Despite its short history, the Chernikhov Prize is a highly respected award given by an international jury, the level of which, unlike other "international" prizes of a domestic standard, is the highest. Suffice it to say that the chairman of the jury of the first edition of the award in 2006 was Zaha Hadid, and now it is Riccardo Scofidio; besides him, the judges were Elizabeth Diller, Makoto Sei Watanabe, Benedetta Taglabue, Totan Kuzembaev and other masters. The mechanism for selecting candidates is also not quite usual here: the nominees do not nominate themselves for the award themselves - it is done for them by international experts, including such leaders of modern architecture as Peter Eisenmann, Thomas Lieser and Tarek Naga.
The composition of the judges cannot be called anything other than "star", therefore the level of works applying for the award should have been appropriate. Indeed, there are big names among their authors: the talented British architect of the young generation David Adjaye and the main laureate of the current Venice Biennale, the American Greg Lynn. However, the jury members heard about most of the nominees for the first time, which is not surprising: the award "describes" the current situation in the latest architecture and distinguishes the best of those young architects who are creating something new right now and have not yet had time to become famous.
Judging the work was not easy, because, as Makoto Sei Watanabe noted at a press conference at the House of Architects, it had to be done outside the nominations. But how to judge works of obviously different genres and choose, for example, between a realized project and an architectural utopia? Add to this the very vague evaluation criteria, which in the curatorial manifesto Elizabeth Diller and Riccardo Scofidio are designated as the search for a "new interdisciplinary form of architectural activity" experience of judges. Note that one winner, of course, could not have absorbed all the genres presented, so he is complemented by 10 finalists, whose projects, according to Watanabe, embody "the variety of directions that we have chosen."
So who is the winner? It was the 34-year-old Japanese architect Junya Ishigami, well-known in his homeland, as evidenced by the fact that he was entrusted with the design of the Japan pavilion at the last Venice Architecture Biennale. The jury members admitted that they were not familiar with Ishigami's works, however, it was his project, as Elizabeth Diller called it, “house-box”, absolutely white - in the spirit of “classical” modernism, simple in form and innovative in terms of the technologies used, was selected from a variety of striking experimental works. According to Diller, “There is a serious understanding and interpretation of the legacy of modernism in Ishigami's work, and yet it somehow transcends his cold logic. In a sense, it is not even possible to fully understand it, the work at first glance seems clear, and then you see this magical understatement. Junya Ishigami created a simple cubic volume with a very thin frame and many subtle supports.
His engineering skills can also be appreciated in one design work - this is a minimalist table with a very thin and at the same time elongated table top. This structure, as explained by the compatriot of the author Makoto Sei Watanabe, does not bend due to the fact that it was made "prestressed", and as soon as we put a load on it, the plane of the tabletop straightens.
The jury's decision confirmed the enduring relevance of minimalism in the modern history of architecture: “Following the path of subtracting an architectural form, not adding it,” as Riccardo Scofidio described Ishigami's work, has always been associated with nobility and purity of the image. This is how the Japanese architect won over the judges: as Skofidio noted, "architecture becomes more noticeable when one subtracts from it."
Of course, it is a pity that none of the Russian teams that applied for the award, among which was our youth "avant-garde" - Panakom, Atrium, DNK, Bureau Moscow, Savinkin / Kuzmin, were not included in the short list. Let's hope that historical justice will prevail next time, and our compatriots will still appear in the top ten.
Nevertheless, the prize named after the outstanding avant-garde architect, original thinker and master of architectural utopia Yakov Chernikhov continues to play its noble role, which consists in discovering for the world community the names of contemporary masters congenial to him - architects who work outside the usual framework, people with a wide architectural outlook and the ability to bold experimentation.
