“Our move to Gorky Park is an exciting new stage in the development of Garage,” Dasha Zhukova admitted yesterday at a press conference dedicated to the project of the temporary pavilion of the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture.
Everyone, of course, is tensely waiting for Rem Koolhaas to deal with the reconstruction of Zholtovsky's "Gear", but life did not stop in place, the program of CSK "Garage" was made up, the question is only for a temporary room. As it turned out, when discussing the candidacy of the architect, the management had no doubts: "Shigeru Ban is a well-known master of the construction of unique buildings in the shortest possible time."
The fifty-seven-year-old Japanese architect really works quite quickly, and the genre of temporary buildings is well known to Banu. He designed many mobile dwellings, shelters for refugees, victims of natural and social disasters, capable of instantly destroying large numbers of people. In 1995, Shigeru Ban was building houses for earthquake victims in the Osaka suburb of Kobe, where the foundations were crates of beer bottles filled with sand, the walls were roll paper, the ceiling was a tent canopy. In the same year, the architect became the official UN emergency advisor. In 2002, he spoke at the Congress of the International Union of Architects in Berlin with a report “Building against disasters. Affordable Sustainability . Ban prefers to experiment with raw materials and environmentally friendly materials. Paper pipes are his know-how. Of the most famous - the project of the Japanese pavilion at the EXPO-2000 World Exhibition in Hannover, a wave-like mesh structure, entirely woven from cardboard tubes. Shigeru Bana's website has a whole section dedicated to paper constructions.
And now he was called to Moscow, which Shigeru Ban will soon decorate with an oval building 6 meters high, with a total area of 2,400 square meters. m. A rectangle will be inscribed in an oval with cardboard columns, the main room of the building intended for exhibitions. The Japanese, he claims, was inspired by Roman baroque cult buildings, in particular the oval shapes of the designs of Francesco Borromini. Where to get cardboard Shigeru Ban has not yet decided finally, although he has already looked after a factory in St. Petersburg that makes paper pipes. They promise that by September a temporary "Garage" will appear at the Pionersky pond in Gorky Park.
The pavilion designed for the Central Park of Culture and Leisure is especially similar to the temporary church that Shigeru Ban built after the 1995 Kobe earthquake. True, that chapel was completely miniature, only 150 sq. m of area (which is 15 times less than the planned pavilion "Garage"). However, like the pavilion of the Central Park of Culture and Leisure, it was also oval: transparent polycarbonate on the outside, a row of paper columns on the inside. There, the architect was also inspired by Bernini's churches. Generally speaking, one gets the impression that Shigeru Ban confuses Bernini and Borromini a little - however, the oval churches were built by both of these architects, although the Borromini spaces are slightly more spacious.
