The PIGHOUSE project is completely paper-based, in the spirit of the jokes of our architects of the 1980s. It was made by two architects living in New York: Alexander Prusakov and John Lim. The essence of the project is to build a kind of hives for keeping pigs on the flat roofs of houses in revolutionary Cairo. Koi are considered useful by the authors due to the pig's ability to process waste into delicious bacon. Schematically, in the spirit of Bilzho, the full cycle of pigsties functioning is drawn: cars bringing bales of garbage; Egyptian women wrapped in headscarves, scurrying up and down stairs with buckets of food in their hands; and the pig hives themselves in longitudinal and cross sections. Along the way, it turns out that the piglets live on three tiers, that is, in a small high-rise building, on a supply, covered either with an adobe dome, or with a lid that just lift up - and here they are, sausages (the hand should be large, gulliver's and stretch, definitely top).
All this is wildly funny, although it is, shall we say, outright irony in relation to the Muslim tradition, which denies pork as such. It should be noted that the theme of the Muslim world is noticeably sore on the jury of Architizer - the prize of the previous competition, held a year ago, was awarded to a project making fun of the rapid construction in Dubai.
On the other hand, in the victory of the Russian project, drawn in the genre of caricatures, there is something so sweet for the mysterious Russian soul: one involuntarily wants to dream that not all living things from the tradition of our wallets perished under the oppression of fuel, something remained, sprouting, behold, in a new generation; right in the States and takes root.
As if frightened by their own courage, the jury chose two more projects that could smooth over the sharpness of Prusakov's caricature.
One of them is a boring Corbusier or even Niemeyer design for the building of the Chicago Institute for Land Generation (architects Stuart Hicks and Alison Newmeyer). The building consists of long and flat bars, circles and cylinders (I would like to think that it is in them that the earth will be processed, although this is certainly not the case; the institute's task is to make the city's policy more effective). The pathos of this project is modernist horizontality, it is opposed to the traditional Chicago vertical (recall that Chicago is still the birthplace of skyscrapers; well, one of them).
The third winner is the project of the 100-meter tower of the Tokyo Fashion Museum from the Armenian architects Narine Gulkhazyan, Anahit Hayrapetyan, Nairi Abrahamyan. This is where the brilliant (literally and figuratively) visualization and bold form take place - for which, according to jury member Barrichter, the project was encouraged. He really dared: the glass tower dances slightly, wrapped in a lattice of metal rods (the project is called “House in a Dress”, or even “in a Roman toga”). To make everything not so simple, the architects add a lot of bridges-consoles, transitions, taken out by 50 meters, and to the best of their ability, overgrown with a metal mesh. One console, made of red glass, according to the authors' plan, would hang over the street. In a word, this is a different, opposite to Prusakov's caricature, a way of fantasizing: modern, three-dimensional-spectacular, calculated on what the audience will say - oh, how can it not fall. The land institution in this company is the calmest object, this type of fantasizing finally ceased to be spectacular by the end of the Cold War and now evokes only nostalgic and historical associations.
So the jury of the "Competition of Contests" this time proved to be a lover of anthologies and anthologies - each of the awarded projects represents one genre of conceptual (and not so much) fantasy. The competition is planned to be held annually, it will be seen what will happen next. But if the number of winners multiplies at the same rate, then the award in the near future will have to be cut into very thin slices (when the competition was announced, it was said that the winner would receive $ 1,500; details of the division of the award between the three winners were not specified).
