The workshop of Sergei Malakhov and Evgenia Repina has existed for 10 years already within the Samara University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, which includes the Institute of Architecture and Design. There, at the Faculty of Design, at the Department of Innovative Design, they teach. The range of their interests is much wider than the actual architectural design; the school deals with interdisciplinary connections, the search for the basic foundations of the profession, which makes them similar to the attitudes of Alexander Ermolaev, the head of the Moscow TAF school, who considers these foundations common to everyone, allowing them to do not only projects, but also "the composition of their own destiny." The methodology of the Samara school is characterized by a bias towards drama, mythology, as evidenced by their exposition, made in the form of a kind of ark, where inside there are a variety of student studies on basic themes and graduation projects of designers and architects, and outside a collage of performances.
The centerpiece is a long layout created by third-year design students as part of their study of the phenomenon of the Soviet dacha. It is called "The City of Lonely Bachelors" - at the beginning the students wrote myths, each about their own fragment, then they made models, then they combined them into one. This is a linear city, which is located along the railway, since the train, explains Evgenia Repina, is also a myth of Soviet culture. All residents of this city are waiting for the never coming train - the project is full of this kind of metaphors. Nearby, parallel to the road, there is a "park", albeit without greenery, drawn from fragments of Soviet reality. It is white and somewhat sentimental, as it emerged from the wreckage of a lost world of meaning and contains mysterious descents into the dungeon, romantic enfilades in the classical order, and the dachas themselves (one of the layouts is a finalist of the Japanese competition “Individual through the Universal”).
In principle, this one model contains all the features of the author's technique of Malakhov - Repina. First: special attention to the so-called "objects trouves", these include those unauthorized cottages from the found "wreckage of the Soviet world", on which the imagination of the owners of the sacred 6 acres is great - their students studied them in kind, and then, according to their impressions, made layouts. “Found things,” Evgenia Repina believes, are sometimes more valuable than super-efforts, the endless production of forms, which the profession is overwhelmed with today. This is a kind of embodiment of professional modesty.
The second is the favorite methodology of "dramatized conflict". Here she is embodied in an attempt to create a collective myth for the group. The model is divided into equal fragments, where each fit into its own zone and had to reckon with its neighbors. The conflicts of the real world, where at the level of basic instincts, people divide territory and food, says Evgenia Repina, are translated here into a game, into a theater, and this gives the right direction to the development of architectural thought - these people will be humanistic designers as opposed to the author's consciousness dominating today. Even the genius Zaha Hadid or Peter Eisenmann thinks that it is flawed and predictable, says Evgeny Repin, because it is already a brand: “When you adapt, you step back a little from the monologue of your mind”.
The third principle is the importance of non-pragmatic, useless things that make up the “blood of the profession”, those “emptiness” that attracts meanings, says Evgenia Repin, referring to M. Epstein: “They need to be talked about in the profession, but there is no language. If he said - this is already a form, so we are trying with students to walk tangentially, not head-on … Typological functional design is something that depresses us very much, and something that we want to distance ourselves from, although we remember about the binary model, that pragmatics goes next to useless things, otherwise both of them become flawed. However, it turns out that it is not easy to put it all together in the provinces, where students see quality and craftsmanship as optional.
Finally, one more methodological move is escapism, or various forms of escape that allow one to “survive in the provinces,” from the metaphorical, inward, inward quality, to the physical - autumn performances. The latter is a literal escape to the right bank of the Volga, where there are no bridges from the city, so it is wild and untouched, where students conduct various spatial experiments, for example, to be in the role of women-towers. A sadder form of flight is the professional self-determination of students who understand that they need to flee from the provinces to the capital, or abroad - where, by the way, they are readily accepted with their portfolio.
Attention to "handicrafts", drawings and models, texture and nature, brings the Malakhov-Repina technique closer to Alexander Ermolaev. “But his propaedeutics,” says Evgenia Repina, “is absolutely masterful, we take off our hats. We, perhaps, do not achieve such a quality, the game aspect prevails in us …”Alexander Ermolaev has been managing his school for thirty years. She was born from an informal circle of the Moscow Architectural Institute called "Theater of Architectural Form" - TAF, in 1980. Ermolaev does not have a rigid program, every time he improvises around some relevant topic, bringing up non-triviality, novelty, an open approach to solving any problem in his students. Students always start by learning to see the structure of the surrounding world from primitive spots, lines, simple objects, in order to then distinguish the internal structure, geometry, shape in architecture. These studies are presented mainly at the workshop stand. There is only one architectural project here - a playground. Associated, however, with deep reflections on the cardinal points.
In addition to architectural propaedeutics, the instrument of "re-education" of students from intractable traditions is "stage performance", during which they learn to understand space, feel the form, only now through their physical capabilities. The performances of this visual plastic theater are often built around "still lifes" of architectural forms, where each is an object, ponders how he can move in space, etc. Older students now, based on this knowledge, are engaged in designing an ideal space for a theater. All this is very reminiscent of the spirit of VKHUTEMAS, experimental, creative, methods of the workshop of Nikolai Ladovsky, who, as you know, brought up a number of talented architects and innovators.
For the first time after a long break, the discussion around architecture education was loudly talked about, and for the first time they showed the leading schools that have been rolling around new (or well-forgotten old) methods in a narrow circle for more than ten years, educating broadly and humanistically thinking architects. A platform for discussion appeared in the form of a forum on the website of the Evgeny Ass school, it remains to involve the teaching contingent, tightly restrained by a long-term "tradition", into it.
