Like last year in Yaroslavl, the current Kargopol City Festival was timed to coincide with Maslenitsa week. So, combining the holiday of architecture and the holiday of spring, it became arch-pagan with traditional festivities and the symbolic burning of the ice tower at the end.
I must say that "Cities" is a festival with a 4-year history and a large number of participants. It changes its location all the time and is more focused on students and young architects. Among which the festival is very popular and dearly loved. After all, he allows not only to demonstrate the wealth of his imagination (and talent, necessarily talent!), Giving ideas - albeit a short one - life. The festival is also a journey (the year before last was Baikal), it is an open-air studio town, where creative people can have fun.
So, about 400 architects took part in the winter festivities in Kargopol. According to one of the permanent organizers of the "Cities" Andrei Asadov, the construction went on almost around the clock.
Unlike last year's "Yar-gorod", in Kargopol they built mostly from snow - according to the assignment. This year, something anti-crisis and environmentally friendly should have been built, and what could be cheaper than snow in the north? It’s impossible to get it clean in Moscow …
Yurts, boxes, slides were built from snow, sculptures were made from ice. On the last day of the festival, which coincided with the first day of spring, the grand opening of the snow-ice city was held, full of various houses, turrets, yurts and simply conceptual projects on the theme of an eco-friendly hotel-home. Here one could meet the most daring fantasies of architects from carved ice double beds of local Kargopol sculptors to “red” slides “Children of Iofan”, from a yurt “in a hole” by bureau 610 to a 15-meter “porcupine” made of huge icicles by Totan Kuzembaev's workshop.
And if all your life you dreamed of getting a herring in the face twice, then you should have looked into the "fish" house of Asadov's workshop, where a show performance was held as a presentation. You go into a house, drink a drink of the "city" bottling "Nyandoma", get herring on your cheeks. But that is not all. Then you sit down on the cherished chair and hit the next visitor with a herring. There were also media projects, for example, a snow wall with a samovar by young architects from the Wowhaus bureau, onto which their home drawings were projected, which later became the stage for outdoor architectural lectures.
According to the organizers, the distinguishing feature of EKA-Gorod from other “Cities” was that all objects lived a double life - day and night. During the day, these are white walls made of snowballs or ice, introverted houses drowning in the same white surrounding landscape, but as soon as night comes, they all flash with different colors of illumination lamps, and each object is transformed, some houses become very cozy, in others, on the contrary, the feeling of cold intensifies, while others take on the appearance of a glowing ball from the ceiling of a nightclub. As a result, by the evening, the entire "City" lit up with all the colors of the rainbow, which a little resembled a Disney castle.
Why not everyone understood ECA-City. Yes, and, to be honest, I thought for a long time too. In fact, ECA is ecology plus Kargopol. Here you can read in different ways ecological Kargopol, ecology in Kargopol, or just a combination of the two words ecology and Kargopol, but in the end the meaning does not change, and the festival continues the tradition begun by the first "Cities" to talk a lot about eco-friendly architecture and make objects made from environmentally friendly and easily recyclable materials: wood, fabric, snow, ice, etc. This year, the fun was accompanied by lectures on ecological architecture or architectural ecology … Lectures were given in the open air with a projection of slides on a snowy wall.
The highlight of the latter for the festival was the symbolic "burning" of the ice tower, inside which they made a fire. This is how the architects celebrated the last day of Maslenitsa. But, oddly enough, the tower did not melt, it only became thinner and more transparent, almost crystal. In that case, our pagan ancestors would probably have decided that spring would not come. But we are people of the 21st century, we know about global warming …
