"There is nothing more permanent than temporary!" - sighed mom, moving to another rented apartment or placing a folded cardboard under the table leg. For Soviet people, "temporary" was a terrible curse. It meant "poor quality", "fake", "hopeless". Life had to be postponed all the time for the future. And let it not be with us! - but our children! - in this bright future, everything should have worked out. In the present, it was only necessary to "turn over". And then there was the phrase: "We are not rich enough to buy cheap things." Expensive ones had to be bought, not because they are beautiful, but precisely because they will last a long time.
Everything has changed before our eyes. Quite different values have become relevant: flexibility, lightness, mobility, mobility, liquidity. It is difficult for architecture to keep up with them: it is, of course, music, but still frozen.
But there is one genre in it where the category of time appears - and not as an interpretation, but as a condition for existence. This is "temporary architecture": exhibition facilities, park pavilions, summer cafes, gazebos. Or, to put it strictly, "a kind of non-capital structures designed for temporary use, which, as a rule, have a lightweight structure, small size, modest budget and limited functionality: representation, food, communication, entertainment."
But is it possible - with all this - to clearly define the boundaries of this concept? After all, there is architecture that was built for a while, but has outlived its term: the Eiffel Tower, the Atomium, the Khrushchev buildings. There is a temporary architecture that preserves the image, but changes material or place: the Crystal Palace, Lenin's Mausoleum, the Misa Pavilion in Barcelona. And there is architecture that was built "forever", but turned out to be "temporary" for various reasons: wars, earthquakes, fires, etc.
The conclusion is obvious: the concept of "temporary architecture" is rather arbitrary. In general, all architecture is temporary. Like human life. But for some reason we do not call our life "temporary." Partly because she has the ability to transform into steamers, lines and other long deeds. Architecture seems to be the most beaten path to immortality. But it is precisely this pathos that clutters our world with absurdly monumental structures. They are so anxious to be registered in eternity that they care little about the adequacy of time and place. "Made to last!" - the architect boasts, hoping that the columns and marble will help him jump into the locomotive of history like a stowaway.
But today man's relationship with eternity is also changing. Equestrian monuments, memorial apartment museums, street names - all this no longer works. Eternity is no longer a motivation. Nobody will read our memoirs, letters, diaries anymore. Yes, we no longer write them, limiting ourselves to posts on Facebook. The future is becoming more and more problematic. It is difficult to guess, not to say - scary. But the present is getting denser and faster. The car is changed every three years, the phone, the computer - even more often. Even a profession - and it is no longer "for life." The cult of travel, the boom in loans - all this indicates that the internal attitude is changing: not to postpone for the future, but to live the present as intensively as possible. It is not for nothing that philosophers started talking about the "society of experiences."
The apartment, the house does not stay away from this race. Our children (let alone grandchildren) will not need our mansions, acquired by such backbreaking work. They will scatter, disperse, and maybe even live in space. And we are already less and less dependent on the place (and more and more - on the availability of the Internet). The boundaries between home and office, work and leisure, reality and virtuality are blurring. Art - the most sensitive weather vane - has long been mobile and interactive: happenings, performances, flash mobs.
It would seem that architecture should not be involved in this fuss - to rush after fashion, to turn into design, to be like gadgets. She would create the opposite pole - stability, reliability, confidence in the future. That is all the more relevant in our country, where already “everything is in vain and everything is fragile”. But at the same time, architecture certainly turns out to be an instrument of enslavement, control and manipulation (the best study of the housing policy of the USSR is called “Punishment by Housing”). The current government is interested in real estate in any other way (like an affiliated developer), and it cannot offer its citizens any other stability (neither in politics, nor in business). But in order to make stone chambers, it is known how righteous the labors must be. Nothing spoils Muscovites like the housing issue - and it is no wonder that ethical values in modern Russian architecture have long been hopelessly reduced. Therefore, it is impossible to identify with it and it does not bring joy. This architecture is not ours, it is not for us and not about us.
Temporary architecture is the only genre capable of responding to the changing demands of society, reflecting our moods and aspirations. The limited temporary existence of the object gives the architect freedom. Frees him from the dictates of the customer, from the inertia and greed of officials, from the whims of buyers. It puts it out of the market, as well as removes the question of getting into eternity. Of course, any architect will tell you that limitations are a blessing, that they are the ones that stimulate imagination, and that in general architecture does not live in an airless space. But our air is too stale.
Perhaps this architecture lacks what is habitually associated with the word "freedom" - fantastic forms, futuristic lines. Which, of course, distinguishes it from the temporary architecture of the 1923 All-Russian Agricultural Exhibition. Then a completely new form came into art, designating the same new - revolutionary - meanings. We have not yet had a revolution, but it seems that the summer boom of pavilion architecture reflected precisely these winter protest moods. When, for once, you want to be together and do something together. However, the feedback is also visible: the Park of Culture, renovated last summer, gave people the feeling that there might be something in the city. And in this sense, temporary architecture turns out to be much more important, meaningful and principled for us than in any country in the world.
And if in the USA urban communities have long become a new subject of architecture (and there are already thousands of "spontaneous interventions" there - the American pavilion at the last Venice Biennale was dedicated to them), then in Russia this process began quite recently. It began, naturally, outside the city, where nature and freedom (and not tempting vaults of palaces). These are Nikola-Lenivets, Klyazminsky boarding house ("Pirogovo"), "ArchFerma", the "Cities" festival, the Siberian "BukhArt". Then, literally two years ago, temporary architecture appeared in city parks: first in Gorky Park, this year - in Muzeon, the Bauman. Penetrated into the former industrial territories (Flacon, New Holland), slowly mastered the embankments, ravines and boulevards: Samara-NEXT, Vologda Activation, Yaroslavl Movement Architecture, Nizhny Novgorod O! Gorod, Sretenka Design Week in Moscow. And just as in nature these objects merged with the landscape, so in the city, temporary architecture does not oppose the existing historical environment (like capital), but, on the contrary, in every possible way provokes a dialogue.
More often, however, our citizens (unlike American ones) rise up for dialogue in order to reject something (for example, the Wall on the Perm esplanade), but it was capital architecture that taught them to do this, spitting on them from the bell tower of its Gazprom scrapers.
Yes, this architecture is not about form, but about space, about people, about self-organization. And beauty here must be sought not in how the beam lies on the counter, but in how these objects are inscribed in the environment, how architects built everything with their own hands in three days, how these objects live … This is not so much a result as a process, and this is another important component of the "time" category. But in the end, we can see behind the temporary architecture a lot of important meanings that our "adult" architecture is not able to convey. The detection of which is the task of the exposure.
For example, “transparency” is as popular in our lexicon as “democracy”, as “fair elections”, as “independent court”. Like everything that you really want, but you can't achieve. That is why “big” architecture reflects this intention purely symbolically - with glass walls of offices. And in Holland even apartments are devoid of curtains: Protestant ethics dictate transparency of private life; if you don't do anything wrong, you have nothing to hide. Our realtors have long understood that “solid glazing” is not at all something that can seduce the buyer of an apartment. The primordial communality of the Russian people was brought to the point of absurdity by the Soviet regime; Bulgakov longs for "cream curtains" as a symbol of comfort and privacy. Today, this trauma of collectivism is happily overcome by the cult of bourgeois privacy. "Your home is your fortress!" - Real estate advertisement screams from all angles. And the thicker the walls and the higher the fence, the stronger it is. But what is going on behind this fence, behind these cream-colored curtains - only God knows. And this is not only about the house, this is about the city too. Any fence provokes to pee, to throw a cigarette butt, an empty bottle. As well as any city gazebo. The gazebos in Marfino, a cafe in Novosibirsk, and a chess club in the Park of Culture are trying to overcome this reality.
Another hot topic is "compactness". The hero of Leo Tolstoy's parable "How Much Land Does Man Need?" chased (literally - running) for an increase in living space and fell dead. And all he needed was three arshins of land. In the story "Gooseberry" Chekhov argues: "Three arshins - a dead man needs it!" And man - he needs the whole globe! " The dispute between the classics seemed to be resolved by itself: the globe has become much more accessible, and progress methodically reduces the size of the things we need, and accordingly, the required amount of space. But in Russia, a car is not a means of transportation, and a house is not a means of living: both are a demonstration of status. Therefore, only objects intended for temporary stay can be truly compact: Sleepbox or "Capsule hotel".
Another topic is “recyclability”. In accordance with Marina Tsvetaeva's intuition (“Or maybe the best victory over time and gravitation is to pass so as not to leave a trace, to pass so as not to leave a shadow”), temporary architecture honestly and responsibly thinks about its own disposal. To stay - and leave a clean area for the next generations. However, you can slam the door and turn your own end into a performance: just like that, blazing, the cooling tower in Nikola-Lenivets left. And the "Ice Bar" on the Klyazminskoye reservoir melted quietly and imperceptibly, in complete harmony with the laws of nature. It is also logical that the skating rink in the Park of Culture ended its life with the ice (in order to start it anew in a year), but God himself ordered Drovnik to burn down. It, of course, the ruins are beautiful, but the romantics, who glorified them, knew what kind of garbage the planet would turn into!
It is easy to see that a new concept of modern world architecture is based on these ethical postulates, which is described by the still mysterious word for us sustainability."Sustainable" does not mean "eternal" at all. Rather, it is “appropriate”, “adequate”, “responsible”. It sounds, of course, boring - like any diet, like sobriety, like the "moral code of the builder of communism." Or, as the poet said: "In a healthy body - a healthy mind, in fact, one of two things." But it happens that a diet is urgently needed. Because further - a stroke. And for Russian architecture (and not only for architecture) now is precisely such a time. It is embarrassing, of course, to promote a diet in a country where not everyone is full. But feeding people with poison is also ashamed.
True, unlike Western architects, who are seriously engaged in experiments within the framework of temporary architecture (with new forms, materials, technologies, society), an ironic note always comes through in the works of their Russian colleagues. This is, firstly, a deep skepticism about local realities: anyway, no one needs anything, everything will be stolen, broken, and the Chinese will put it on stream - as happened with slipboxes. But it is also a subtle insight into the reverse side of the issue: a vigorous change of everything and everyone is trivial consumerism. The market encourages the consumer to constantly buy more and more new things. Tired of it? - here's a new toy. And throw out the old ones, not forgetting to sort them into the appropriate sections of the trash heap.
Infantilism of this kind is opposed by the best projects of Russian architects. It is clear that Alexander Kuptsov's "House for the Homeless" is not about "transformability" at all, but about the fact that people sleep on the streets. And the open-air auditorium in Vologda is not at all about "environmental friendliness", but about how hopelessly outdated our universities are. And even the real estate office of Anton Mosin is not about "lightness", but about trade in goods that have not yet been built, in fact, air. And Alexander Brodsky's "Vodka Pavilion" is definitely not about "reuse", although any Japanese, seeing old window frames, believes that this is so. And this is exactly the opposite - about the mysterious Russian soul, which saw all these environmental values in the grave. Which would hide from prying eyes and clap in close company.
The ARCHIWOOD project team worked on the exposition "Contemporary Temporary": Yulia Zinkevich (producer), Nikolay Malinin (curator), Maria Fadeeva (co-curator), as well as PR-agency "Rules of Communication" and design bureau Golinelli & Zaks. The exhibition was created with the comprehensive assistance of CSK "Garage", the catalog was published with the financial support of the HONKA company. The round table "Architecture is Nearby" will take place on November 22 at 20.00 at the Garage pavilion in the Park of Culture as part of the educational program "The Adventures of a Walking Unit" of the exhibition "Temporary Architecture of Gorky Park: from Melnikov to Ban". Free admission.
