The issue of holding a school is considered anew every year - this event is not included in the annual plan, therefore, in a sense, it is an annual voluntary feat of its organizers. And since there is no place for routine in heroism, the Urban Studio program changes every year - teachers carefully take into account the experience of past studios and strive to diversify and improve the educational process as much as possible. The only thing that remains unchanged is the very structure of training in the summer school: Urban Studio consists of several blocks, including lectures, workshops, and the studio itself. Lectures and workshops take place in the afternoon, leaving students with the choice of listening to lectures, participating in a master class, or even staying on the beach.
This year there were five studios: “Text and story-telling”, “Photo”, “Architecture”, “Materialization” and “New-media”. Each studio is its own, different from others, a special way of finding answers to universal questions that reality poses to modern specialists. Thus, students who chose “Text” and “Photo” for themselves talked about family, home, homeland, profession, striving for the most effective self-expression through words and images. The participants of "Materialization" tried to express themselves through working with the material, and those who studied at "New-media" were engaged in gamification, namely, they developed a game that could make friends of schoolchildren, students in different classes (we are not only talking about age differences, but also about national ones, for example, the studio participants considered a variant of the relationship between two classes - Russian and Jewish).
Those who chose the Studio "Architecture" worked on the theme of the library. The teacher of this studio was the Israeli architect Zeev Drukman - he joined the Urban Studio organizing team four years ago and was directly involved in the development of the concept and programs of the summer school. The first task, a brief clause, was the expression in the model of the image with which the students associate the very word “library”. Zeev especially drew the students' attention to the fact that they should drop the function and for a while forget that the library is a building where books are kept. As a result of such an abstract exercise, the concept of the library appeared as a crossroads, as folds, as windows in a corner: in general, each of the seventeen students of this studio had a different concept.
The next step was to link the concept to a specific site. The studio participants were offered six real-life libraries located in Moscow: library N8 on Chistoprudny Boulevard, combined libraries N59 and 111 on Bolshaya Cherkizovskaya street, library N128 on Polymernaya street, library N171 near Gagarinskaya square, library N248 in Severny Butovo, and library of the Central House of Arts in Granatny Lane. All these institutions are part of the Moscow city library renovation program, so the Urban Studio participants were faced with the task of choosing the most suitable example of a traditional book depository and applying the concept they had invented to it.
It should be admitted that most of the students at this stage were at a dead end. Having come up with spectacular abstract ideas, they were far from immediately able to apply them to a real-life situation with its traffic flows and the density of surrounding buildings. However, Drukman was able to direct each of the students in the right direction, not only to discern a rational kernel in the notion of each student, but also to suggest how to “pull” it into the light. As a result, at the time of the presentation in the Studio "Architecture" there were 12 ready-made projects (some of the students united in groups), consisting of models, details, sections, and most importantly - harmonious concepts of further development of territories. It is interesting that on the same territories, different authors, without saying a word at all, solved the same problems in similar ways. So, on Gagarinskaya Square, they united residential areas, trying to communicate a human scale to the monumental denouement, in Perovo they organized the movement of streams in a new way, in Butovo they relied on the unification of nature and the city.
At the final presentation of the works of all studios, it became clear that even while working on completely different topics and using different ways of self-expression, all students were looking for solutions to the same problems: the relationship between the external and the internal, the private and the general, the abstract and the concrete. By and large, these are the very universal philosophical questions of any work with space and environment, and the fact that all Urban Studio participants were able to answer them can be considered the best proof that the summer school coped with its task one hundred percent.
