Archi.ru: Alexey Alexandrovich, you started your professional career in the workshop of Vladimir Stepanovich Kubasov. What did the work with this master give you for the formation of your personal style and understanding of architecture?
Alexey Ivanov: I consider Vladimir Stepanovich to be my first real teacher in architecture. Kubasov was my supervisor on my diploma, and these six months turned out to be important for understanding the profession. After graduation, I asked to see him in the workshop. Being then at the peak of his fame after the Moscow Art Theater and the newly built "Khamerovsky Center" (WTC), energetic and open to new ideas, Kubasov was an image of an ideal architect and still remains for me an example of talent and success in the profession, which I aspire to to follow. We came to the studio on Monday, and each of us already had several sketches of Vladimir Stepanovich on the table, on which we had to work. Sometimes we tried to argue with his proposals, but he was adamant: "You came empty-handed, so do as I ask, then take time for your own version." Here, look, the only graphic sheet that hangs in my office is his sketch - a constant reminder to me how to work and what should be on the table every Monday at my architects. It turns out, unfortunately, not always …
Then, in the late 1980s, at the invitation of Andrei Vladimirovich Bokov, I moved to work at SIAS, and this was the second very important experience for me working with the Master, which also determined a lot for years to come. It is to Andrei Vladimirovich that I owe my understanding of what a figurative, literary approach to architecture is. He taught me that the most important thing in working on a project is a clear statement of the problem and the search for the most intelligible solution.
Archi.ru: Many designers of your generation worked for Kubasov and Bokov, but the opportunity to try yourself as an architect in the United States in those years was frankly exotic. How did you end up in America?
AI: A happy coincidence of circumstances - you can't say otherwise. The restoration of relations between countries and families gave me the opportunity to get a postage in America, work there, and even organize one of the first Soviet-American architectural exchanges in the USSR. I myself worked for almost a year in a bureau that was engaged in the design of mass housing, hotels and shopping and entertainment centers. The approach to work, its intensity, design terms, the manner in which the material was presented and the relationship with the customer, of course, were very different from ours, but this is precisely why this experience turned out to be invaluable for me. I remember that in a week we could make a draft of the layout of the village and 5 draft designs of houses, and in 3-4 months we could already completely build it. America showed me how to really work, taught me to respect the cult of labor. But, to be honest, when I imagined that I would be doing nameless projects for another five years like this without unbending before I could somehow declare myself as an architect, the thoughts of emigration disappeared. I closed this question for myself once and for all, and after returning from the States, I took up private practice.
Archi.ru: Perhaps one of the main distinguishing features of the Archstroydesign company is that you work in a variety of styles and genres. Did you initially rely on the diversity of the creative method?
A. I.: Yes, we are recognizable precisely by the diversity. This is also a position. Maybe not the best, but if you define a style as a set of planning or visual techniques and details, then you are right. For me, style is more of an ideology. It seems to me that the fact is that I was born and raised in Moscow. This city, with its incomprehensible variety of architecture and environment, literally forces you to try yourself in different styles - almost all seem equally appropriate. “Relevance” can be a key definition in a design approach. Each new task determines its own solutions.
Historicism in architecture as a direction and a search for roots has always interested me very much. Those. an architectural event, be it a master plan, volume or interior, must have the logic of its appearance on this site, a history and a distinct image and must have a chance to be built in the form in which you came up with it. In general, I prefer to answer different architectural questions in different ways. And I think this diversity is not so bad - you must admit that it is impossible to build in the center, in Zhulebino and outside the city in the same way.
Archi.ru: Is your company just as open to work with different typologies?
AI: We are actively designing community centers, office complexes, and suburban housing; although in recent years, urban planning projects and projects for the integrated development of suburban areas prevail among our orders. In particular, over the past 10 years we have built more than 30 villages: about half of them are located in the Moscow region, the rest are in various parts of the country. This is the Leningrad Region, and the Krasnodar Territory, and Ufa, Rostov-on-Don, Penza, Kirov, even Khabarovsk. According to my calculations, more than 10 thousand people live in our houses.
Archi.ru: To what extent has the recent economic crisis affected the projects of suburban settlements? Are they still in demand?
AI: I'm not sure that the term "crisis" is correct, rather, stabilization, a return to pragmatism. In his article in Kommersant, Stepan Solzhenitsy once noted that "the crisis is generally a largely subjective category." Of course, the order structure changes. Nowadays, not such pretentious housing is becoming in demand, as it was in the recent "pre-crisis" past. Plus, for several years now, in our urban planning projects, we have been developing the idea of a polycentric organization of development, which implies the creation of several functionally identical centers of attraction within the framework of one project, which allows us to uniformly saturate residential buildings with infrastructure facilities and remove the traffic load from one area. In addition, the very territories with which we have to work are gradually increasing - now we are designing on an area of 500 hectares, and even on 1000 hectares. Such large-scale sites open up completely new opportunities for architects both in terms of the general plan and in terms of typology. For example, we are engaged in a project for the complex development of the peninsula in Myakinino, where several micro-districts, at the request of the customer, will be located on an impressive single stylobate. Near Pereslavl-Zalessky we are finishing the construction of the multifunctional resort "Golden Ring".
I would like to note that we have participated in almost all mega-projects near Moscow. In Rublevo-Arkhangelskoye, for example, Bassenian Lagoni Architects (USA) jointly designed cluster development. It was a very interesting experience of introducing a new type of housing into Russian practice: small houses (with an area of about 300 sq.m.) were located on small plots (0.05 hectares), in fact, they were "connected" to a single circulatory system of roads and public spaces, but at the same time, each of the households was guaranteed the necessary privacy. And groups of 5-6 houses unite around a common area.
Archi.ru: Needless to say, while such an urban planning model is more widespread and in demand abroad. By the way, how often do you have to work together with foreign colleagues or participate in tenders with them?
AI: Quite often. First of all, I will say that I have nothing against the very idea of “foreigners in Russia”. In my opinion, any exchange of experience and ideas is always a blessing. At least my generation has emerged from such an information vacuum that now nothing can eradicate our passion for knowledge and learning. Peter Cook, mocking at the inherent in all, incl. and in Britain, fears of foreign architects says: "What, they have a different electrical circuit, or a different width of the glazing impost?" It is another matter that today Russian architects, in my opinion, are already quite at the level of their Western colleagues, therefore, situations in which a foreign designer is preferred only on the basis of his origin seem to me deeply unfair. It is also true that many architects who came to work in Russia from abroad indulge in outright hack-work - I personally saw, for example, a settlement project made by the Americans, in which there was only one entrance to an area with a million square meters of housing! The famous Dutch landscape planners planted potatoes in my park in the Golden Ring project near Yaroslavl, in missionary zeal, apparently assuming that the natives would be delighted with a fashionable plant unseen in these parts. We were lucky: the natives - the investors - already knew about the potatoes. Unfortunately, the fashion for foreigners, especially among officials, still continues, although I can say that personally my customers who tried to work with foreign architects were mostly disappointed. But architecture is created not by producer countries, but by individuals. This allows masterpieces to appear in Beijing, London, Bilbao, Seattle, Berlin …
Archi.ru: How fully do you fulfill the customer's requirements? Are you trying, for example, to form it?
A. I.: Charles Jencks noted that it is almost impossible to create an architectural work - an icon without the participation of the customer and society, who know what they want. At the same time, the word "almost" is important and gives hope for a chance of gaining independence.
I am not at war with the customer, I always try to hear and understand him, to find the most complete answer to his request. As for education … I think that I definitely shouldn't teach my client to read and write - we most likely won't work well with such a person right away, and I don't see any point in investing my time and energy in him. In general, I am very lucky with my customers - in my entire professional practice I had, perhaps, only two really difficult cases, with all the rest it was possible to agree. And then the customers in their development, like architects, do not stand still, learn to compromise, acquire both taste and curiosity, pushing them to interesting experiments. They need help: they are the only ones who bear the financial risks for our common decisions, and only good architecture reduces the risks, at least some of them. It is also important to remember that only a few are ready to invest in truly innovative technologies that are so popular thanks to architectural magazines all over the world - the bulk of customers work in the genre of mass development, and this must be reckoned with. And you have to imagine what the abstractly beautiful pictures will actually turn into, translated after the romantic enthusiasm of sketching into a working project with its usually poor budget.
Archi.ru: How does the work on the project start for you? Are you personally involved in every project in your workshop?
AI: Yes, I feel responsible for the Archstroydesign brand, and therefore no project is complete without my participation. The original idea is usually mine too. Democracy in inventing somehow did not take root, since there is usually little time for thinking. I believe that the most important thing in work is to turn all your employees into like-minded people. I usually start a project with the development of a plan and a functional diagram - they are born earlier than the image: in order to imagine what the object will be, I must first clearly understand what exactly this object is, what its tasks are. The truth repeated a thousand times remains undeniable: our mistakes as doctors are difficult to correct. Even when it disappears, architecture leaves in ruins, and as Louis Kahn said, only good architecture gives great ruins.
Archi.ru: How many architects work in Archstroydesign and how is the work of the workshop organized?
A. I.: We have 17 designers on our staff: architects, designers, planners. Each architect maintains his own object, sometimes employees unite in small teams in order to do the work. In general, we have a small but close-knit and professional team, which I value very much for its curiosity, responsibility, openness and talent.
