Wood, once the main building material for Russian architects, today has been surprisingly forgotten and not in demand. All that the mass consumer associates with it is carved and painted "wooden-wooden" and prefabricated frame houses assembled according to several standard projects. While the whole world is crazy about wooden hi-tech, designing a public building out of wood in our country most often means condemning yourself to an unequal battle with the expertise and the customer. Therefore, if wooden objects are being built anywhere, then within the framework of land-art festivals or outside the city, as private houses, baths, gazebos. And there, not constrained by SNiPs or surroundings, Russian architects create the most modern forms from the most traditional material. The paradox is that, hidden behind high fences, these objects were occasionally published in the professional press, but were never studied as a phenomenon, as an independent genre of modern Russian architecture. It is precisely this gap that the exhibition is called upon to fill first, and then ARCHIWOOD - a new national award for the best architectural structure made of wood.
The curator of the exhibition, editor-in-chief of the magazine Made in future Nikolai Malinin was able to collect as many as 120 wooden buildings that have appeared over the past ten years within the framework of this exhibition. The buildings of the Pirogovo resort, architects' own houses, spectacular art objects like Timur Bashkaev's "Half-Bridge of Hope" from one of the old "Archstoyanias" - of course, some of the "wooden fund" of modern times is well known at least to critics, but in private possessions also revealed much that had never been published before. Malinin was the first to compile a real anthology of scattered projects. It includes private houses (of which, of course, the majority), and public buildings, and small forms, and art objects - and each genre in the exhibition has its own section. But the names of the architects are repeated with enviable regularity: Alexander Brodsky, Totan Kuzembaev, Nikolay Belousov, Evgeny Ass, Yuri Grigoryan, Svetlana Golovina, Ivan Shalmin, Alexander Ermolaev - those who work with wood, in fact, can be counted on one hand. Nikolai Malinin, however, sincerely hopes to expand this list in the very near future: someone will respond to the call for the prize and show his wooden creations, someone will begin to comprehend the art of working with living material, inspired by the exhibition. By the way, there were a lot of students at the opening of "New Wooden", and the authors of the exposition Vladislav Savinkin and Vladimir Kuzmin even held a small seminar for their students on the perception of wooden interiors and buildings - fortunately, there was plenty of "nature" at hand.
The exposition was housed in a ruin wing, whose limited area, it would seem, is not intended to display 120 objects. But Savinkin and Kuzmin found a very simple and one hundred percent corresponding to the theme of the exhibition, proposing to use as the main "showcases" not walls, but glued beams - by the way, the most durable and reliable building material from among the wooden ones. Plywood walkways bristled with two-meter "needles", often installed at the most intricate angle, and at their ends there are photographs of objects, which in some places interspersed with statements by Russian architects about working with wood. From these quotes, in particular, you can learn that Totan Kuzembaev works with wood, because this is the only “peaceful” material from which weapons have never been made, Alexander Skokan has been dreaming of building a wooden building for more than a dozen years, and Sergei Tkachenko is very afraid fires. At the same time, the walls did not remain bare either - gigantic posters of our most famous wooden buildings like the Kuzembaev Yacht Club hang somewhere, and somewhere "live pictures" are projected, telling about the evolution of the genre over the past hundred years.
The exhibition "New Wooden" will last until November 1, and then the expert council of the ARCHIWOOD Prize will begin its work - for almost half a year it will be open to consider projects and buildings, from which, as the organizers hope, a new fashion for the forever young and forever will begin in Russia a living material called wood.
