"White City" was built in a week, from 20 to 27 February. The site of the festival this time was Veliky Ustyug, or, more precisely, the largest tourist and entertainment complex in this city, "the residence of Ded Moroz." The main territory of the estate is a pine forest with tiny glades between trees, some of which are already built up with art objects, while others are still empty. The works of the festival participants were located along a single walking route - the so-called Path of Fairy Tales - and today they have already become full-fledged objects of display.
The preliminary selection of participants, according to the already established tradition, was carried out on the Internet: anyone could send their project of the construction for the future "Snow Village", and then the jury selected 33 projects worthy of implementation from all the submitted works. It was they who were supposed to form the appearance of the "White City", but until the very last moment neither the organizers nor the participants themselves knew which objects would be built. This is the manifestation of the extremely liberal nature of the festival - teams of architects who come to the "City" have the right to implement both their own and any other people's projects they like, making improvements and additions to them to their liking directly in the process of implementation.
The main theme of the construction of the "Snow Village" was the traditional Russian hut and the modern interpretation of this one of the oldest national architectural genres. The festival organizers in their manifesto defined the central characteristic of the hut as a residential building “its integrity as an ensemble - the unity of the architectural volume, decor and interior”. Well, snow and ice became the main building materials: each team was provided with about 6 cubic meters of pressed snow, ice blocks measuring 1x0.5x0.2 meters, as well as tools, without which the creation of winter architecture is unthinkable - hand saws, buckets and shovels.
Traditionally, the active festival life was by no means limited to exhausting work on construction sites. In the evenings, the White City hosted master classes on working with snow and ice (organized by the general partner of the festival - AGC), lectures, film screenings and, of course, parties. On February 21, Ivan Ovchinnikov spoke about the tour of the GO! Roda festival, and the next day Andrei Asadov delivered a lecture “Arch-survival” on the existence of architecture and architects in the conditions of the economic crisis. An unusual presentation on modern architecture and landscape design in Finland was prepared by a team from this country, and representatives of RevitCity told about the next achievements in parametric architecture. And in honor of the Defender of the Fatherland Day, White Dances were held in the White City, in which everyone who followed the dress code, formulated quite predictably: “All in white!” Could participate.
During the week, more than 30 snow and ice arch-objects have grown along the Path of Fairy Tales, among which there were huts, barns, and refectories. A snow mill, an ice chapel, an arch-Skating rink and "Izbar" were also erected on the shore of the lake. Many participants creatively rethought not only the hut genre itself, but also the proposed building material. Thus, the Gagayagaya team from Zhukovsky, near Moscow, built their house out of glasses made of ice (the resulting object was named “Stakanoids”), and the FARTART team used giant ice figures instead of ordinary bricks to create their “izBABAB”. The designers had to not only carefully think over their original architectural solution, but also provide for the night lighting of the object, the improvement of the entire site and a place for an information plate. In addition, each of the teams paid great attention to the safety issues of the facilities: after all, the festival didn’t have time to end, and the created snow structures were already included in the excursion program around the estate of Santa Claus and are now visited by hundreds of children every day.
![EQUITONE [Natura] N164 White: Delicate White](https://i.architectureprof.com/images/004/image-9928-j.webp "EQUITONE [Natura] N164 White: Delicate White")