The credibility of the Quality Architecture award is based primarily on the fact that it is awarded by the architects themselves. The works that appear on the pages of the catalog are selected by a special commission - this year it included Alexander Asadov, Andrey Bokov, Vladimir Plotkin, Alexander Skokan, Sergey Kiselev, Sergey Skuratov and Viktor Logvinov. However, there is a downside to the fact that professionals give preference to only the best and most interesting projects. So, on the pages of the catalog, it is practically impossible to find new objects - it was made up of buildings that have been published more than once in the professional press and have received various awards. For example, a good half of the nominees for the House of the Year 2009 and The Most Beautiful House with a Brick Facade competitions, as well as the winners of the festivals “Under the Roof of a House”, “Golden Section”, “Architecture.
The catalog of the award, according to tradition, consists of four sections - "residential and public buildings", "interiors", "country houses", "urban planning". And if the first three nominations have existed since the creation of the award, then the best urban planning projects are awarded for the first time - this nomination has replaced "Experimental Architecture", which has exhausted itself for the most banal, that is, economic reason.
The new nomination was presented by the head of Mosproekt-4 and the president of the Union of Architects of Russia, Andrey Bokov, who noted that the most important criterion for evaluating an urban planning project is not so much the quality of building materials and technologies as the quality of the solution itself and the “level of architectural thinking”. “Advanced Western architecture has long been trying to measure this very level,” said Andrei Bokov, “I even came up with a special word for this - sustainable. It can be translated as “sustainable”, but in fact it means a combination of various aspects of the interaction of a building or a complex of buildings with the environment, for example, the level of energy savings, the use of renewable resources, the comfort of various groups of the population, etc. " Best of all, these principles, according to the jury, are implemented in eight urban planning projects carried out by Russian architects. Among them are the Public and Business Center in Ufa PTAM Vissarionova, the project for the development of Beregovoy Proezd in Moscow and the R1 residential area in the village of Rublevo-Arkhangelskoye, workshop "Sergei Kiselev and Partners", the concept of development of residential neighborhoods No. 32-33 Lipetsk and the Special Economic Zone in Tomsk Bureau ABD Architects, the Avangard microdistrict in Omsk by the Ostozhenka bureau and two projects of the young architect Polina Nozdracheva near Moscow - renovation of microdistrict No. 1 in Povarovo and reconstruction of a quarter in Krasnoarmeysk.
Another innovation of this year can be considered the presence in the ranking of several regional architectural schools at once. And if the projects from Nizhny Novgorod in the catalog are more than expected (the "High-quality architecture-2010" has included the international trade center of the NGO "Archstroy", which has been repeatedly noted by critics), then Perm has become a very interesting discovery of the year. Recently, this city has been increasingly mentioned in the architectural news - it hosts high-profile international competitions, and the master plan is developed by the Dutch bureau KCAP. However, the catalog of "Quality Architecture" does not publish them, but the laconic high-rise residential complex "Gates of Prikamye" (Euro Towers), developed by the "Saturn-R" bureau under the leadership of Igor Lugovoi. This project was noted by the jury for the unique planning solution of high-rise buildings, which are connected in pairs not only by gallery passages, but also by a single core of vertical communications.
The section "Residential and public buildings" turned out to be surprisingly extensive and representative this year. It would seem that this particular genre during the crisis should have suffered the greatest losses both in terms of the number of implementations and in terms of their quality, but in reality everything is much more optimistic. Along with the already well-known Moscow shopping and entertainment complex "Metropolis" (ABD Architects), the catalog contains several shopping centers built in other cities of Russia, for example, the public and shopping center "Equator" in Reutov or an administrative building on the street. Duma in Omsk.
At the gold masters award ceremony, much was said about the quality of modern construction and how far sometimes completed buildings are from the original approved projects. Thus, Boris Stuchebryukov, receiving an award for ABD Architects for the above-mentioned Metropolis complex, could not resist criticizing the contractor - the Enka company, which, according to him, did everything to prevent this object from being included in the catalog. The fact that he got there, nevertheless, is a considerable merit of the architects, however, not as designers, but as competent managers and managers. In other words, high-quality architecture is not born, but becomes precisely in the process of project implementation, provided that its authors do not give their offspring at the mercy of builders, but personally control all stages of work. Perhaps the most irreconcilable position in this sense is taken by Sergei Skuratov, who not only constantly visits the construction site and personally supervises its progress, but also regularly forces the builders to correct their mistakes. How effective this position is, eloquently testifies to the "High-quality architecture-2010": the catalog of the award published as many as three objects of the bureau "Sergey Skuratov Architects" - "Danilovsky Fort", "Barkli Plaza" and a residential building on Mosfilmovskaya.
The evening of "Quality Architecture" ended quite unexpectedly. When all the "golden masters" were awarded, the rock group Granatny Pereulok took the stage, consisting of Boris Uborevich-Borovsky (bass guitar), Dmitry Alexandrov (guitar, keys), Dmitry Velichkin (guitar), Levon Airapetov (drums), Alexander Akimkin (guitar) and Alexander Pokrovsky (keys, harmonica). Last fall, the musicians found a permanent site for rehearsals and recordings in the House of Architects, so now performances by architecture rockers promise to become regular. This impromptu concert greatly diversified the usual course of the ceremony and once again showed how versatile real architects are - the high-quality music they create, as it turned out, is by no means always frozen.
