When a dear person leaves, we begin to remember him. Thinking about him, looking for what they were going to say, do, but did not have time. Or vice versa - to cherish good memories, to talk about what a person was dear to us. It just so happened that death becomes a reason to draw the line, to stop for a minute in the midst of the rush of bustle, to take a closer look at oneself, at others, at the past and present. We publish short memoirs about Andrei Gozak.
Karen Balyan, Chairman of the Russian Branch of the Union of Architects of Armenia (ROSAA), 19.04.2012:
Someone said that all death is sudden.
When you learn about the death of a person who three weeks ago at your home discussed the preparation of a book for publication with you, it seems absolutely incredible.
We talked about a book dedicated to the Yerevan modernists of the 60s-70s Artur Tarkhanyan, Spartak Khachikyan, Hrachya Poghosyan. I was leaving for Armenia and decided that I would call him after my return. Tomorrow I was going to do it …
Three decades ago we were introduced in Yerevan by his friend Spartak Khachikyan. All modernists were friends of Gozak - in Moscow, Helsinki, Tallinn, Yerevan …
For everyone, this death is sudden and irreparable.
Vitaly Stadnikov, chief architect of the city of Samara, 2012-20-04:
It is believed that a person walks vertically, differing in this from a monkey.
Gozak walked horizontally, different from the monkeys crawling up.
Without earning the general's shoulder straps, he gathered around him an innumerable army of admirers and, of course, admirers … of good architecture. Just "good" - he knew how to explain the most difficult things so simply.
- I cook fish soup - salmon with cream, navy-style pasta, students will come, they carry whiskey.
- Why do they visit you all the time?
- And now I give them lectures at home, so as not to carry slides.
If anyone could endow modernists with spirituality, it was he. Above any logic, directly to feelings, he fell in love with Aalto, Melnikov, Leonidov, or with wood or brick, with everything real, without accepting anything false, synthetic. He simply kept the cedar cone all his life, which his father sent him from the camp: and it is no longer necessary to explain why it is not normal to substitute a genuine copy with a copy.
Now I went to work as an architectural official in our beloved Samara with Gozak, where he built a beautiful building of the regional library. Observing how amicably and recklessly colleagues destroy the memory of the city, I remember this bump and think: Lord, give these people love for yourself and your ancestors. How Andrei Pavlovich gave it to everyone around him.
Remembering Gozak, one should smile, not shed tears. Despondency is a sin!
See articles by Andrey Gozak, and an essay about one of his latest exhibitions: Space and Light by Andrey Gozak.
Video of the Museum of Architecture from the presentation of the book by Andrey Gozak
about the project of the People's Commissariat for Industry of Ivan Leonidov, March 2012:
