This is the third time the prize has been awarded in Moscow; it is well known to professionals. Recently, in May, it was first awarded in St. Petersburg (the Benois House won there). According to the organizers, there are plans to hold the same vote in Krasnoyarsk, and possibly in other cities.
A successful and very convenient feature of the House of the Year award lies in the fact that the gustatory position of professionals here intersects with the opinion of the "people". The first one influences the list of nominees - there are twelve buildings every year, they are chosen in consultation with experts - famous architects. Thus, a completely professional cross-section of new buildings appears, so the House of the Year is valuable not so much for the name of the final winner, but for this very list. The nominees for the award may well be considered the result of the year - and not ephemeral, but quite real, since only constructed buildings fall into it. In April (as part of the Days of Architecture) Nikolai Malinin even conducted an excursion to the objects-nominees, showing not just the “new Moscow”, but a super-new one, the most that is.
After a professional selection of a dozen nominees on the website of the award, Internet voting begins. This is already the voice of the people. True, it should be noted that not only the people. In the past years, young architects have actively participated in the voting - so actively that it was possible to gossip about whether they were winding up the counter. But the programmers have coped with the cheating for a long time, and this year the organizers also closed the voting results for viewing. It was possible to vote only once, but to see how many were voted for - it became possible only now, after the announcement of the final result.
Therefore, not everyone, but only the organizers themselves, could watch the process of the “pre-election struggle”. “A week before the announcement, voting has intensified noticeably - probably after the results of the St. Petersburg House of the Year were announced,” says curator of the award Oksana Batalova: the last few days were marked by the struggle of four applicants for the first place. Among them: the winning complex "Kitezh" by Andrey Bokov and Dmitry Bush, "Danilovsky Fort" by Sergei Skuratov, the Intellect-Telecom office building by Irina Bolychevtseva and the complex on Bolshaya Gruzinskaya by Mikhail Posokhin and Viktor Lapin. These four buildings moved from one position to another, alternately approaching the first place. And finally, about a day before the awarding ceremony, if not later, it became clear that Kitezh was in the lead."
Looking now at the voting results, it is easy to see that the named buildings have remained the “four leaders”. The winner, Kitezh, received 25% of the votes, Danilovsky Fort - 20%, Intellect-Telecom 15%, Mikhail Posokhin's building on Gruzinskaya - 10%. Very even distribution of points: firstly, four buildings "took" the overwhelming majority of votes - 80%, the remaining 20%, distributed over eight objects; this, eighty to twenty, is considered one of the classics in statistics and economics. So it has penetrated into architecture.
Secondly, the votes in the four were also distributed very evenly - with a step of 5%. It turns out to be an ideal scheme, it is hard to believe that the four leaders were fighting among themselves.
But they fought, albeit implicitly (since the viewers - visitors to the award's website, were deprived of the pleasure of watching this fight), and the result was the victory of Kitezh.
"From the very beginning I thought that this building would receive the majority of votes," says Erika Markarova, director of the House of the Year award, probably because of its unusual shape …"
The shape is really unusual, primarily because it is inverted. Less at the bottom, more at the top. From the end, from the side of the station building, it looks like … right, like a nail, or like a button not completely stuck into the ground. Although it would be more elegant to compare with a ship - however, among the buildings of the 20th century, about a third (if not more) begs to be similar to a liner. Here it is, at least not literal. It definitely decorated the dirty and dreary station square, from the train it looks great, everything is so smooth and glassy.
After talking with several journalists at the award ceremony, I was convinced that the professionals, of course, were waiting for the victory of another building - Sergey Skuratov's Danilovsky Fort (which ended up in second place). Much has been said and written about him before, during and after construction. This is one of the contextual, poetic, and at the same time plastic, sculptural buildings. It has graced the embankment - and many magazines. But it lost in the popular vote.
In this I would like to see the peculiarities of the view of a simple, not well-read by magazines and not seen by exhibitions, viewer. If you succumb to the temptation, you can conclude that the “simple” viewer respects a capacious and laconic form, something similar. And also respects the architecture of the attraction. When the house "stands on a leg", or when it looks like a very large ear (laureate of last year's House-Parus Prize on Khodynskoye Pole). The professionals of the architecture-attraction quickly got tired of it, they considered it, although bright, but shallow. But the audience likes it - even in those more than modest manifestations that are available in Moscow.
To this we can add that the voter viewer looks first of all at the picture displayed on the site, and among the pictures "Kitezh" was definitely one of the brightest and most capacious images. Understandable at once. Which is probably not bad.
It is also interesting to look at the other two buildings of the leading four, especially considering that in the voting process they also claimed the first place. Intellect-telecom is the reconstruction of the automatic telephone exchange building. Now there is a lot of talk about such a reconstruction, there are many projects, few finished buildings. It must be admitted that the result was not bad, at least very noticeable.
Two large buildings on Bolshaya Gruzinskaya, for some time now flanking 1 Brestskaya Street, are more dubious products, mainly due to the manganese-pink color of the glass. The houses took a long time to build and stood in concrete for a long time. In my opinion, they were better concrete - they had some kind of true form: round supports, flat ceilings. When flat pink facades were pulled over them, it became a pity.
So the four houses "elected by the people" turned out to be very different. Although the word "popular" in this case is conditional, since the composition of the voters is unknown. Indeed, I would very much like to understand who exactly votes - at least by profession. The result would then be more informative and interesting for analysis. True, one can understand the organizers - the information obtained during registration via the Internet is not entirely reliable. Although, on the other hand, why would people cheat in such a situation? Knowing the composition of the voters, one could understand how many non-architects are interested in the new Moscow architecture. However, the prize itself is a curious precedent, so one can only wish for it to grow and develop.
