The Venice Biennale is a height that, by and large, has never conquered us. The only architectural "Golden Lion" that left for Russia belongs to Ilya Utkin and was awarded for photographs. It is customary to attribute our failures in Venice to the fact that, by and large, there is nothing to show us - Russian architecture can hardly boast of belonging to the European mainstream, and what is being built in abundance in Moscow and other cities of the country within the framework of the phenomenon called "construction boom”, is somehow awkward to demonstrate. But in reality, the problem is perhaps deeper: the Biennale is the same Olympics or, say, the Eurovision Song Contest, the number of victories in which for nations with morbid self-importance is not just important, but very important, to tears.
In a word, we have always wanted to "sound" at the Biennale so badly that this desire prevented us from thinking in cold blood. We either exhibited classics, then sent students of architecture universities to the biennale to adopt the European experience, and two years ago we showed the Tournament for Russia - a chess field on which, instead of figures, models of buildings designed for Russian megacities by domestic and foreign architects were placed. There were several realizations in those pawns and kings and many projects fully approved and ready for construction. Only the theme of the Biennale, formulated by the then curator Aaron Betsky, as luck would have it, is extremely vague “From outside. Architecture Beyond Buildings”, this exposition did not quite match. And two years later, another thing became obvious: the game played in 2008 turned out to be as far from the real architecture as all our previous biennial exhibitions: due to the economic crisis, most of the projects from that chessboard were either frozen for an indefinite period, or rejected altogether.
The crisis is sobering - you can't argue with that. And today, victory at any cost is no longer quoted as high as, for example, cost justification and versatility of application. It is these qualities that form the basis of the Russian exposition-2010, curated by Pavel Khoroshilov, Grigory Revzin and Sergei Tchoban. And if the Khoroshilov-Revzin duet is already engaged in the second biennial in a row, the Russian-German architect Tchoban joined them only this year, after the project he made together with Irina Shipova and dedicated to the study of the domestic experience of reviving industrial complexes, won the competition curators at Zodchestvo-2009. That competition was conceived and conducted by Yuri Avvakumov and is oriented (albeit unofficially, but quite definitely) towards the future Russian pavilion of the 2010 Venice Biennale. So, the conversion of factories is a win-win plot, and after the theme of the XII Architecture Biennale was announced (curator Kazuyo Sejima formulated it as "People meet in architecture"), it became clear that Sergei Tchoban hit the bull's eye.
However, experienced both in European architecture and in the Western manner of doing conceptual research, charged with significant social pathos, Tchoban understood that there were few stands with illustrations about how we learned to reconstruct factories for offices and art sites. Today everyone knows how to renovate the building externally and re-plan it from the inside, turning a former ruin into a profitable place is also not difficult, but making it so that yesterday's factory becomes a meeting place for people - with each other, with art, history or the future, and a place that can change life the whole city is indeed a task. A task worthy of the Biennale and extremely topical in principle, and not so much for large metropolitan areas as for other smaller cities.
So it was decided to move three hundred kilometers from Moscow and explore the potential of the industrial architecture of small towns in Russia.“Fabrika” is both about typology, because the project provides for the conversion of real factory buildings, and about the image of a conveyor belt, because five leading architects of the country are invited to participate in it. It is also important that the product of the "factory" in the future can be adapted for any small town in Russia where there are industrial buildings that are no longer used in any way.
Now about the main thing, namely about the place of action and the main characters. Vyshny Volochok was selected as a model of a small town. A city with 300 years of history, a unique master plan and a regular system of canals created by Peter (hello, Venice!), And most importantly, located exactly between Moscow and St. Petersburg. Over the centuries it has developed as a center of the textile industry, and today there are three large industrial zones within walking distance from the center of Vyshny Volochek - Prokhorovskie Manufactories, the Krasny May plant and the Ryabushinsky manufactories, as well as the former training textile factory Aelita. The current socio-economic situation in the city is also characteristic: over the past 20 years, the development of the center has gradually declined, and no new industries or infrastructure related to the maintenance of railways, highways and waterways have emerged. The location of Vyshny Volochok between the two capitals prompted Sergei Tchoban to invite architects from both cities to participate in the project: Moscow at the Biennale will be represented by Sergei Skuratov, Vladimir Plotkin and Sergei Kuznetsov, St. Petersburg - by Evgeny Gerasimov and Nikita Yavein.
The super task of the project is briefly described as follows: "understanding the old industrial zones as a historical landscape open to universal transformations." “The very topic of conversion of industrial buildings can be safely called traditional, including in Russia,” says Grigory Revzin. - But what is usually done on the site of an abandoned factory? If you think about it, there is a rather limited set of subjects - a disco, a museum of modern art, lofts or offices. None of them is needed by a small city, the resources and capabilities of which are very limited, and at the same time, it is the old factories that often form the basis of the urban fabric. So we asked ourselves the question, how can we fundamentally rethink the role of industrial zones in small towns? " As Sergey Tchoban said at the presentation of the project, the conversion of factories and manufactories of Vyshny Volochok will be carried out in five directions: housing and hotels, the revival of production, including textile production, the Center for the Study of Folklore and Folklore Theater (the city hosts an annual “theater of small towns of Russia”), water transport system and museum of waterways. The total design area, including reconstruction and new construction, will be about 75 thousand square meters.
Thus, in the Russian pavilion, for the first time, not an “exhibition of achievements” of one architect or a group of authors will be presented, but a project created specifically for the Biennale, which meets the current trends in world architecture and contains answers to acute problems of internal architecture. And although the project of the exposition itself is still kept in the strictest confidence, the curators hinted that the space on the second floor of the Russian pavilion will be treated as a suite, and the conversion options are presented as a logical continuation and development of each other. What is already known for sure is the cost of the exposition - the Ministry of Culture and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation allocated 10 million rubles for it. VTB became the general sponsor of the Russian pavilion at the XII Architecture Biennale in Venice. And Alfa-Bank paid for the reconstruction of the pavilion itself, renewing its roof and drainage system. So the roof shouldn't leak this summer.
