The greatest success of the exposition dedicated to the architectural projects of the Skolkovo innovation city and created by the curator Sergei Choban and co-curators Sergei Kuznetsov and Valeria Kashirina, had the network publications. This is understandable: the idea to encode “exhibits” in QR codes was consonant with their activity, no less virtual and intangible. It was for this intangibility and manufacturability that the exhibition was praised by the founder of Archdaily.com David Basulto, and the popular blog dezeen included the Russian Federation in the top 5 best pavilions of the Biennale. French melty.fr and English artlyst.com also expressed their enthusiasm. The American TV channel CNN has also joined online publications.
However, according to the correct remark of Anne-Marie Febvre in a French newspaper
Libération, the Russian pavilion had its "ultra-fans" and "ultra-opponents". Thus, the correspondent of Australian Design Review magazine Juliet Moore compared being at the exhibition with "swimming on a quiet moonless night when the horizon is not visible": the information there is "hidden under the cover of darkness, shown through a web of QR codes."
At the same time, critic of the British newspaper
The Guardian Steve Rose called the pavilion "an invigorating charge of op-art, bordering on vulgarity" and noted that the large-scale project of "stars" architects presented at the exhibition does not fit well with the general theme of the biennial, dedicated to the serious problems of the profession and society. His colleague Rowan Moore from the related publication The Observer did not mention Skolkovo at all, approvingly noted another part of the exposition - about Soviet secret science cities.
AFP correspondent Dario Tebern called the exhibition in the Russian pavilion a "temple of high technologies", and Rory Olkaito from the British The Architect's Journal saw in the i-city a metaphor for the entire biennale and even city life in general, with its process of absorbing information without much comprehending it. He was led to this conclusion by observing visitors constantly reading QR codes from the walls, but not considering the projects received with their help.
For such public behavior, Laura Weissmüller from
The Süddeutsche Zeitung has a harsher explanation: Skolkovo's projects are simply not interesting, and the process of getting them high-tech does not make them better. Nikolaus Bernau from the Berliner Zeitung wonders: why are dark, glittering halls needed when all the information presented there can be downloaded from the net?
Wojciech Chaya in his articles
in the Austrian Der Standard condemns the Russian pavilion precisely for its technological effectiveness - along with all its other manifestations at the Biennale, and also sees in the complex process of obtaining information at the exhibition a contradiction with the idea of openness, which Sergei Tchoban told him about in an interview.
Magazine
Wallpaper * praised the exposition for its photogenicity, and in this category Russia won an indisputable victory: images of i-city appeared as illustrations of articles about the Biennale in many media, even if the exhibition was not mentioned at all in the texts themselves. Among the publications that limited themselves to a neutral description of the pavilion are the French Le Figaro and Le Nouvel Observateur, the German Tagesspiegel and the American The Wall Street Journal.
A funny aspect of foreign reviews of the national exhibition of the Russian Federation in Venice was that more than half of the commentators called tablet computers, with which visitors "examined" the exhibition, iPads (in fact, they were Samsung tablets). Apparently, the authors were confused by the name of the exposition: i-city. And only The Architect's Journal went to the other extreme, mysteriously remarking: "The Russians would never use Apple in their national pavilion." Apparently, for this edition, the riddle of the Russian soul does not exist.
