The exposition is based on Will Price's book Architecture In Wood, published by Thames & Hudson in 2005. Five years ago it was translated into Russian, but it came out in a very limited edition and quickly became a bibliographic rarity. In fact, now Nikolai Malinin suggested that Mr. Price "republish" it, but this time in the form of an exhibition and with an enlarged section of modern wooden architecture, which was presented very modestly in the book. This idea gave rise to the concept of "Parallels" - the exposition is built according to the principle of pairs, in which one component represents traditional wooden architecture (photo by Will Price), and the other represents the search for contemporary architects. Couples are united by this or that detail, technique, function, theme, and all together - wood as the most ancient and at the same time the most relevant material.
There are 64 such pairs in total. To exhibit them, the architect Anton Kochurkin came up with special plywood constructions, vaguely reminiscent of lightboxes in shape, joined in pairs at a slight angle. The organizers themselves lovingly call them "butterflies", on the open wooden "wings" of which wooden buildings of the past and present are presented. It is also interesting that these structures are suspended from the ceiling, so that visitors to the exhibition wander between them, as if in a forest, comprehending the diversity of the tree not only with the help of illustrations, but also, so to speak, on living samples, which, if desired, can be touched, turned and even sniff.
It should be noted that the parallels built by Nikolai Malinin are very diverse. Some objects are compared on the basis of the similarity of the geometry of buildings (cylinder, cube or circle, for example) or their function; sometimes it takes a long time to guess about the nature of other similarities selected by the curator. For example, the structuralist concept of "folds", which modern architects materialize on the basis of mathematical models of Mobius strips and Klein bottles, was paired with a village hut by Nikolai Malinin. According to the curator, the metaphor of infinity does not have to be so intricate: it is enough to understand the nature of a traditional wooden house, which has been moving and reborn for centuries without changing its image.
Perhaps the main message of "Parallels" can be formulated as follows: in working with wood, the architects of the past centuries are not inferior in anything to the architects of a computerized modernity through and through. For example, in a traditional kanak hut (residents of New Caledonia), two layers of bent branches of a tropical tree are responsible for ventilation, and in the Jean-Marie Tjibau Cultural Center, designed by Renzo Piano, the branches turn into computer-controlled blinds that are sensitive to the force of the wind. … It is important that both types of structures - both man-made and created using the most accurate electronic calculations - do their job equally well. And this is just one of dozens of examples proving that all those constructive and compositional techniques that the 20th century proudly considered to be their achievements, in fact, have long been known to traditional architecture. Nikolai Malinin found in her ideas about bionics, and "transformability" and "atectonicity". The only difference is that today the wavy wooden frames of buildings, considered to be the height of ingenuity, are designed on a computer, while ancient churches “without a single nail” were built by eye… “It remains only to be surprised that such modern themes are found in the architecture of the 11th century! And this is not only a demonstration of the antiquity (and, therefore, strength) of wooden buildings, but also an amazing feeling that wooden architecture is timeless,”the curator says.
One of the main virtues for which architects value wood architecture so highly is, of course, its authenticity. Everything here is too lively and honest - both the material, and the designs, and the image - in order to be able to lie or attach something fake at the request of the customer. Wooden architecture develops according to its own organic laws - a separate hall is devoted to this process at the exhibition, in which an animated film is shown about the fact that the structure of a leaf can serve as a prototype of a constructive scheme, and the domes of temples "grow" from the umbrella structure of dandelions. No less clearly the relationship of wooden architecture with nature is illustrated by a lyrical couple entitled "Loneliness in a Landscape", demonstrating how the "world draft and silence" enveloping the slender wooden churches of the Russian north are becoming one of the key concepts of the world-recognized poetics of architect Peter Zumthor.
Zumthor is just one of the stars of modern wooden architecture, which carefully selects its heroes and creators. The exhibition also features objects by Tadao Ando, Renzo Piano, Thomas Herzog, Eduard Callinan, Herman Kaufman, Sami Rintal. It is very important for the organizers of the exposition that the Russian masters are not inferior to Western masters in their ingenuity: Alexander Brodsky and Totan Kuzembaev, Evgeny Ass and Yuri Grigoryan, Nikolai Belousov and Dmitry Dolgoy. True, if the geography of western objects is truly unlimited, then practically all Russian examples of modern wooden architecture are concentrated on the territory of the Pirogovo resort near Moscow. This quite logically led to the resort becoming the official partner of Parallels and implementing such an effective and educational project. We can only hope that the efforts of the exhibition organizers to promote the "wooden way of life" will be picked up by Russian architects.
