"SPEECH:" is perhaps the most European magazine of all professional architectural publications published in Russian today. Even in times of crisis, it has competitors - more well-known and well-known media outlets seriously claiming comprehensive coverage of the architectural process - but there is hardly any other publication that selects objects for publication and evaluates them so carefully. In its style and tonality, "SPEECH:" is very similar to the architecture it writes about - high-quality, restrained, devoid of any outrageousness and pretentiousness.
The SPEECH: editors have chosen Materiality as the theme of the fourth issue. Now it is customary to see a connection with the economic crisis in everything, and from this point of view, of course, one can argue for a long time about the timeliness of the topic. While the world is going through an era of global instability, it is especially important to remind readers that there are, in the literal sense of the word, unshakable values. However, "SPEECH:" is inclined to call another, purely architectural phenomenon a crisis, namely the craze of architects of the late 20th century with digital forms and artificial materials. With the advent of modern technologies in architecture, the design standard has become the creation of objects that are almost weightless, as if dissolving in space, or, on the contrary, opposed to it with bright forms devoid of geometrism. Materiality, on the other hand, is a property that is originally inherent in architecture and has always been perceived as its synonym, has become an open rarity for architecture. Non-linear digital forms, bright colors and plastic cladding - in the mass consciousness even today, such a building is considered "modern". But where, in this case, is the truth of the material, where is the honesty of the palpability of the bodily shell of the building and that much-needed feeling of stability and durability?
The magazine dedicated to Materiality is an attempt by architectural critics led by Irina Shipova to show that today materials that most adequately embody the idea of materiality - stone and brick - are gradually returning to architecture. The fourth issue contains the most striking buildings of this new material wave. These include the San Blas Estudio.entresitio City Health Center, the De Eikenhof residential complex in Enschede by the Klaus and Cannes bureaus, the Arata Isozaki Art Museum of the Central Academy of Arts in Beijing, as well as an overview of modern architecture in the Netherlands, which is largely built by made of bricks. Traditionally strong in "SPEECH:" interviews - in the "Pros and Cons" section, the advantages and disadvantages of "material" materials are discussed by Arno Lederer and Dominique Perrault, and the heroes of the "Portrait" column are David Chipperfield, Fernando Menis and Sergey Skuratov. From its very first issue, "SPEECH:" has started a tradition of inviting one of the heroes of the issue to the presentation of the release. The fact that this time the choice fell on Skuratov is quite predictable and understandable. It is unlikely that in modern Russia, someone knows more about brick and stone than he does.
In fact, the presentation turned into a benefit performance of the head of the bureau "Sergey Skuratov Architects", since his lecture lasted much longer than the speeches of Sergei Tchoban and Irina Shipova. Skuratov called his message "Monomaterialnos", a mixture of Latin and Cyrillic, obviously trying to show the richness of nuances and meanings inherent in this topic. However, it is impossible to argue that in his speech the architect fully disclosed the theme of materiality, rather, he briefly and succinctly spoke about his most famous objects, including a residential building in Tessinsky Lane, Danilovsky Fort, a skyscraper on Mosfilmovskaya, the Barkley Plaza complex … Another thing is that the image of each Skuratov house is largely created by the material from which it is built. Brick in the hands of an architect not only comes to life and sounds, but acquires dozens of different tones and halftones, and each facade as a result resembles a hand-woven canvas.
The final point of the official program of the evening was another mini-presentation. Sergei Tchoban invited Niels Peters, head of the Berlin publishing house Archimap Publishers, to the microphone, and he presented the audience with the newly released schematic map "New Architecture of Moscow". Archimap Publishers was founded just a year ago and, as you might guess from its name, specializes in the production of maps of architectural landmarks. This genre was invented by Niels himself, when he realized that walking around the city with a traditional guidebook is not only inconvenient, but often very useless, since the book does not always help to navigate in an unfamiliar metropolis. Peters' idea is very simple - on a 6-fold sheet of paper, route maps are published on one side, and on the other, a chessboard of photographs and short descriptions of attractions. Such guides have already been released for Berlin, Hamburg, London and Venice, and this summer German publisher and author Heike-Maria Jochenning was in Moscow for the first time and immediately realized that the Russian capital should have its own map of new architecture. According to Niels, Moscow impressed him with both the number of new buildings and their genre and stylistic diversity. It must be said that this amazement of the publisher was wholly reflected in the final choice of objects for the map: the 35 landmarks of the Russian capital of the XXI century included both the buildings of Sergey Skuratov, Boris Levyant, Sergey Kiselev and Vladimir Plotkin, as well as very odious realizations, for example, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and house-egg of Sergei Tkachenko.
