The ARCHIWOOD Prize - for the best architectural structure using wood - was established last autumn. The general partner of the project is Rossa Rakenne SPb (the exclusive distributor of HONKA), the co-organizer is the PR-agency "Rules of Communication". Having announced its principles with the exhibition "New Wooden 1999-2009" at the Museum of Architecture in October 2009, the Prize began collecting applications, it was completed in March, and last week the Expert Council determined the shortlist. In addition to the professional jury, everyone is invited to choose the best projects: voting is open on the website www.archiwood.ru. Its curator Nikolai Malinin tells about what the prize is reaching the finish line with:
“The ARCHIWOOD Prize - as stated in the Regulations - was established for the sake of“promoting modern architecture (rational, economical, environmentally friendly, ingenious) and wood as an ideal material for creating such”. The exhibition in MUAR not only demonstrated the presence of such architecture in Russia (the best of 10 years was collected here), but also served as a kind of tuning fork for the award. We were, of course, worried: whether this architecture will continue in times of crisis and whether there will be examples of it outside the Moscow region. But reality exceeded expectations: 145 applications were submitted for the Prize!
True, some of them were objects already presented at the exhibition in the MUAR, but this does not contradict the Regulations: the prize is annual, and March 2009 was taken as the lower chronological limit. And it was not these works that made up the impressive geography of the award. In addition to the quite expected participation of the Leningrad and Nizhny Novgorod regions, Krasnodar Territory (architectural forwards of Russia), applications for the ARCHIWOOD Prize were submitted from Irkutsk, Astrakhan, Chelyabinsk, Tver, Kostroma, Vologda, Vladimir, Kaluga, Novosibirsk regions, Altai Territory and from the Republic of Tatarstan. There is also a special guest from Riga in the competition - he is, however, a very special, because the author of this project is Moscow architect Totan Kuzembaev.
Probably, our satisfaction with such a breadth of coverage looks somewhat Soviet-style, but this was the first task of ARCHIWOOD: to reach out to the regions, find out what is happening there, find unknown masterpieces and undiscovered talents. And it's really nice that the quality of the submitted works is, in general, very high. What are the hotels in the city of Vyksa (bureau "DA"), the object "I do not know" (Alexey Tomilov), a house on the Volga (bureau BERNASKONI) or a dacha in the village of Izdrevaya, Novosibirsk region (Andrey Chernov)! And the Nizhny Novgorod bureau "DA" (Zoya Ryurikova and Mikhail Noginov), which also presented a bus stop in the village of Zeleny Gorod and "Water Tea Room" in Altai, became a real discovery for the majority of the Council members. All of the above objects, as well as all the material that made up the long-list in general, will be available on the Prize's website - even if the object did not get into the short-list.
Despite the curator's delight, the Expert Council was strict. The work was judged without any leniency, according to the Hamburg score. Therefore, of course, the bulk of the shortlist was made up of objects by famous masters. Alexander Brodsky and Totan Kuzembaev, Nikolai Lyzlov and Sergey Tchoban, Dmitry Dolgoy and Nikolai Lyutomsky, Alexey Kozyr and Yaroslav Kovalchuk, Anton Nadtochiy and Vera Butko, St. Petersburg Studio 44 and Asadov's Workshop … But the real record holder turned out to be Nikolai Belousov - the most enthusiastic and consistent enthusiast of wooden architecture. Of the 9 buildings and 11 projects submitted to him for the award, 9 works were shortlisted!
Here, of course, a reasonable question arises for the attentive reader: it turns out that the members of the Expert Council judged their own works? Yes, we have to statethat the circle of authoritative specialists in the field of wooden architecture is extremely narrow. But it would also be ridiculous to ignore interesting work just because it was done by a member of the Expert Council. Therefore, it was impossible to completely avoid this situation, and in order to remove the acuteness of the issue, the jury (which will select the winners) was formed precisely with this condition: its member could not be an architect whose works were included in the shortlist.
As a result of secret ballot (candidates were nominated by members of the Expert Council), the jury of the Prize was composed of architects Yuri Grigoryan, Ilya Utkin, Svetlana Golovina, Vladislav Savinkin, head of the Moscow office of Rossa Rakenne St. Petersburg Alexander Lvovsky, architectural critics Grigory Revzin and Nikolai Malinin. In parallel with the work of the professional jury, online voting is also opening. Anyone can take part in it, for which it is enough to go to the website of the Prize (www.archiwood.ru) and vote for your favorite in each nomination.
Five nominations remained as a result of heated debate. At its previous meeting, the Expert Council agreed that the nominations would be determined only after the long list was collected. We really wanted to avoid the situation when the nomination is empty or, on the contrary, the work of the original genre loses its chances due to the lack of a suitable nomination. After reviewing all the works, the Council decided not to follow the traditional path - the formation of nominations by function (private house, public building, small form, etc.). After all, we are talking about a tree and here it is important how and for what it lives. Therefore, the Council accepted the proposal of the critic Grigory Revzin to form nominations according to the principle of how the tree is used. Hence - five nominations: "Function", "Constructive", "Wood in finishing", "Art object", "Project".
True, the editor-in-chief of "Architectural Bulletin" Dmitry Fesenko spoke out categorically against the destruction of the "Private House" nomination - "which is the main one in this segment of architecture." Indeed, it is difficult not to recognize the controversial nomination "Function", in which private houses coexist with baths and gazebos. On the other hand, both there and there the tree works the same way, the difference is only in scale. But, given that the current baths sometimes have an area of under 500 meters, the Council decided that the quantitative measurement should not be decisive.
Whereas to separate plots in which the tree plays a constructive and decorative role, it was, on the contrary, essential. True, the controversial remains here: for example, the houses of Pyotr Kostelov or Totan Kuzembaev ("Er") have a wooden structure, but at the same time they are offered in the nomination "Wood in decoration". Why? Because it is the decorative role of the tree that is most interesting in them. As well as in every “Art object” one can, if desired, find a certain function (smoking, thinking, meditating), but for placing an object in this section, it was its artistic, not practical, component that was decisive.
A total of 50 works were shortlisted. All of them are presented on the website www.archiwood.ru (with the completeness provided by the authors), and, in addition, they will be included in the prize catalog and will be exhibited at the ARCHIWOOD-2010 stand in the Central House of Artists within the framework of the II Moscow Biennale of Architecture. The exposition will be deployed right at the entrance to the building, and the same famous couple who did the October exhibition in the MUAR - Vladimir Kuzmin and Vladislav Savinkin - are working on its design. The exposition will also include master classes by well-known woodworkers, performances by construction companies, a report by Olga Sevan on the upcoming conference “Wood in culture. The culture of wood ", as well as the presentation of the book" New wooden 1999 - 2009. Russian architecture in search of identity ", which is being prepared for publication in the publishing house TATLIN. And, hopefully, he will have time to get out of there.
