It was a restless year. Half of the New Year's cards are about the crisis. Everyone is at a loss and no one knows who to ask for help now, the red bull or Santa Claus. After all, what architecture is without big money? Paper, or virtual (depending on the approach to business). Or, in extreme cases, plywood, earthen, snow - the City Festival has already announced an anti-crisis theme. Someone is sad, someone is hoping, someone is trying to find positive aspects: they say, the monuments will be more intact (if they do not fall apart from old age), impudent projects will be canceled (although some of the foundation pits may remain), and the architects will return to profound experiments with form and content, and they will finally invent something like that, worthy of the XXI century. Unseen or, on the contrary, known for a long time, opinions differ further.
But many agree that now - at least in terms of architecture - we are witnessing the end of a certain era, well, or a period. And if so, then I want to say a few words after him, preferably kind. This period was mercantile, but not poor, which allowed many private workshops to receive worthy orders and even build a lot. Interiors and cottages were replaced by villages, quarters and cities. Plaster, flying around a year after construction, gave way to polished stone, bent glass and many other finishing materials. Foreigners from semi-real idols have turned into real rivals. And the ambitious craving of Russian customers for the "most-most" (tall, long, big, then everywhere) once again began to frighten sophisticated Europeans.
True, the matter did not seem to have come to the real construction of new cities, and most of the new quarters have remained on paper. Although the very fact that by this spring there were a lot of new cities for the exhibition (“Cities” in the MUAR) is already significant. In a word, our architecture has gone through a time of rapid development over these 10 years, intertwined with the construction boom that has stepped from Moscow to other cities in recent years.
Generally speaking, the past year, apart from the crisis, turned out to be “summing up the results” in itself. Two architectural biennials were held. One, for the first time, Moscow, which has absorbed the most popular exhibition in the capital "Arch-Moscow" (which in connection with the plans to rebuild the Central House of Artists risks being left without a roof over his head, which is a pity). The second is the worldwide Venetian one, which, according to eyewitnesses of previous exhibitions, turned out to be on the whole relatively dull and vague. But there, in Venice, the critic Grigory Revzin made the first exposition-catalog of modern buildings in Russia - the results of those 10 (or rather five) last years of the construction boom. The curator, probably, was not going to draw the line, but only wanted to show the existing situation, and the final exhibition turned out.
In addition, the Union of Architects has elected a new president; and the usual licensing was legally replaced by SROs, forcing the most persistent independent to appear in the meeting rooms and get used to the new living conditions. The architects have one more thing to do - they can deal with internal politics, or paper architecture - whoever likes what better.
As regards the destruction of monuments (not to be called protection), the year also turned out to be a milestone: at the very beginning we had the good fortune to contemplate the apotheosis work of the mayor's style - the renewed Tsaritsyno, and during the year two more masterpieces, the brilliant (literally) Voentorg and the yellow "Moscow" … Several large projects, which have been discussed for several years, have come true. It should be noted that none of the major remakes was interrupted by the crisis - everyone succeeded, and how are they doing?
The year turned out to be a bit too final. What will happen next - life will show. Happy New Year, dear readers!
