The competition, which started in November last year, brought together mainly students and recent graduates of architecture universities. The participants had to design a small pavilion - a showroom that could be easily assembled and placed on the street. As for the architectural solution of this building, it could have been obtained by anyone - the participants were limited only by the footage (15x6 m) - but they had to present the products of Electra in the most favorable light.
In total, about 50 works were submitted for the competition, 8 of them were shortlisted, and it was these projects that were exhibited on February 2 at the Bulthaup gallery. It should be noted that young architects interpreted the theme of the pavilion in different ways. Someone focused on functionality, someone on how to reflect the symbolism of cycling, and someone did prefer the promotion of their own ideas to the competition.
The Yaroslavl architect Alexander Lebedev decided to literally express its content in the forms of the pavilion. The display windows are reminiscent of a bicycle sprocket, and the roof, sheathed with thin strips of plywood, curves into the side wall in the same way as the frame of a regular bicycle tends to the rear wheel.
Bureau23, which includes Arseniy Brodach, Manas Chozhobekov and Vadim Zamula, also used a tree in its project, ideally emphasizing the exceptional environmental friendliness of such a mode of transport as a bicycle. But the dynamics and silhouette of the two-wheeled iron horse are introduced into the architectural image in a completely different way: in this pavilion, the main thing is the roof, which is connected to the street by means of a narrow ramp, and a spiral staircase to the interior space.
Mikhail Deev and Gleb Nikanorov tried to emphasize the exposition function of the projected structure. For this, display cases are screwed to the main volume of the pavilion, where bicycles of six Elektra lines are displayed. The roller blinds used inside these boxes create a winning backdrop for bicycles and can also serve as a screen for commercials and video clips. True, the excessive theatricality of the presentation forces us to compare the resulting pavilion, rather, with a jewelry store than with a showroom of fashionable bicycles.
The most non-trivial project was proposed by a group of architects who called themselves the "Hitek" team. Here, the showcase is equated to a bicycle parking, over which a spectacular awning is stretched, more like a transparent sail. The bike racks themselves are made of circular tubes of three different diameters - such a pavilion from afar can be mistaken for both an information office for tourists and a bus stop, in general, for a very memorable city landmark that cannot be overlooked. However, the place for buyers here is reduced to an annoying minimum - bicycles occupy almost the entire space of the pavilion.
A student from Chisinau Yevgeniy Trifman could become the winner of the competition. But, as the jury noted with regret, the building culture in Russia is not yet ready for the implementation of his project. Here, parking racks are also the main element of the interior, but they do not displace everything else from it. Moreover, the structural scheme of the pavilion is based on the same racks, only greatly enlarged - the architect proposed to insulate the metal frames and sheathe them with wood, and three walls are completely glazed.
The jury named the project of Andrey Ukolov and Ekaterina Osipova, architects from St. Petersburg, as the winner of the competition. It is based on the solution of a simple functional problem - placing and exposing the maximum number of bicycles in a limited area. The walls of the pavilion, they are also showcases, consist of rectangular cells, a kind of whatnots stacked on top of each other in a checkerboard pattern. Bicycles are displayed in these "cells", and the internal space is freed up for customers and store employees. Bicycles can be viewed from the outside as well as from the inside. This extremely simple and intelligible solution ideally corresponds to the spirit and tasks of a small conceptual pavilion, which ultimately determined the choice of the jury.
The winners of the CYCLE HOME competition received diplomas, a small cash prize (1000 USD), Electra bicycles and the right to implement their project in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
