Both of them, to one degree or another, refer to the theme of the 2012 Biennale - “Identities”. Shown in the British School of Design Block City, Goldhoorn summarizes his research over the past few years, beginning with a concept shown at the 2009 Rotterdam Biennale, co-created with Alexander Sverdlov. Since then, it has been expanded and applied for the A101 City of Quarters competition, which is planned to be built on the southern borders of Moscow, and was demonstrated last summer at the Danish Louisiana Museum.
At this exhibition, the main place is occupied by a huge model of the "city", made up of 150 models of different types of residential quarters. Despite the quite modernist regularity of the layout, such development does not seem trivial or monotonous due to the variety of solutions. Each of the "blocks" differs in the type of development - this is a large house that occupies almost all the available space, but compensates for this with its public terraces, and traditional perimeter buildings, and curved plans with buildings-stripes, creating a series of courtyards of different shapes. The same projects are presented in the form of mini-tablets.
Detailed accompanying texts place the curator's ideas in a historical and contemporary context - starting with the turn to cheap prefabricated construction under N. S. Khrushchev. In the current post-Soviet situation, endlessly replicated standard houses (modular city) are combined with expensive "elite" housing (design city), and the architectural quality in the latter case often leaves much to be desired. The ideal answer to this situation, not only in Russia, but also in most other countries, can be the standardization of the size of the quarter. This would make it possible to develop a catalog of diverse and high quality neighborhood projects and apply them in the construction of new districts and cities. The differences between the quarters and the variability of their mutual disposition would allow achieving the variety of buildings that residents of residential areas around the world dream of, giving each of them the desired “identity”.
Despite the innovative approach, one cannot fail to notice the generic signs of modernism in the "Block City" project: this is the desire to simplify and reduce the cost of the process (in this case, design, since although high-quality, but standard projects will be used), some indifference to context and the idea of the architect's social responsibility and his ability to change the life of society for the better. Undoubtedly, the concept of the “city of quarters” takes into account all the weaknesses of “classical” modernism, but its general spirit has been preserved, which speaks of the great vitality of this paradigm.
Exhibition of photographs by Alexei Naroditsky “Cuba. Architecture of Tropical Socialism”(curated by Elena Gonzalez) complements Bart Goldhorn's exposition as an excursion into the past. The main exhibition hall, Artplay, shows the buildings created for the people after the socialist revolution: in 1959-1972. These are stadiums and public buildings, but the most interesting are the types of residential complexes. Immediately after the change in the social system, the new authorities made a decision in the spirit of the romantic utopia characteristic of young "popular" regimes: to build for the poor the same luxurious houses in which the "oppressors" lived. Then the apartment buildings of Havana del Este appeared in the spirit of the luxuriously decorated mansions of the bourgeoisie, but it became clear very quickly that with such an expenditure of time and money, housing for all those in need could not be provided. Cuban architects turned to the experience of the USSR and the United States and in the 1960s created the Chiron system - precast concrete structures.
The modernist style with elements of brutalism has undergone significant changes on the "Island of Liberty", to which Aleksey Naroditsky draws our attention: the facelessness and colorlessness of typical buildings here have been replaced by rich colors, unexpected combinations of volumes, bold formal experiments, and, of course, attention to climate peculiarities. Thus, the Latin American tradition, which greatly influenced the local examples of European styles, was able to successfully rework the line of modernism, which again shows us the already tried way forward in the search for architectural identity - a combination of the best features of the “global” and “local”.
