It is difficult to imagine a more “summer” theme than “Water” and a more suitable place for the presentation of an issue dedicated to it than the Strelka Institute on Bersenevskaya Embankment. However, as the founder of the publication, architect Sergei Tchoban, said at the opening of the evening, the theme of each issue of “Speech:” is determined based on the real needs of Russian architecture - and there is no doubt that it is high time for Russian cities to turn “face to water”. And the stylish wooden amphitheater on the banks of the Moskva River, which was filled with people that evening, is a wonderful, but still very rare example of humane and artistically impeccable development of the embankments and adjacent territories for our megacities.
“The connection between water and architecture, its role in creating a favorable living environment is much deeper than it might seem at first glance,” says Irina Shipova, editor-in-chief of “Speech:”. “Water is capable of separating and uniting, serving as a natural barrier or a place of attraction, it can be used for utilitarian or aesthetic purposes, it can be both a reality and a symbol”. On the pages of the new issue, a similar duality in the meaning and perception of water spaces in modern megacities is shown using a variety of examples. These are complex projects for the reconstruction of the former port zones (Oslo and Drammen in Norway, Le Havre in France, Stralsund in Germany), and objects, whose investment attractiveness is largely built precisely on the proximity to the reservoir (apartment buildings and suburban settlements), and the rethinking of the typology the most "water" structures - the bridge (bridge-pavilion in Zaha Hadid in Zaragoza) and the pool (aqua center Les Bains des Docks). Art critic Vladimir Paperny wrote for this issue an article on the relationship between Stalinist architecture and water, and his German colleague Bernhard Schultz investigated the phenomenon of "event architecture" in the United Arab Emirates. As always, the magazine also contains a very voluminous and substantial block of interviews: Meinhard von Gerkan, Stephen Hall and Kim Herfort Nielsen reflect on the relationship between water and architecture.
The head of the 3XN bureau also brought to Moscow projects and implementations, the architecture of which was predetermined by the proximity to water. These are the Muziekgebouw hall in Amsterdam (2005), and the University of Southern Denmark in Sonderborg (2007), and Saxo bank (2007) and the headquarters of Horten in Copenhagen harbor Tuborg (2009), and the museum in Liverpool (2010), as well as an as-yet-to-be-implemented project for an aquarium on the shores of the Øresund Strait, in terms of a whirlpool “It’s water that has most influenced the way we work with views and light,” admits Nielsen. - When building near the water, we have to think not only about how it will look from the water and be reflected in it, but also about how it will withstand this neighborhood from a purely constructive and engineering point of view. I would say that it is water that makes us work finer, more accurate and more efficient. " The Moscow audience was no less interested in 3XN projects, in which the bureau implements its famous postulate “Architecture controls people”. The London School of Economics and College in Erestad (Copenhagen) are perhaps the most striking examples of such "behavioristic" design, where masterly thought-out internal planning and a system of visual connections make the educational process as interesting and therefore effective as possible.
The listeners did not let go of Kim Herforth Nielsen for a long time, asking clarifying questions about 3XN design methods, the use of innovative technologies (and the bureau has a special department,engaged in environmental design) and even individual structural units of buildings demonstrated during the performance. At the end of the hour and a half lecture, the architect was asked what he thinks about Moscow, where he was for the first time, and about the venue for the presentation of the magazine. Nielsen admitted that he imagined the Russian capital in a completely different way and was amazed at the scale of both the city and the river on which it was built. “The topic“water and architecture”is really very relevant for you, as I see it now,” the head of 3XN said with a smile, “which means that my Russian colleagues have a lot of very interesting work ahead.”
