Architect Igor Korbut shows at this exhibition a collection of graphics, installations and models of architectural objects created after 1994 by him personally or in co-authorship. The main intrigue of the exposition is that all these are unrealized projects - as if they were taken out of the architect's basket and staged a retrospective. The name of the exhibition, however, is not devoid of guile: Korbut was not only an architect, who first worked in the team of Yuri Platonov, and then designed the development of Khodynskoye Pole and the reconstruction of the Pushkin Museum under the supervision of Andrei Bokov. Korbut is also an artist, a participant in "paper" exhibitions in Moscow, America and Britain, so that his works, even taken from a non-existent "basket", do not look like boring auxiliary material of the designer.
Models are placed in a small but well-lit space of the VKHUTEMAS gallery, the rest of the exhibits hang on the walls. Projects include plans for coastal zones, museums, office centers and open spaces. It is interesting to observe how the sketches located in different corners of the hall overlap with each other.
For example, on a pair of collages "Parallel Moscow", two straight lines in aluminum colors are fixed, intersecting over multi-colored maps of the city. You might think - if the lines intersect, then where are the parallels? But if we turn 180 degrees and take a few steps forward to the Parallel Bronx model, created in the same year, the architect proposes to hide the entire infrastructure, including transport, and housing in a parallelepiped with a cross section of 60x60 meters and a length of 6 miles, raised above the ground. Parallel Moscow, apparently, works on the same principle. The chain of experiments with the "aboveground" is not interrupted at this point, and the architect uses a similar technique when developing his version of the reconstruction of the Pushkin Museum. Pushkin. The main building of the museum is surrounded by a ring raised above the ground. This "tiara" is supposed to tie the museum branches scattered throughout the surrounding neighborhoods so that museum visitors can move around the complex without going down to the ground.
At some point, it begins to seem that "taking off from the ground" is almost the central theme of the entire exposition. Whether on purpose or by accident, this theme is supported by other works. In the projects of the Museum of Aviation and Cosmonautics on Khodynskoye Pole, made in various techniques, the "oval" roof soars upwards. The flight is also felt in the project for Gagarin Square: there is a tower that looks like a rocket and a monumental arch. When Korbut projects "earthly reality", it also turns out to be some kind of cosmic one. Whether it's a whimsical sketch of a zoo in Harbin or a project to rehabilitate the Douro River in Portugal with transparent recreational bridges. Even the new exhibition area at the All-Russian Exhibition Center turns out to be like an imitation of a runway.
After graduating from the Moscow Architectural Institute, Igor Korbut worked in the studio of the famous modernist of the 1970s Leonid Pavlov, whom he considers to be his teacher; in his student years he was close friends with the son of the great avant-garde artist of the 1920s Ivan Leonidov. One can feel how this was reflected in the architect's work: sometimes he gravitates towards monumentality, but tends to experiment, but he always adheres to his own principle: "simplicity-modesty-clarity-ingenuousness-naturalness and sincerity." It is worth paying attention to this formula: after all, one could say about simplicity in one word, but here there are unexpectedly many words. One might even say that a very complex form is used to express a simple meaning.
A similar approach is observed at this exhibition everywhere: the complex pretends to be simple, and the simple is complex. Sketches and layouts are colorful, like the avant-garde of the 1920s, and artistically careless, like (for example) those of the underground artists of the 1970s: sometimes cardboard, sometimes foam, sometimes aluminum. These are completely unglamorous layouts, they cannot be shown to the customer, the customer will not understand this. But they are ideal for a small art exhibition, a materialized attempt to stretch a thread from Leonidov (or Tatlin) in our time. So, although some of the models were made for very specific projects, the exhibition with its careless multicolor is as detached from life as Korbut's objects are off the ground.
The exhibition will run until April 23.
