If David Sakrisyan, being not quite an architectural person, in ten years created a new, albeit informal structure of the MUAR in the process of stormy exposition and public activities within the quiet GNIMA, then the new director Irina Korobyina came to MUAR-GNIMA with her own and well-known structure - the Center for Contemporary Architecture (C: SA). Now C: SA is celebrating its 10th anniversary, and the museum has hosted a whole cycle of festive events since last Friday. Among them are several lectures, the presentation of the book "C: CA +5" with a report on the Center's activities over the past five years, and - as a culmination - an exhibition in the building of the Pharmaceutical Order.
The exhibition consists of two parts. In the center of the vaulted hall, there are monitors showing videos of C: SA projects from different years. Along the perimeter, on the walls, there are tablets with the projects of the nominees for the conceptual competition "Space of Modern Architecture". Its results were solemnly announced in the Pharmaceutical Order on Monday.
The competition task was formulated extremely broadly: "the transformation of the whole of Russia into a space of modern architecture." And by any means, which even embarrassed some judges. According to Evgeny Ass, after reading the program, he decided, "… that nothing good will happen - such a space should be formed in the brain, and this is not good enough for us." However, more than 200 entries submitted for the competition convinced the opposite. In addition to Assa, the jury included Alexander Brodsky, Project Meganom, Icing Architects, Art-Bla, Alfred Jacoby, MVRDV, and other eminent architects. Each judge could choose from a total of 10 projects, the winners were determined by statistics.
Maxim Malein's project got the largest number of votes. The next one was the project of Anastasia Gritskova and Tatyana Leshikhina "We are what we look at", projecting architectural consciousness onto the pictures of the comic strip. Another winning project by Natalia Sukhova and Justus Vunshik continues the discussion started by Project Russia magazine about the possibilities of micro-district development. Nikita Asadov and Elizaveta Fonskaya received two prizes at once: one for the cute project "Meaningful emptiness: total illusion" with a quote from V. Venetsianov's painting "The Sleeping Shepherd" - as the same Evgeny Ass noted: "This is a desperate admission that modern architecture in Russia is impossible”. Another - for the project "Route Putin" with the capital migrating after the prime minister. Among the winners was also the Global table project, an endless discussion table on the problems of modern architecture, reminiscent of the projects of the urban structures encircling the planet by the Italian Superstudio group of the 1970s. The jury members also presented something from themselves. For example, Evgeny Ass and Alexander Rappaport showed a map of urbanized Russia covered with a grid of metro lines.
All ten teams that won the competition will become participants in a special exhibition project of the Museum of Architecture dedicated to the best young architects. And the Institute of Architecture Bauhaus - Dessau awarded the authors he liked with certificates for training.
It must be admitted that the theme of the competition was indeed chosen symbolic. When the Center for Contemporary Architecture was nine years old and several months old, its director became the director of the Museum of Architecture. Now the Center is ten, this is a serious age, it is time to expand, that is, to spread its progressive activities throughout the country. It cannot be said that C: SA was ever limited only to Moscow - on the contrary, the Center persistently promoted progressive Western ideas both in Moscow and in big cities. Thanks to the CREDO lecture program, Moscow was visited by the "stars" of world architecture - Rem Koolhaas, Kionore Kikutake, Norman Foster, Dominique Perrault and many others, who gathered several hundred listeners. C: CA has broadcast advanced ideas from the West through exhibitions (for example, "DUTCH architecture", etc.), competitions (PermMuseum XX1, Zeppelinstation in Berlin, "Moskva River in Moscow", etc.), project seminars and professional discussions, as well as and more mainstream formats like movies and TV shows. For 10 years, the Center has been creating its own "space of modern architecture", provoking public discussion of the most acute architectural issues. And now, upon reaching the mature age of ten, having united with the main architectural museum of the country, C: SA, it seems, decided to carry these same progressive ideas to the people. There it will be seen whether it will be possible to wake up the "sleeping shepherds" from Venetsianov's painting and instill in them progressive thoughts, or whether it will be necessary to limit ourselves to the activities of proven representatives of the progressive public.
