Recall that the Yakov Chernikhov Prize is awarded to young designers once every two years for the best architectural concept that contains "an innovative response to the present and at the same time a professional challenge to the future." Any architect under the age of 44 can become a nominee for the award, provided that he is recommended for participation in the competition by one of the members of the international committee of experts. The competition was established in 2006, and then 55 architects and creative teams took part in it. Two years later, the prize has already collected 75 nominees, and this year 135 people from more than 20 countries of the world competed for the right to become a laureate of the award bearing the name of Yakov Chernikhov.
This year's award was curated by the renowned Italian urban planner and architectural theorist Stefano Boeri. He called his manifesto "For a new form of localism" and dedicated it to the problem of the existence of architecture in the era of globalization. No, Boeri does not advocate for nurturing national schools, but he considers it very important to what extent modern architecture is able to meet the needs of specific territories and communities. Boeri compares local landscapes and traditions that become polygons for architecture with the eye of a needle through which a powerful stream of information and global trends flows. And the question that the curator addresses to the participants of the competition is, in essence, very simple: how do global currents change in this “ear”, what exactly makes them the key to a positive transformation of this or that space?
As Stefano Boeri himself said at the final press conference in the Central House of Architects, the works submitted to the competition answered this question in completely different ways. Some of the participants limited themselves to criticism of the existing state of affairs and thus actually recognized the helplessness of architecture in the face of globalization. Someone, on the contrary, threw all their efforts into finding a promising solution. “The top ten works include projects that consider architecture as an effective tool with which you can radically change not only the urban planning and social, but also the political situation,” explains Boeri. As one of the most striking examples of this approach, the curator cites the project of the Israeli group Decolonizing Architecture, which studies the possibility of resolving national and interethnic conflicts by means of architecture. No less significant Boeri seems to be the loyalty of young architects to the classical principles of their profession: for their attention to the context and the needs of real people, their willingness to interact with space in the name of beauty and comfort, and not just to satisfy their own ambitions, the jury noted the projects of the Feld 72 group from Austria and Standard Architecture from China, as well as from Muscovite Nikita Asadov.
Nikita Asadov and his co-authors (Konstantin Lagutin, Vera Odyn, Anna Sazhinova, Olga Treyvas, Elizaveta Fonskaya) presented several concepts for the competition - an outwardly traditional village house, which actually turns out to be a multifunctional transformer, a multi-level parking lot, whose not the most attractive vertical is “compensated »A witty paraphrase of the campaign, and the so-called Sugar house - a mosaic-tiled volume that can be used as a museum, cultural center or information office. As a result of the final voting, the Moscow architect, alas, did not become a laureate of the prize, but Nikita Asadov's chamber projects, executed with wit and optimism and with surgical precision filling the gaps in the tissue of a city or village, had many admirers among the jury members. In particular, the French architect Rudy Ricciotti was so fascinated by Asadov's work that he publicly retracted the jury's decision in favor of Nikita, stating that he considered him the strongest and most distinctive participant in the competition. The temperament and fearlessness with which the architect defended the Russian at the press conference turned the jury member's formal commentary into a real show. Well, when it turned out that Nikita's mother, the architect Marina Asadova, was present in the hall, and Ricciotti rushed to her with enthusiastic embraces, the journalists could only burst into applause.
In what all the members of the jury (this year it was headed by Odile Dekk, however, due to her employment, she worked in this position for only one and a half days instead of three) were unanimous, it was in the recognition that it was very difficult to choose the winner. With a margin of only one vote, the group "Fantastic Norway" became the laureate of the Third International Yakov Chernikhov Prize for Architecture, which conquered the experts with its active life position. The fact is that the bureau, founded in 2005 by Erlend Blakstad Haffner and Håkon Matre Aasarød, does not have a stationary office - the architects live in a red van, which is called "a mobile platform for architectural discussions." Driving it around Norway, they have enough time and opportunities to communicate with local residents, study their real needs and desires - and it is on the basis of this knowledge that they develop their projects. Such an approach guarantees that every object they create, be it a creative workshop, a private house or a viewing platform, is aimed at improving the situation "here and now", which means turning a country of fantastic opportunities into a country that is fantastically comfortable and beautiful.
