Moscow does not and never has had a design museum - this is the basis of the idea of the competition held as part of the Sretenka Design Week. The lack of such a museum is unfair, the organizers of the competition believe - after all, the Soviet avant-garde represented by Rodchenko, Popova, Stepanova and other "leftist artists" was one of those movements that stood at the origins of the formation of design as a phenomenon. So far, the idea of creating a design museum has not found a response from the Moscow authorities and there is no definite platform for it - therefore, the design was conceptual; but the authors were free from most of the usual restrictions. They could come up with anything, with any hypothetical budget and place it anywhere, the main thing is that the image of the future building should be bright, provocative, and the future building could claim the title of an architectural landmark of the city - here the organizers sent authors to the complexes of the German Vitra museum, built by Frank Gary in 1989, the boiler room of the Red Dot Museum in Essen modernized by Norman Foster, the Berlin Design Museum, created according to the idea of Walter Gropius, and so on.
Meanwhile, in the design of museums there are not so many conceptual moves, or rather only two: either the building itself becomes an exhibit and “challenges” the main role of the collection - for example, Frank Gary built his sculpture buildings. Or the museum is designed as a neutral "container", focusing attention on the exposition, similar to the New York MOMA. The first move, of course, is more attractive to the architect, and many participants preferred exactly "provocation". But there were also those who considered it inappropriate in the conditions of the historic city. Among them was the winner of the competition - a joint project of Alexey Malafeev, Evgeny Zatulveter and Anton Kirillov from Barnaul.
One of his main arguments is that "the transfer of global trends to the exterior and the development of the external form in line with Western traditions is a big mistake and leads to a loss of identity, which is unacceptable for a Russian museum …". For originality, the authors went to the village, took as a basis its "archetypes" - roughly put together "huts", "sheds", "barns" and so on. - and modernized them, turning them into "containers" for exhibiting design items. “There is nothing more permanent than temporary, so we propose to make something temporary and use it until it falls apart by itself,” the authors write in an explanatory note, referring to national character and national laziness. But if you look closely, behind the paradoxical and ironic forms of huts and barns on wheels, you can see the continuity with the Russian design of the avant-garde period - among the masterpieces of this time there are many temporary wooden pavilions, stands, kiosks and (also temporary in nature) theatrical scenery.
Another thing is that it is difficult to imagine such a museum built in Moscow; although it would be nice to fit into the Kaluga fields somewhere in the vicinity of the objects of Nikolai Polissky. However, the winning project exists by definition outside of space and, therefore, it could arise anywhere.
Many other contestants chose to stick to a specific location. So, some have chosen the territory of the Crimean Wall around the Central House of Artists as a site. Artists and designers have repeatedly tried to save their favorite place from the upcoming reconstruction, offering alternative options without demolishing the exhibition hall. These include the project of Gennady Nadtochiy and Svetlana Shilova, which took third place. The museum building is a broken red "ribbon" stretched from the building of the artists' house to the Strelka institute on Bersenevskaya embankment. Thus, as conceived by the authors, the building-bridge connects “two cultural zones of different eras”. It houses a two-level exhibition hall, a lecture and showroom, and an open-air amphitheater, which complement the free-standing exhibition pavilions. The broken shapes and red color give it a deconstructivist look in the spirit of Libeskind and Chumi. One interpretation of the avant-garde against the background of another - the modernist building of the Central House of Artists - looks quite harmonious, but the giant bronze "Columbus" is clearly superfluous here - the authors propose to transfer it to America.
Perhaps the most accurate idea of the container museum was embodied by the Praktika collective (Denis Chistov, Grigory Guryanov, Anastasia Glukhova), proposing a luminous white cube made of fabric, inside which the architects placed a black cube - the actual repository of exhibits. The space between the outer membrane and the black box is used to showcase large-scale installations. By placing the artifacts in the "packaging", the authors interpreted the essence of the design as a mass production of objects and thus fell into the modern trend. Another new Moscow museum, the Federal Museum of Contemporary Art, a project of which PTAM Khazanova recently demonstrated to the Minister of Culture, uses the same technique: this is a frame-like building covered with a woven shell that can be changed, illuminated, projected a movie onto it, and made art by itself. object. At Praktika, however, the shell is fundamentally white, so that at night, illuminating objects from the inside, look at their shadows - “the pure form of design objects”.
Finally, about the exposition: the stands on which the projects of the nominees are placed are made in the form of cardboard chairs; this was done in honor of the main sponsor of the competition, Vitra, the most famous manufacturer of designer furniture. By the way, it was the collection of chairs that originally formed the basis of the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, where the first place holders, the architects from Barnaul, will now go. The Vitra campus, meanwhile, is interesting not only for its design collection, but also for its buildings, which at different times were created by the "stars" of the world school - Frank Gary, Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, etc. The rest of the exhibitors were awarded souvenirs - memorable bricks, which "Will form the basis of the future design museum."
