The architecture of the stagnant thirty years - 1960-1980s - is customary to scold. For no other period of Russian architecture, perhaps, so many offensive cliches have been invented as for this. "Tipovuhi" is about housing, "marble slime" - about the buildings of regional and city committees, "dull glass" - about the numerous parallelepipeds of scientific research institutes. Was there art? And has that time left behind anything worth exploring, preserving, and training a sense of legitimate pride?
To talk about how the buildings of Soviet modernism are perceived today, Nikolai Malinin invited famous critics and curators - Grigory Revzin, Natalia and Anna Bronovitsky, Andrey Kaftanov, Andrey Gozak, Elena Gonzalez, Dmitry Fesenko, as well as architects who started working in the 1980s, but really realized after perestroika - Alexander Skokan, Nikolai Lyzlov, Vladimir Yudintsev. The discussion, which dragged on for more than three hours, was not distinguished by either the harmony of the composition or the clarity of the conclusions - each of the participants in a very free and lengthy form shared his own thoughts and memories of the (relatively) recent past of Russian architecture. However, Nikolai Malinin did not expect unambiguous answers from the guests. The main task of the meeting was to introduce the question of the meaning of modernism architecture into the field of active discussion by professionals. Simultaneously with the discussion, a presentation of a new series of works by Yuri Palmin, one of the best architectural photographers in Russia, took place. For many years, Palmin has been photographing Moscow objects of the 1960s-1980s; these photographs will form an illustrative series of the upcoming guidebook.
They started talking about the architecture of the Khrushchev-Brezhnev time recently, 5-6 years ago, when the first buildings of that time were demolished. But the monuments of the 1960s-1980s still remain, perhaps, the most unprotected and at the same time the least explored part of the architectural heritage. Giant concrete structures of the 1960s-1980s, deprived of the love of the authorities and the people (although they are at the same time here), and ignored by historians, are rapidly disappearing: Intourist and Minsk were demolished; preparing to demolish the Central House of Artists, the Sayany cinema, the Zhiguli technical center, the Montreal pavilion at VDNKh; the hotel "Yunost" and one of the "books" of Novy Arbat were radically redesigned, the facades of TsEMI and the Plekhanov Institute disappeared behind the new buildings, the INION pond was turned into a cesspool, and a similar pool of the Institute of Oceanology became a parking lot … "Each historical epoch builds itself on the negation of the previous one. So it was in 1917, so it happened in the 1990s, - Malinin is convinced. - Gorbachev's perestroika and the changes that followed it were carried out in a fierce struggle against everything Soviet. It could not be otherwise, otherwise they would not have won. But 20 years pass - and you start to look at every victory with different eyes …"
There was no consensus among the participants in the discussion. The architects talked mainly about how difficult the years were in creative terms, when the heavy responsibility for the fight against excesses was placed on the shoulders of the designers. Any, even the tiniest artistic gesture was perceived as heroism, and today, almost 40 years later, this is what gives architects the right to call the best buildings of that time honest. The definition of "honest architecture" as applied to Soviet modernism sounded at the round table almost more often than anyone else. And honesty, as you know, is a positive quality, but not the most convenient in life …
Another problem of modernism, as Anna Bronovitskaya very accurately noted, is that the buildings of this period, unfortunately, "age badly and ugly." Concrete is not the material that is able to keep the face fresh for a long time without special cosmetic procedures, but in order to ensure these procedures, very considerable funds are required. Especially when you consider that among the monuments of the era under discussion there are almost no chamber, modest buildings. And functionalism, and brutalism, and the notorious "maximum utility, inspired by the presence of communist ideas" operated only on a large or very large scale, which, of course, not everyone is ready to comprehend. About the new building of the State Tretyakov Gallery / Central House of Artists on Krymsky Val, the then architectural press, for example, wrote: “The architecture of the building is modern. It is monumental. The authors came to this monumentality through compositional simplicity, large scale and tectonic significance. But we would like, and even need, that, looking at the building, there was something to think about, dream about and say … "Beautiful!" ("Architecture of the USSR", No. 10, 1974). Perhaps, here it is, the most painful moment for the legacy of the era of modernism - it is ugly in the generally accepted sense of the word. And so it is very inconvenient, because in order to understand and feel such beauty, a lot of inner work is required. After all, there are such people about whom I would like to say “there are a lot of them” - they are large, loud, gesticulating violently and talking a lot, and they only insist on the truth of their opinion. These are very uncomfortable conversationalists. And they can, of course, be avoided. Only where everyone else is likely to lower their eyes to the floor and remain silent, these will tell you the truth. So the modernist loud-voiced gigantic volumes speak the truth about their time, sometimes very awkwardly, but honestly. In a modern city, they sometimes look too brutal, cumbersome, even ridiculous, and in their straightforwardness and absurdity, unfortunately, are very defenseless.
“If society does not understand what is the uniqueness and value of these objects, then perhaps it is not worth waiting for it to finally see its light? And will he see the light? The professional community preserves the monuments of other eras and, at the same time, is not always understood by the so-called people,”says Elena Gonzalez. However, Grigory Revzin reasonably objected to his colleague: "The opinion of society in this case is necessary, since the professional community on its own is not able to provide funds for the preservation of such large-scale objects." Revzin himself, by the way, does not feel much reverence for the era under discussion, believing that the 1960s were the indisputable rise of modernist thought, but later it was crushed by ideology. "The epoch in these objects is felt very well, but the personality, alas, is not." And since, according to Revzin, we are not talking about a piece product, but about industrial production, then it is necessary to approach the preservation of this heritage accordingly. In other words, save not every copy, but only one, but the most characteristic one. Of course, there are also a lot of such “typical specimens” throughout the country, and the conclusion that the modernist buildings that have not yet been demolished need a comprehensive revision and a kind of cataloging suggests itself. The willingness of the professional community to compile such a catalog, perhaps, can be considered the main result of the discussion. Look, twenty years later (and the last speaker at the round table, the English architect James McAdam confirmed that in his homeland they have been talking about saving the heritage of modernism for a very long time,and concrete actions began to be taken relatively recently), it will become the basis for the real salvation of the monuments of the thaw and stagnation.
