau OMA / AMO was one of three consultants to the Hermitage on the Guggenheim-Hermitage project (the other two are the Guggenheim Foundation and Interros). Their criticism and discussions helped us a lot to hone the ideology of the reconstruction project of the General Staff Building. But the director of the Hermitage, Mikhail Piotrovsky, helped even more by creating the conditions for the evolution of the project. A rare customer does not drive the designer, but reflects and investigates with him.
It is clear that cultivation is a lengthy process. And how does it happen in a workshop where 120 people work? Who generates ideas - are you always?
Not always. In the case of the General Staff, this is primarily my brother Oleg Yavein. Sometimes my participation in the process is limited to words: at the first stage, when we discuss the concept, and then, when I correct something during the design process. And it all starts like this: I gather a group of architects, and we begin to analyze the source material in all aspects, that is, the place, function, construction program. As a result, we come to a general idea, which, as a rule, first exists in a verbal form. Then it is translated into manual sketches or working layouts, and only after that the team sits down at the computers.
Does everything go through reasoning every time? And there is no such thing that someone took a pencil, and now he wanted to be in this place …
Never. This is not an intuitive process. No artistic willfulness.
Should everything be reflected, analyzed? Rather knowledge than creativity?
Knowledge, of course. Once the creative play starts, things turn out worse than others. I confess that I am not always satisfied with the sketching stage. That is, the idea is born quickly, but it still has to put on a lot of clothes, gain sounds, meanings. Not even details, but meanings. And the details appear when new meanings appear. We are growing a thing. We are watching how it develops. In parallel, we are developing ourselves. Only
at the third or fourth level of cognition, a certain freedom arises. Free drawing starts only in the working design. Therefore, our working drawings are always better than the "project" stage. The implementation may be worse, but we are always happy with the work.
What do you consider to be a complete success?
When the customer, greed or whims, did not ruin the architecture at the construction stage. When it was possible to turn the original difficulties and limitations in favor of a figurative solution. When the thing turned out to be not one-dimensional, but multi-layered, multi-valued. Finally, when she is understood and appreciated.
And the last question - don't be surprised - about what is bothering you
It is disturbing that architecture began to live according to the laws of show business, "haute couture" and object design. This is when a new “range of products” leaves the podiums every season, and the previous one is automatically transferred to the category of unfashionable, last season. When architecture is compared to brands of cars and clothing. In my opinion, this is vulgar. For me, architecture, like culture, is a fundamental category. Today, within the framework of globalism, it is not even the style that is being rigidly imposed, but the image that determines everything - from the curve of the house to the "star" demeanor of the author. And everyone sculpts the same stellar cliches. Well, with the exception of a few figures that stand apart (Botta, Siza, Moneo, Zumthor, Nouvelle), and regional schools (for example, Hungarian), the existence of which few people know about. With us, like any new convert, the situation is both more frightening and comical. Today every Russian governor knows that a skyscraper is in fashion and that it should be a screw. And if not a skyscraper and not a screw, then it is indecent and provincial. Gunnar Asplund said that there are houses that cannot be remodeled, and that this is terrible. On this basis, many products of the globalist range are perishable. Buying disposable items at the price of a masterpiece is stupid and insulting. As well as, pulling up your pants, chasing fashion.
Wise Melnikov, back in 1967, warned that when there are a lot of materials and “everything shines”, you need to have great courage to work with space, light, ideas, and not just brilliance and constructive tricks. To use the enormous opportunities not for empty effect, you need much more "deepening, concentration and penetration."
Lyudmila Likhacheva
