Starting this year, the best building is chosen not only by Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also by Nizhny Novgorod and Yekaterinburg. However, the award, it seems, is already outgrowing its all-Russian status - in the fall, the best building of 2010 will be determined in Riga as well. At the same time, the voting mechanism remained the same - everyone who wants to mark the building they like on the award website, and at the same time, a jury consisting of professionals makes their choice. However, this time it was also possible to vote at Arch Moscow itself, provided, of course, that you could find the prize exposition located on the career ladder. In this not the most convenient place, the gallery of lightboxes with the buildings-nominees looked unusual, but at the same time very conceptual, and was perceived as a kind of end-to-end exposition summarizing the results of the remaining three floors of the exhibition.
The award was invented in 2006 by the architectural critic Nikolai Malinin as an alternative to all existing professional awards. "House of the Year" has always positioned itself as an emphatically popular award, somewhat naive and, most importantly, free from clichés and prejudices. Ordinary citizens do not care who and why builds this or that building in the city - they evaluate it according to the only criterion "like it or not." It is largely due to this approach that the short-list of the award from year to year is a picturesque collection of all current architectural trends. And if in previous years their variegation and diversity were striking, first of all, the main feature of the "House of the Year" -2010 was the absence of a large number of star names. For comparison, last year, for example, three objects by Sergei Skuratov nominated for the award, but now there were only two "star" buildings among the Moscow nominees - an office building on Nizhnyaya Krasnoselskaya by Alexey Bavykin and the headquarters of Aeroflot of Vladimir Plotkin. The ratio of typologies also looked somewhat different: this year social objects very actively intervened in the usual confrontation between office and residential complexes - a school ("dedalonous" No. 1414, designed by CJSC "ARST") and a sports center (a complex on Solzhenitsyn street from the SPEECH bureau) …
The award, designed to identify the building most beloved by the public, by definition does not set itself the task of discovering new architects and new objects, therefore all the nominees for the House of the Year are well known from their publications in the press and participation in other competitions and shows. Thus, the popular vote this year recognized the Skolkovo International School of Management, designed by David Adjaye, as the best building in Moscow, an object that has not left the pages of the architectural press for the past few months. Perhaps that is why the professional jury ultimately preferred a slightly less favored project - the White Square office complex by ABD Architects.
But in St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, the professionals were completely in solidarity with the popular opinion. The neoclassical hotel on Ostrovsky Square, designed by the workshop "Evgeny Gerasimov and Partners", conquered both those and others with a deep knowledge of classical techniques and a correct sense of the morphology of the surrounding buildings. In Yekaterinburg, the best was the administrative center built according to the project of VostokProekt LLC at the intersection of Pervomayskaya and Turgenev streets. The object is very controversial - due to its gigantic scale, it suppresses the surrounding historical buildings, but at the same time it boasts an interesting composition and modern appearance.
Residents of Nizhny Novgorod called the entertainment center on the Nizhnevolzhskaya embankment the best (architect Stanislav Gorshunov), and the townspeople were not at all embarrassed by the proximity of the modern complex to the Kremlin. For the sake of fairness, we note that the building is dug into the relief and does not overlap with the panorama of the fortress, but its modernist volumes are frankly alien to the historical context. Probably, not least for this reason, the workshop of professionals preferred this object to the multifunctional complex "Lobachevsky" (TMA of Viktor Bykov), in the composition of which various geometric volumes are masterfully juxtaposed.
As already mentioned, this fall the Best Building award will be presented in Riga for the first time. Riga nominated buildings were also presented at the exhibition in the Central House of Artists, and even a cursory glance at them is enough to feel that they belong to high-quality European architecture. Muscovites will be able to meet the best of them at the Zodchestvo festival.
