The genre of the architect's monograph, which is quite popular all over the world, is not very actively developed in Russia. If it were not for the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of the Tatlin publishing house, which launched a series of monographic publications in 2006, this type of architectural journalism generally risked not going beyond the boundaries of historical and biographical collections dedicated to the legendary architects of the past. The initiative of the Yekaterinburg publishing house has spawned a representative series of monographs covering the last 5 to 10 years of the practice of a whole cohort of famous Russian architects and giving the reader an exhaustive idea of the most notable projects and buildings. The reverse side of the periodical (up to 5 editions per year) nature of the series has become a magazine format, assuming a soft cover and a uniform, albeit at the traditional high level of design for Tatlin, printing presentation. Those who wanted more were forced to publish monographs themselves, plunging into the specifics of the editorial and design craft at their own peril and risk, attracting familiar critics to write articles or the entire workshop, spread by spread. Thanks to these efforts, the architectural library in recent years has been replenished with several very impressive publications, but not one of them can compare in the completeness of the information presented and the printing excellence with the collection dedicated to Alexander Asadov.
A. Asadov's workshop also chose not to follow the standard path and decided to publish the monograph on its own, relying on the help of the team that once participated in the creation of the ARX magazine. When developing a concept, simply by starting to record everything that needed to be included in the upcoming book - projects completed since the mid-90s, competition concepts, a rich photo archive and biographical information - the authors were faced with the impossibility of accommodating all this in the volume of one editions. And then the team decided to go to a printing experiment and prepare a block of several books, collected in a hard cardboard case. Something similar was done in Europe by the Thames & Hudson publishing house, which released in 2004 Zaha Hadid's famous monograph in a red plastic box. In Russia, the publication was the first experience of a team of architectural monographs of this level and class.
The composition of the project and the content of each element included in it were not immediately determined. As a result, the team settled on a square case format, in which 4 elements would fit into a box: one large book - a monograph by Aleksandar Asadov with 25 of his best projects, two narrow books - a complete catalog of workshop projects and a collection of various materials giving an idea of the history of formation creative method and the inner kitchen of the architect Alexander Asadov, as well as a cardboard digipak with a CD. In fact, all the publications included in the project were prepared and published independently of each other, so that the workshop could use them both separately and, at the end of the entire project, together in the form of a prefabricated case. Each of the books being prepared for publication is a complete printed work, with its own introductory article, artistic photographic portrait (photographer Kirill Ovchinnikov), clear composition, comprehensive content and clear functionality.
The workshop itself, first of all, needed a representative catalog of its projects and buildings, in which it would be possible to demonstrate with all clarity the typological and large-scale range of works skillfully performed under the leadership of Alexander Asadov. As a result, almost 200 objects were collected in five sections: "Urban Development", "Housing", "Business", "Culture" and "Transport". The introductory article was called "High Voltage Architecture" and was devoted to the analysis of the most characteristic features of the author's architecture.
The next implemented element of the project was the book "Top-25", which is a variation on the most common format of a monograph - a collection or collection of the 25 best buildings and projects by Alexander Asadov. In order to avoid subjectivity in the selection of objects, the team used a multilevel voting system, in which the opinion of independent architectural critics was taken into account along with the wishes of the hero of the book. Each object was represented by a series of the most advantageous images, a selection of drawings and a description in Russian and English. The selection was preceded by the article "Inner Freedom", in which the analysis of the work of the architect Asadov was interspersed with quotes from his interviews given to various media over the past ten years. The book ended with an illustrated chronology of the architect's life, in which the sequence of personal events - study, marriage, the birth of children and grandchildren - went in parallel with the events in professional activity: the dates of the completion of projects, the construction of buildings, the receipt of awards and victories in competitions.
The third book cannot be classified in any generally known category. In it, the authors tried to find a way and form to look behind the external, well-known to everyone, albeit a little detached image of the architect Asadov (Alexander Rafailovich is not the most secular person in the architectural community) in order to feel a little closer to this wonderful person. What worries him, how he creates, with whom he is friends, how he brings up children and grandchildren. Of course, the easiest and most obvious way is to ask about all this himself, his colleagues and friends, with whom he ate a pound of salt and painted a tracing paper warehouse. As a result, very different stories related to different periods of Alexander Asadov's life have gathered under one cover, as well as a selection of unique archival materials: old projects, drawings, photographs from a family album and everything that can tell a lot about the life of architects outside the studio. It is no coincidence that the introductory article to this collection is titled "Pair || History", which implies immersion in a parallel reality - the inner life and creative cuisine of the famous architect A. Asadov.
The fourth part of the publishing project is a tribute to the modern fashion for digital ways of presenting information. The CD-disk, packed in a cardboard folder of the same narrow format as the catalog and collection of interviews, contains an original film created by the film crew of the Moscow Center for Contemporary Architecture in 2011 for the anniversary of Alexander Rafailovich and a large personal exhibition in the Central House of Architects. The title of the film echoes the title of the introductory article from the Top 25 book, Inner Freedom. Apparently, it is this concept that most fully, according to the general opinion, reflects the individual peculiarity of the work of Alexander Asadov. In addition to the video, the disc contains 12 more videos of various projects, as well as the portfolio of "A. Asadov's Workshop" in Powerpoint presentation format. All of these materials are sort of a collection of bonus tracks. If we follow the analogy with the branded editions of the world's best film bestsellers, the film itself must be accompanied by additional materials, sometimes interesting, sometimes funny, but in any case not useless. Especially for those who watched the film itself and was imbued with a sincere interest in its creators and the world captured in it. So in our case, everyone who has familiarized themselves with the workshop catalog, studied a selection of the best projects or read a collection of interviews, will inevitably want to extend their acquaintance with the work of Alexander Asadov by watching a film about him or simply making it a rule to keep track of his new projects that are regularly published in various magazines, as well as the Architectural News Agency. The terms of purchase of the publication can be found on the workshop website.
