The festival, which has been held for 12 years in a row, until recently remained the only national show of landscape architects. Now they still have a "Green Project", but there the emphasis is on innovation and environmental friendliness of projects, so the results of painstaking work to create the image of the park and garden can still be seen only in the House on Brestskaya. And these results are traditionally predictable: for every 15-20 projects of a riot of stones and greenery, there are 3-4 really interesting works that can seriously claim the festival's awards. An increasing percentage of nominees every year are urban planning objects - complex renovations of city squares, parks and territories that were not greened at all before - but even this cannot affect the overall sweet-chamber tone of the festival. This is how most adults involuntarily begin to lisp when confronted with small children, so working with soil and plants, apparently, sets architects to that special endless lyricism, which neither sense of proportion, nor often, alas, taste as such is able to resist.
It is curious that this applies both to the projects themselves (and in the open spaces of the same Moscow region, Japanese rock gardens, French parks, and hobbit-style caves are still actively created), and to their presentation: rarely any participant will not write on the iridescent in all shades of green tablets that the garden is a “mirror of the soul” and the main place of its rest, or will not remind that nature is the most precious treasure of mankind. Frankly, the concentration of such common truths, inscribed in especially large fonts, as well as slogans like “Call me, quiet nature…” or “Do good” at the festival is almost prohibitive and makes us look for projects different from the amicably green majority with triple care.
On the one hand, these are land art festivals - Archstoyanie, Cities, Samara NEXT - each of which exhibited 1-2 tablets in the House on Brestskaya (though those who went to Zodchestvo ", The feeling of deja vu inevitably awaits, because the tablets are the same). On the other hand, there are small architectural forms developed for the Dachny Answer program, for example, a gazebo in the form of a half-house of the architect Alexei Nikolashin or a round two-story pavilion with a staircase by Tatyana Kononova (Proektor bureau). The gazebo-yacht of Ivan Kachalov is also very close to them in genre - with a galley (barbecue area), a wardroom for noisy gatherings and an upper deck where you can retire. But in fairness, we note that these certainly very stylish and elegant objects have an extremely indirect relationship to landscape architecture and can just as well participate (and some have participated) in other equally well-known festivals of the House on Brestskaya - "Under the Roof of a House", for example, or "The ABC of suburban construction". Much closer to the theme of the festival and the more interesting are the projects of the Rombostyle studio (the backyard of one of the cottages in Gorki-10) and the Philosophy of Design LLC company (a landscape project in Zhukovka of the XXI century), where the nature of the landscape is completely determined by the architecture of the cottage and becomes an organic continuation plastics and geometry of the volume erected on the site.
It is impossible not to name several of the most interesting urban planning projects presented for the "View from home" competition. This is the complex improvement of the microdistrict No. 52 in the Marfino bureau Planar (wonderful wooden arbors, invented within the framework of the project, were already "lit up" in May of this year at the ARCHIWOOD 2011 competition), and the renovation of the green spaces of the Moscow Zoo ("Mosproekt-4"), and the development of the residential area of Volokolamsk (a group of 3rd year students of the Moscow Architectural Institute), and the "Park Hotel" from the "DK-style" workshop, consisting of many tiny houses scattered over the generously green area. There are, of course, more "sovereign" projects in this category - for example, "Victory Park" in Minsk, or a park on the territory of the Ministry of Energy of the Republic of Tatarstan. And the international experience of Russian landscape painters is presented this time by two projects: the Russian Garden on the territory of the Park of the World in Berlin-Marzand (Mosproekt-4) and, quite unexpectedly, the Russian cultural and spiritual center in Paris (Arch Group "), or rather, its landscape concept.
The hottest "landscape" theme of this year is the reconstruction of the Central Park of Culture and Leisure named after Gorky - formed the basis of the Smart Park project of the Higher School of Landscape Architecture and Design. True, the students approached the problem more broadly and considered the typology of the modern city park as a whole as a kind of "intensive care unit" for the ecology of the metropolis. 17 of the best works are exhibited on the mezzanine floor of the Moscow model hall, and this is perhaps the most picturesque part of the festival exposition. In terms of fantasy and innovation, it can only compete with the exposition of the works of the students of the "Start" school, who created projects for "living" buildings, for example, a "clover house" or a "tree house".
Well, the participants of the so-called “non-competition of the festival” - a parade of installations on the theme “Man's parking”, were not constrained by any conventions. The theme chosen by the curator Sergei Yaralov allowed young architects to reflect to their hearts' content on the role that landscape plays in the present and future of mankind. The answers to this question, as usual, turned out to be very different, and they are united by their sense of humor and a non-trivial view of familiar things. For some, the “man’s parking lot” is a collection of family relics, for others, high-speed elevators launched right between the trees, and for others, it’s just a wall with a big announcement, from which each next generation can tear off the “tongue” with the wise or a funny saying.
