The appearance of the Russia pavilion in the Zodchestvo-2009 program was accompanied by a serious intrigue. The fact is that the concept of the competition is formulated in the press release of the festival, to put it mildly, ambiguously. It says that the winners of the competition will be "the first applicants for the positions of Russian emissaries of the architectural biennials in Venice or Rotterdam." And at the same time, it does not say that they will become them. This ambiguity is embarrassing, therefore, as with all sorts of intrigues, it remains to wait for the outcome. So far, one thing is clear - the winner is the curatorial project of Sergei Tchoban and Irina Shipova, which was implemented in the Russia pavilion at Zodchestvo.
The "emergency reserve" is, in fact, industrial facilities. The logic of the exhibition authors is simple and clear: numerous factories and plants, firstly, traditionally occupy a large area, and secondly, they were always built soundly and with high quality. Perhaps, it has even become a commonplace idea that with the extensive development of megalopolises, the former outskirts of the factory zones were practically in the very center of the cities, and after the withdrawal of non-ecological industries, these territories also became free. Of course, they can be razed to the ground - and the "not" particle enclosed in brackets in the title of the exhibition unambiguously shows that this is very often done in Russia - but you can also return them to the active life of the city, preserving the original architecture and endowing the complexes with a new function - residential, office, retail or cultural and leisure. The exhibition of Choban and Shipova just brought together all examples of such a conversion, showing that, firstly, the industry lends itself to restoration with gratitude, and secondly, it is really capable of reorienting itself to a variety of functions.
Most of the buildings on display - for example, the St. Petersburg Water Museum, the Stanislavsky Factory business center, Winzavod, Krasnaya Roza factory, Benois House and others - are well known to the professional community, but put together, they make it possible to evaluate the success of this so far, alas, is not the most widespread architectural genre in our country. The exposition itself is also interestingly built - photographs of old buildings in a dilapidated and abandoned state are attached to the wall, and translucent films hang in front of them depicting the progress of restoration work and the modern look of the building. Superimposed on one another, they form a multidimensional image of an object, and at any other angle, except for the frontal one, they seem to reveal its duality. The passage from object to object is carried out along wide wooden bridges, which form a simple geometric ornament with several rectangular grooves in the center filled with gray pebbles. At first, the authors of the exposition were going to fill them with water, but then they abandoned this idea due to the complexity of implementation in the Manege conditions. Instead, the pebbles are regularly slightly moistened in order to achieve a black shade of the stone, creating a feeling of a "dark pool" that inevitably threatens industrial buildings with indifferent attitude towards them from officials and society.
Having shown with various examples how a bridge can be built between the past and the future with the help of careful restoration and delicate re-profiling of an object, the authors of (Non) touched stock actually gave their answer to the theme of Architecture 2009, formulated as the Sustainability Index. The western version of the decoding of the concept of "sustainability", better known as sustainability, was demonstrated in the Green House pavilion by curator Vladimir Belogolovsky.
It is related to "Russia" by the intimacy and coziness of design - solved in completely different ways, both of them, nevertheless, became the only corners at Zodchestvo-2009 where you can plunge into a calm, unhurried atmosphere, relax and just have a little rest.
In particular, Green House (the author of the artistic concept is also Vladimir Belogolovsky) is a lawn, albeit artificial, but soft and green grass, on which there are eco-benches made of dense paper tubes imitating bamboo. The same "bamboo" plafonds hang in the corners of the pavilion, and inside each of them are photographs of 12 of the world's most recent and interesting green projects. " The illustrations alternate with quotes from the Great Ones, who convince us that environmental problems did not begin to worry Western architects yesterday.
All projects - some of them are already being implemented, others will be built in thirty years - are divided into four groups: landscapes, eco-cities, eco-materials and eco-technologies. Video clips of the projects are alternately played on all four walls of the pavilion to the disturbing minimalist music of Philip Glass, written in due time for the documentary film Godfrey Reggio, which is dedicated to the destructive influence of civilization on nature. And in this sense, the choice of a musical theme for the exhibition is more than predictable and therefore is perceived almost like a cliche. However, on the other hand, this is only for Americans (and Vladimir Belogolovsky has been living in the States for many years), the problems of ecology, formulated in the language of music, sound exactly like that, but for us that music, that issues of global warming solved with the help of architecture, in general, then, while equally new. So it is not surprising that the collection of "green" projects assembled by Vladimir Belogolovsky seems to Russian architects too futuristic and far from real practice. But, as already mentioned, in this case there is another scenario for building a bright future - with the help of careful handling of the past.
Vladimir Belogolovsky, curator of the Green House pavilion:
The pavilion's exposition presents 12 "green" projects, which use a variety of energy-saving technologies and environmentally friendly materials. However, the main criterion for selecting my TOP-12 was not technologies as such, but how architectural issues are solved in combination with them.
The problem is that the conversation about energy-efficient buildings today, as a rule, ends with energy saving. I wanted to present to the Russian public objects that, despite all their "greenness", remain architecture - innovative, intriguing, simply beautiful.
In general, I am convinced that in the very near future, first in the West, and then in Russia, energy-saving technologies will cease to be fashionable. No, they, of course, will not disappear, but they will become as integral part of buildings as electrical wiring and sewage, and then it will become obvious to everyone that a building is more than just a refrigerator or an air conditioner. So I show, using the example of objects that are different in size and purpose, that environmental friendliness can be not only an important technical characteristic, but also an interesting aesthetic quality, organically built into the "artistic code" of the project.
