At the end of last week, a new pavilion of the Center for Contemporary Art “Garage” was opened in Gorky Park, designed by the “world-renowned Japanese architect” (as it is now accepted to represent him) Shigeru Ban. The pavilion opened an exhibition dedicated to the temporary pavilion of Gorky Park and equipped with a meaningful motto "from Melnikov to Ban", which denotes the two poles of the history of the park's architecture: on the one hand, the "Makhorka" pavilion, from which the glory of Konstantin Melnikov began, on the other side, Shigeru Ban. "Garage" in the middle, it is also built into this scheme in its own way, because it moved from the Bakhmetyevsky garage, built by Melnikov, straight to Ban (however, not quite straight, in the summer the projects of "Garage" lived in a light, oval and white, pavilion, built by Alexander Brodsky).
In September, photos of cardboard columns, taken from behind a fence by curious historians of architecture and art, began to appear more and more on various social networks in September. There is indeed an intrigue - everyone knows how difficult it is in Russia to build something for a foreign architect from the beginning to the end: we are not talking about the offices of foreign companies and not even about the country villas that exist, but about something truly public, exhibition or theatrical. Of the works of this kind that happened here, I recall only small and very temporary projects, all mostly from Nikola-Lenivets of the Kaluga region. We can say that the Bana pavilion continues this tradition too, taking a step from a small installation in the forest to an exhibition pavilion in the park.
Both the exhibition and the organizers put the main emphasis on the temporality of the Shigeru Bana pavilion. He was invited, having carefully chosen, precisely as a master of temporary architecture, who built his recognizable language (and there is no way to be "stars" without such a set of iconic features) on the theme of collapsible, cardboard and paper architecture. The pavilion has already become almost accepted to be called "cardboard". However, in fact, it does not look like cardboard, or even temporary (unless, of course, we take into account the aesthetic irony of Grigory Revzin: “… some people involuntarily have a hope that this is not for long”).
An oval spread out on the ground, with a wide white flat roof pancake, is surrounded by a dense row of cardboard tubes, varnished for protection from the weather and therefore dirty brown. From a distance, the pipes seem to be either plastic or painted with oil paint, and one may wonder why they were painted in such a strange color, when they could have been made, for example, white or black. But this is only if you do not know what Shigeru Ban is famous for. Everyone, of course, knows and therefore is not surprised, but comes closer and examines the pipes, revealing signs of their cardboardness under the varnish: thin spiral contours of the coils of compressed paper.
Cardboard pipes are arranged unevenly around the pavilion: on the main "front" facade facing the park alley, they smoothly part, forming a kind of portico, in the center of which (to cool the ardor of lovers of classical allusions) instead of an intercolumnium there is a pillar that needs to be bypassed to get inside through the automatic doors of the glass wall hidden behind it. But the classic allusions do not disappear - whatever one may say, the pavilion looks like a tholos temple, elongated horizontally and equipped with a completely frontal facade. This is how the architects of the 1970s experimented with history, "cleaning" the schemes, changing the scale and proportions. True, the later Moscow-Luzhkov trick of postmodernism switched to pipes instead of columns, which somewhat discredits the method - but let's be tactful: here, firstly, the pipes look better (albeit similar to plastic ones), and, secondly, we all know why pipes appeared here and why are they needed.
They are needed to make the "star" authorship of the pavilion obvious. Shigeru Ban builds from cardboard pipes - here they are, on the facade, like a sign. Although the pavilion, as already mentioned, is not cardboard at all, but metal. The walls of the inner rectangular exhibition hall are made of metal structures; the metal ceiling with a large offset rests on them. The outer wall of cardboard tubes does not even touch the ceiling; at the bottom, it does not rely on anything (now it can be seen, while some details are not yet completed).
However, all this is not a secret: according to Vedomosti, the Japanese architect was forced to revise the concept when faced with Russian building codes, but it cannot be ruled out that the pavilion is simply too large. The oval church in Kobe, which became, according to Bana's own admission, the prototype of the pavilion and in which cardboard tubes are the supporting structure, was 15 times smaller, only 150 sq. meters, the area of the paper house in Yamanaka is about 180 sq. m, and finally, a temporary concert hall in L'Aquila - 700 sq. meters, but this is the total area of the outer square, and the inner oval is two times less.
The area of the pavilion in Gorky Park is 2,400 meters, of which 800 m (one third) is occupied by the exhibition hall box, one third is a semicircular entrance hall, and a third is utility rooms; ceiling height 7.5 meters. This made it possible to create a large-scale, high space, as if the customers, missing the lost Bakhmetyevsky garage, had purposely built something similar for themselves. But in comparison with the charming cardboard houses that made the author famous, the pavilion looks overgrown, the connection of which with prototypes turns out to be somewhat far-fetched, or rather, even too direct. Its meaning is easy to determine - the pavilion looks like a celebrity's autograph: now we have our own Shigeru Ban. All the signs are there: an oval, a rectangle, cardboard columns. But only larger. A sort of monument to temporary architecture.
By the way, Shigeru Ban, speaking to journalists, somehow without enthusiasm responded to the question about the "temporary" nature of its construction: you can disassemble, you can not disassemble, it can stand for a long time, if necessary …
If we consider the pavilion as an autograph, then it should be admitted that with his abilities a world-renowned architect could sign a little more picky. Shigeru Ban makes not only ovals and rectangles from cardboard pipes, he weaves arched bridges and domes from them. Take, for example, the temporary studio that he built for his office on the balcony of the sixth floor of the Pompidou Center after winning a competition for a museum branch in Metz - in the form of a semi-cylindrical tube with a honeycomb vault. The museum building itself, covered with a complex mesh sail, is not even talking - although it was this building that delighted the director of Garage, Anton Belov. However, in Moscow it turned out not a supernatural web and not a funny house from a pseudo-bamboo Japanese stockade, but an enlarged autograph.
