The first issue of the magazine appeared about six months ago, and was also presented to the professional community at the Museum of Architecture, accompanied by an exhibition and a lecture by one of the heroes of the issue. But then it was summer, it was fun, Arch-Moscow recently ended, and the holiday of the new edition was also held on a joyful note. Now, in the gloomy crisis of December, when (to paraphrase the anecdote), some have already been fired, while others are afraid - the moderately solemn publication of the second SPEECH book looks like an encouraging sign of the stability of the profession despite everything. However, now all events for some reason seem to be happening either because of the crisis, or in spite of it.
The theme of the second issue is the reconstruction and re-profiling of old buildings for a new function, succinctly expressed by the words “second life”, and in translation - afterlife, which paradoxically coincides with the concept that Polish architects abused in their pavilion at the Biennale, for which they received the “Golden lion . But in the magazine - no jokes, everything is very serious and thorough. It does not even look very much like a usual professional magazine - except that it contains no advertising (this is understandable - the publication is entirely financed by the workshop of Sergei Tchoban, Pavel Shaburov and Sergei Kuznetsov SPeeCH and bears a similar name) - it also has no news. Add to this a lot of small text in two languages - and we get (typologically) something between a journal and a thematic collection of articles.
However, the topic is relevant. Moscow intellectuals have been raving about the idea of re-profiling old buildings, arranging lofts and cultural centers in factories for about five to seven years. There are classical foreign examples, first of all it is the London Tate Art Nouveau gallery, in Moscow there are also well-known examples, though not always funny. Just about six months ago, the Art-Play design center was finally settled. In Moscow, in general, along with re-profiling, in recent years, another technique has been even more popular, which I would like to call an Erazian: to make a cultural center out of an old factory in order to raise the prestige of the place, and then break everything down and build an expensive office center on the site with the raised prestige. It is well known that there is no way to build class A + offices in an old building.
But the fact of the matter is that the journal mentions classical examples only in passing - in general reviews. The rest of it contains buildings that are not so sonorous, although no less interesting and diverse in function. For example, the synagogue rebuilt by Sergei Tchoban in Berlin from a power plant in 1922 (the only object of the founder in the magazine), or - the London Evangelical church, adapted by Harry Handelsman for 14 lofts. But for the most part, conversion cases still concern industrial, military (the base of French submarines during the Second World War) and other utilitarian buildings. An incomplete (the publishers do not claim to be complete, because the topic is already huge), but a diverse review, which is abundantly accompanied by general articles - the history of the question from Bernhard Schultz, in some places a sparkling article by Vladimir Sedov on the origins of the Russian attitude to monuments (in which the distinguished professor tries to find an answer to the question of why, in our part of the world, historical buildings are constantly striving to renovate and few people care about preserving their authenticity). In the Russian context, the second aspect of the theme of the second life - preservation - sounds especially acute. An interview with Natalia Dushkina is about him, and he is elegantly crowned with the text of the Venice Charter, published in the section "Reader". However, the ideas of the struggle for monuments remain in the background. The journal is architectural, and its main material is practice.
For practice, the topic of renovation is relevant for many reasons. Personally, it seems more important to me than others that the fact that reconstructed (that is, partially preserved) buildings sometimes turn out to be very interesting spaces, the presence of which in modern architecture enlivens it. Although it does it somewhat differently than amusement buildings. In something more modest, but in something richer.
Because for modern architecture, paradoxical as it may sound, there is no material more precious than an old building. It carries in itself not only a different texture, but also a different content, and therefore, enriches in a way that no one, even the most outrageous, invention will do. The very feeling of material authenticity is a gift for today's architecture, it becomes more and more ephemeral (shiny, transparent, flat, plastic), and from this sometimes it becomes a toy. The connection with the old building exposes the ephemerality of modern materials, but also gives them a starting point, colliding with more weighty matter, old and therefore loaded with meanings.
Some reconstructed buildings (especially cultural centers) are perceived even as a kind of museums of old architecture - all the more so, as a rule, one that you will not see in addition to a museum (gas-holder towers, factories, military bases, etc. - how else to visit them?). Hence the attraction, but special, museum, not like Disneyland.
This seems to me to be the main value of the "second life". You can also talk about pragmatic benefits - it seems at first glance it sounds logical that it should be more profitable to maintain, instead of demolishing and building - but this benefit, as it turns out, is not very obvious. Moscow of the past decade has clearly shown that it is cheaper to demolish and rebuild, because what is newly built will be more expensive to sell. True, now there is a crisis, offices are getting cheaper, maybe the demand for cheaper non-luxury solutions will grow. Perhaps the topic of "second life" is now even more relevant than ever.
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