Let's start with the fact that this year the very structure of "Arch of Moscow" has radically changed, which over the previous fifteen years has managed to become almost native, "classic". So, if earlier the main section "Architecture" was located on the second floor, embracing the commercial exposition around the perimeter and periodically invading it, now it has moved to the uppermost, third floor, and all kinds of finishing and furniture firms at the central level of the CHA unconditionally dominate. The filling of the first floor has also changed - earlier its space served to accommodate conceptual projects and turned into a labyrinth of many separate stands, and this year it is delimited by high walls into two long corridors - in one i-gorod Skolkovo reigns, in the second - the works of nominees for the Avangard Prize, the main competition within the framework of the current exhibition.
The core of the entire exposition, its compositional and ideological center, of course, was the exhibition of Vladimir Plotkin, the architect of the year 2010. Located in the foyer of the second floor, it becomes that central “interchange hub” from where the acquaintance of visitors with “Arch Moscow” begins - someone goes to commercial expositions, someone to festival projects, and someone, inspired by the poetry of Plotkin's laconicism, immediately rises to the third floor, hoping to continue acquaintance with high-quality architecture.
The space allotted for the presentation of the architect of the year was fenced off by Vladimir Plotkin with four white parallelepipeds, spaced away from each other so that convenient passageways for visitors would form between them. In this structure, if you wish, you can see a paraphrase of the quarterly perimeter building - a typology so masterfully mastered and sincerely loved by Plotkin. And as in any real quarter, all life here is concentrated inside, remaining unobvious for those who just walk past the snow-white "boxes".
Four internal "facades" play the role of stands: one of them contains monitors showing three-dimensional models of projects and buildings of TPO "Reserve", and three others have wide rectangles filled with different volumetric patterns made of the same snow-white plastic. Somewhere it is a rigid geometric grid, somewhere diagonals and rhombuses, somewhere, on the contrary, careless strokes and complex polygonal patterns. From time to time they are illuminated from the inside and then small silhouettes of people flicker in them - however, even without this clue, the installations immediately recognize the Plotkin houses, the architectural image of which is largely created with the help of facade graphics. If you wish, you can name specific analogs - a house on 3rd Frunzenskaya Street, for example, or the famous Airbus, or last year's project for Factory Russia. However, the architect himself does not hide that the heroes of this exhibition were not fragments of previously completed projects, but improvisations as such, artistic exercises, with which work on the image of any new building begins in the studio. In fact, at Arch Moscow, Plotkin shows a kind of creative laboratory - a space in which an architectural image is born before our eyes. Probably, that is why exactly white was chosen as the main (and only) color - here the architecture is created from scratch. And in this sense, the exposition of the architect of the year, of course, perfectly matches the idea of the entire current "Arch of Moscow", the majority of the participants and audience of which are young designers interested in a "visual aid", a reference point, a wise mentor, finally.
The space of the third floor is almost equally divided: in the main hall there are Russian bureaus, on the left and on the right - foreign ones (including the “City named Spain”, which we have already written about), and in the far appendix of the galleries there is a youth competition of furniture ideas, a competition diploma works and stand "Architectural Schools of Russia". The first thing that a visitor sees when he climbs to the top floor is the MAO tribune, pasted over with scarlet slogans in the spirit of the Russian avant-garde. "MAO for an open competition for Zaryadye!" - from this inscription, when studying the stand, it literally dazzles in the eyes. However, you gradually realize what's what: the Moscow authorities are considering the possibility of building a parliamentary center, that is, a new State Duma, on the site of the Rossiya hotel, and the architects are outraged, firstly, that this is being done without a competition, and secondly, because that a huge territory in the center of the city, if it is occupied by deputies, will forever be excluded from public life. On two video screens, all kinds of cultural and architectural figures urge the authorities to come to their senses, and the Moscow Architectural Institute shows the diploma project for the renovation of Zaryadye. It is not difficult to decipher this message: even students think more progressively and socially than the officials who run the city.
Some other projects included in the exposition are also charged with a certain polemical pathos: for example, Arch Group is showing a project of a Russian cultural and spiritual center in Paris, which a couple of months ago caused a flurry of criticism in the press, and the "Ass Architects" located directly opposite to the infamous "Perm Wall ". The rest of the participants in the section can be counted literally on one hand: Ardepo exhibited the reconstruction of a country house, Timur Bashkaev - the already well-known project New Land (he will give a lecture about him on Saturday, May 28), the architectural studio Dmitry Pshenichnikov and Partners "- sketches of residential buildings of the Vostochny cosmodrome. Only two projects were shown by Mosproekt-4 - the reconstructed Moscow House of Photography and the Linkor business center on Khodynskoye Pole, which is also present at the exhibition of the Golden Section nominees (on the mezzanine floor). In general, the modesty of self-presentation is a key quality of this year's architectural stands, and it seems to be explained by the same economic crisis, in which one cannot believe absolutely on the floor below. But the fact remains: if the commercial exposition this year barely fit into the space allotted to it, then some of the architects were even forced to unite in the name of economy, due to which very unexpected alliances were born. Thus, the already mentioned Mosproekt-4 was docked with STIM Remservice LLC, which deals with cottages and artistic painting in the interior, and Alexandra Fedorova's AB modestly huddled with its only tablet at the end of the stand of the workshop of Levon Airapetov and Valeria Preobrazhenskaya Totement / Paper. Interestingly, the latter, on the other hand, was supported by a commercial exposition, it is not known how it ended up among architectural firms - a stand with a frozen vortex of color film glorifies the art of home theater.
Apart from the glaring slogans of the MAO, the most colorful in design and rich in content in this section turned out to be "prefabricated" stands of young people. Project "5 - 2011" brought together the works of five bureaus - "Studio MEL", group "A2", "PlanAR", SL project and za bor, and "New Workshops" presented a portfolio of teams such as "Children of Iofan", "Architectural Bureau Bakushin and Kiselev”,“Vi project”and“Traditional architecture + design”. Frankly, these expositions, unlike many neighboring ones, I want to study carefully and for a long time, so non-trivial, serious and at the same time witty are the projects of young architects who have not yet been burdened with either age spleen or the burden of copper pipes.
The same positive impression remains from the study of the exposition of the first floor, where, as already mentioned, the nominees for the Avangard Prize were housed. As you know, 20 participants selected by the curator (this year out of 109) submit their portfolios and specially created projects to the competition. In the announcements of the Arch of Moscow, it was indicated that young architects would express their opinion on the theme of Education, but at the exhibition itself it turned out that this meant a very fantasy genre of public education - the reading-hut. What kind of "huts" are not there! The typology "library in the forest" provided the authors with the widest field for experiments, and the opportunity to use any materials and technologies allowed to give the volume of the XXI reading room the most intricate form. The conceptual projects of the contestants are even more bold. Floating houses for pensioners Artyom Ukropov, Nikita Asadov's cottage soaring in the air (the height of the house can be adjusted with a special cable), the multicellular urban structure of Ekaterina Ageeva and chairs for observation by Daria Listopad - these and other works make one believe that the potential of domestic architecture is huge, and dreams of its competitiveness are by no means groundless.
“There will be a new Russia here,” promises a poster of Boris Bernasconi at the stand dedicated to the Skolkovo project, but so far it seems that the next section of the exhibition has much more chances to fulfill this promise. However, it cannot be ruled out that the innovation city will focus on young people, for whom innovation and experimentation are an integral part of their chosen profession.