On this day, a rehearsal for the Victory Parade was held in the city, because of which all main highways were paralyzed by kilometer-long traffic jams, which delayed or did not allow many of the invited guests to the ceremony. Jury member Mikhail Filippov, for example, ran into the hall after the end of the official part of the evening and then bitterly complained to the laureate Nikolai Belousov: “I should have awarded you, and there are tanks on Leningradka!..” However, to be honest, the problems of the “Golden Section” 2011 began long before the tanks.
First of all, only 51 works were submitted to the review competition, held every two years and this time evaluating projects completed by Moscow architects in 2008-2011. In 2009, for comparison, there were 100; in 2007 - 150, but now, when it was time to see what was designed and built during the crisis, it turned out that the competition barely collects a quorum. And if once a whole labyrinth was built in the foyer of the Central House of the Architect from the tablets of the participants, in which one could get lost, then this year its space was almost not used. Fortunately, the organizers did not place the existing tablets on the walls of the foyer, as is done in the Central House of Artists most often, but tried to compensate for the modest amount of work by inventing very unusual stands for them. In the plan, each stand had the shape of a five-pointed star, "embracing" the column, and tablets were placed between its rays. Combined in pairs, they resembled book spreads, and in order to "read" each of them, visitors had to cut more than one circle around the columns.
Of the 51 works submitted to the "Golden Section 2011", only 25 turned out to be realizations. A figure that in itself more than eloquently testifies to the impact of the crisis on architecture. Moreover, I think, the crisis is not only and not so much an economic one, because Moscow is a city in which financial flows never completely dry up. A much more difficult phenomenon that the professional community had to face was the change in political course. On the one hand, the resignation of Yuri Luzhkov made architectural opposition meaningless, for there is no longer a style that needs to be resisted, that needs to be fought. On the other hand, the new leadership of the city not only stopped most of the construction projects inherited from the "Luzhkov regime", but questioned the very expediency of further development of many districts of the capital. All this affected the results of the "Golden Section" in the most direct way: most of the implementations are not too fresh and are rather weak in architectural terms, the projects (again in large quantities) are timid and secondary.
As you know, the works submitted for the competition are selected twice. First, the jury (this year was headed by the architect Timur Bashkaev) forms a long list of nominees, and then the committee (this year it includes Yuri Volchok, Vladimir Plotkin, Sergey Skuratov, Alexander Skokan and Sergey Tumanin) selects the laureates from them. And although Timur Bashkaev assured the guests of the ceremony that the selection criteria were simple and reinforced concrete: the jury tried to find the best projects - both in terms of the originality of the architectural concept and quality, some of the experts' decisions frankly puzzled.
For example, in the “Implementation” section, the list of nominees included the Linkor business center on the Khodynskoye field of Mosproekt-4 - a building in black-and-white speckled masking windows. Actually, only the name is new in it - the project was being implemented as the Club of Foreign Intelligence Veterans (that's why the disguise is so serious), but during the construction process, apparently, it turned out that one floor would be enough for the intelligence officers, and the rest of the area was adapted for offices. Why at the same time he became "Linkor" is also not very clear: in St. Petersburg, for example, there is a business center of the same name, only there it is built on the embankment, next to the "Aurora", and looks like a cruiser itself. The capital's "Linkor" - a triangular hulk with rounded sides without windows and doors - ended up on a former airfield, and in this, like in tanks for a holiday, for the sake of which the whole city is doomed to traffic jams, there is something elusively Moscow.
However, there were no unknown works among the nominees at all. Nikolay Belousov's “Dom-Bridge” was a laureate of the recent festival “Under the Roof of a House”, the Center for Specially Protected Natural Areas “Nuvi at” by the “City-Arch” workshop received a Golden Diploma at the last “Zodchestvo”, metro stations “Mitino” and “Volokolamskaya” have been published many times in the press. The two most realistic contenders for the Golden Section were the Sergey Kiselev & Partners workshop on Ostozhenka and the reconstructed Chelyabinsk Pipe-Rolling Plant (a team of authors led by Sergey Ilyshev and Vladimir Yudanov). The first is an example of the most delicate and at the same time very stylish construction in the historical center of Moscow, an attempt to rehabilitate a street that suffered greatly from the construction boom of the 1990s. The second is a mind-boggling injection of color designed to transform an industrial facility into a living and comfortable space. The factory painted in all colors of the rainbow, by the way, is likely to win the popular vote, the results of which will be summed up at the end of May at Arch Moscow, but in the main race the project was disqualified: the committee considered this work to be a work of design rather than architecture. “In addition, it is not at all clear from the photographs to what extent the project took place in terms of creating comfortable working conditions,” architect Sergei Tumanin told our portal. As for the residential building on Ostozhenka, it was actually also removed from the distance: as Sergey Skuratov explained for Archi.ru, the complex is not yet finished and "there are a number of questions for him."
The winner of the "Golden Section 2011" in the nomination "Implementation" was the architect Nikolai Belousov - perhaps the most famous Russian designer working with wood today. Several of Belousov's projects took part in the competition, but he received the prize not for them, but for the aggregate of merits, "for a modern reading of traditions." The second gold plate was awarded to Grigory Mudrov and the "Firm" MARSS "headed by him for the project of reconstruction of the federal monument - the Lobanov-Rostovsky house. In principle, this award can also be easily attributed to the category of "cumulative merits": the restoration was carried out for so long that the architects themselves do not really remember when they took up this project. All these years, they courageously guarded the mansion from hasty decisions and distortions, restoring the monument millimeter by millimeter. Professor of Moscow Architectural Institute Yuri Volchok called this work an example of "responsive restoration": the object, which has been returned to its original appearance, at the same time meets all the requirements of modern reality.
Sergey Skuratov was the last to present the award to the microphone, and the audience prepared to hear the name of the winner in the "Projects" nomination. But Skuratov did not open any envelopes and in general did not say a word about the projects: the last "Golden Section" was awarded to the famous architect Alexander Larin, whose 75th anniversary last year went unjustly unnoticed. “In fact, this year we awarded not works of architecture, but people - a restorer, an architect and a Master,” Sergey Skuratov himself comments on the results of the competition. “And in this situation, I consider such a solution to be the best: among the projects that participated in the review, there was not a single unconditional leader.” “We chose those who are most devoted to the profession,” agrees Sergei Tumanin. “In general, the conservative point of view on which our profession is based has won.”
