The Arkhip Prize, established in 2002 by the Salon magazine, has been an award for Russian interior designers and architects of private residential buildings for several years, occupying the “salon” niche quite professionally. However, since the time when the Salon-press publishing house entered the RBC media holding two years ago, the prize has been consistently and persistently expanding. Last year it was combined with accompanying contests and with the "Interior Show" held in the Manezh. It was also declared international by honoring the house designed by the son of Alvaro Siza. Although foreign projects at "Arkhip" were awarded before, but earlier this was done within the framework of a special nomination.
This year, the range of events has expanded - several exhibitions have joined, as well as a conference and a lecture dedicated to the crisis by Harvard professor Peter Ebner, and the result is “Russian Day of Architecture”. Which this time separated from the "Interior Show" - it will be held in the Manege a week later (from November 26). True, the lecture took place 10 days earlier than the actual "day of architecture" - but one way or another, and the solemn event "Salon-press" now has all the signs of a serious architectural festival - a lecture by a foreigner, a conference on real estate, student competition and, most importantly, an architectural nomination within the framework of the "Arkhip" award. One more step has been passed, and now we have a new architectural award.
The presentation ceremony, this time held in the building of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as always, turned out to be an original orchestrated performance. It began in the foyer, where three-meter-long actors suddenly wandered among the guests on stilts, in costumes reminiscent of the characters of the Italian comedy del arte. Then the phantasmagoric figures moved to the stage for the presentation of awards. In the intervals between awards, opera arias sounded, circus tricks were demonstrated, however, quite exciting. The intrigue with the awarding of the main architectural prize, as it should be, was resolved only at the end, when the hosts of the ceremony Vadim Vernik and Tatiana Arno asked Sergei Kiselev to announce the main characters of the evening. They turned out to be Norwegians - Craig Dykers, Tarall Lundevalle and Kjetil Tredal Thorsen from the Snohetta bureau, who received an award for the project of an opera and ballet theater in Oslo. Opening the envelope, Sergei Kiselev expressed the hope that his forebodings did not deceive him, since such architecture is difficult to miss.
The building that was awarded the "Arkhip" is really beautiful - the theater, located on a platform surrounded by water, looks like something partially sunken, tilted, but did not sink to the bottom. A kind of an example of restrained Scandinavian modernism, affected by modern bevelling (outside) and curvature (inside). It seems to have been blown up, but not completely - when they blow up in temperamental Spain, it turns out Bilbao, but here, in the north, everything is more restrained, and the explosion is also not very terrible, you might think that it happened in the lower compartments of this pseudo-ship. And the proportions are harmonious, and the lines are delicately beveled, and in the interior, modernist originality, in a traditional way for Scandinavians, coexists with warm wood. So Snohetta's victory must be admitted as quite fair.
Another building was awarded the so-called prize of the Public Council - Nikolai Shumakov received it for the Zhivopisny Bridge, a unique engineering facility, sinceFirstly, it is placed not across, but along the river, and secondly, it has, as you know, a restaurant at an altitude of 100 meters. And when the entire bridge trembles, the floor of the restaurant remains motionless, which, as Shumakov assured, was verified by recent tests with a filled glass, from which not a drop was splashed out during the experiment.
The winners of the other three sections, familiar to "Arkhip", were selected, as in the previous year, in two nominations - tradition and innovation. The author of the best individual residential building in the traditional style was Alexey Rosenberg, who, in his own words, "considered himself a terry avant-garde artist all his life."
In the Residential Building / Innovation nomination, among 17 applicants from Japan, Italy, Estonia, Russia, Chile, Norway and other countries, the jury chose the Japanese architect Yasuhiro Yamashita for the project of the Mineral Reflection private residence in Tokyo. As Alexander Asadov, present at the ceremony, noted, "a private house is always more than a building, it is a portrait of the owner, architect and time, everything that came before is accumulated in it, and it is a message to the future …". Yamashito's house resembles a crystal in shape, the edges of which become window and doorways. Its appearance is defiantly modern, although at the same time, the house follows the traditional Japanese approach to home improvement - it occupies a tiny piece of land, is completely introverted and at the same time unusually inventive in its use of space.
Among the nominees for the Public Interior / Tradition section, only Russian objects were presented. For the most part - restaurants, which is probably due to the national craving for delicious and expensive food. However, the prize was awarded not for the restaurant, but for the office designed by Tatyana Boronina and Nadezhda Neslukhovskaya, which the authors, as it turned out at the ceremony, had designed for themselves. Among the innovative projects, the jury noted the Berlin dental clinic of the Graft company (authors Lars Krueckeberg, Gregor Hoheisel, Alejandra Lillo, Thomas Willemite, Wolfram Putz) - for the sculptural orange-yellow interior, designed, apparently, to distract the visitors of the clinic from unpleasant thoughts.
In the Residential / Tradition section, the Dutch architect Marnix van der Meer was awarded for the non-standard reconstruction of a former church building in Utrecht into a private apartment. The choice in the Innovation category became more predictable, where the jury pointed to the penthouse project in Monte Carlo, Monaco, created by the renowned minimalist Claudio Silvestrin.
But the most original award of the evening was the special prize of the Domus magazine for the project "Orange" by Norman Foster - the hero of the serious social struggle of the last six months. But the main highlight was not that the Russian Domus, one of the publications of the founders of the award, the Salon-Press Publishing House, awarded this high-profile project, but that the award was presented to the director of the Museum of Architecture David Sargsyan - one of those who actively participated in the fight against "Orange". Apparently sensing the absurdity of the situation, the director of the museum commented on the award, informing the audience that he was awarding the project “for being the most discussed. And he added, looking back at the representative of Inteko standing next to him: "why not hand over how good the house is, just not in this place …".
As part of "Arkhip 2008", it is not the first time that an international architectural competition was held among students who designed a private country house for a "star". The candidacy could be chosen among such headliners of the current popularity ratings as Hugo Chavez, Nikolai Valuev, Paris Hilton, Vadim Vernik, Sergey Brin, Guus Hidding, Merlin Manson, etc. among others, famous architects - Oscar Mamleev, Evgeny Ass, Alexander Brodsky, Nikolai Lyzlov. As Oskar Mamleev noted, judging was hindered by the odiousness of the figures of the "customers", it was simply impossible to relate to some of them without sarcasm. Therefore, the more poisonous the image was given in the project, the more I liked it. All three prizes were awarded to students of the Moscow Architectural Institute. The first is Viktor Krylov and Artem Staborovsky, who invented a cave house for Nikolai Valuev. The second - Leonid Slonimsky for the house-pyramid for Hugo Chavez. The third - Shamsudin Kerimov and Pavel Prishin for the smart and simple house “Google-teleport” for Sergey Brin.
So, a new stage in the development of the Arkhip Prize, without losing the glamorous solemnity of the ceremony, presented us with a floating Norwegian museum as the main laureate of a new architectural nomination. And the organizers said that Russian architects are stronger in tradition, and Western architects are stronger in innovations. And the joy that within the framework of the award the names of such world stars as Stephen Hall and Claudio Silvestrin are beginning to sound, which means that the award is gaining a high international level.
The development of the Russian international award itself is probably a pleasant fact. However, there is something strange about rewarding foreigners. This is a relatively new trend in recent years - to take and even reward a foreigner. In Russia, at first they studied and copied foreigners, then they invited foreigners to competitions (albeit not very successfully), now they are rewarding foreigners. There is nothing heroic about awarding Snohetta, this is a very well-known bureau - their new works, in theory, should be well known, including to the jury members. Therefore, it is important to understand how these international Russian awards are perceived from the outside, and this is not yet very clear. But the last thing to do is to divide architects into Russian traditionalists and foreign innovators. Although, according to the materials of "Arkhip", this is exactly how it turns out.
In the photographs of the projects - the winners of the student competition "Home for a Star - 2008", mistakes were made in the captions. Corrections made. We apologize to the participants and winners of the competition.
