"Knigostroy" was invented by Nikolai Malinin and Natalia Babintseva. It all started when two critics, one architectural, the other literary, noticed how incredibly popular photographs about the modern use of books are on the facebook social network. Advanced European libraries, futuristic bookmakers, buildings made of folios - in terms of the number of likes, these plots can compete even with adorable cats. And if the success of the cats does not raise questions, then the phenomenon of the modern popularity of the paper book seriously interested critics. And starting to collect examples of how and where books live today, Malinin and Babintseva could not stop, and soon the city project “Books in Parks”, actively and successfully promoting reading in the fresh air, joined their impromptu research.
In general, the idea of the exhibition suggested itself - the International Fair of Intellectual Literature Non / fiction, which started this week, and the
May Prize ARCHIWOOD exposition pavilion. “Peripter”, invented by the bureau Gikalo Kuptsov architects, was actually designed as a temporary object, but so ideally fit into the space under the columns of the Central House of Artists that, most likely, it will remain there for a long time. Here is the curator of ARCHIWOOD, Nikolai Malinin, and took care of how to use Peripter - the pavilion is undoubtedly good in itself (the kids are happy to play hide and seek between wooden pylons), but it's still somehow strange for the exhibition space to be empty for 11 months a year …
Having collected more than a hundred examples of the modern existence of paper books and started sorting them according to formal criteria - function, place, scale - the curators came to an important conclusion: if earlier only architecture created space for a book, today the book itself forms the space. This postulate formed the basis of the exposition, giving it the sonorous name “Knigostroy”. The organizers of the exhibition are Books in Parks, ARCHIWOOD, BURO 17, co-organizer - EXPO-Park. Exhibition Projects”, PR support was provided by the“Rules of Communication”agency, three build editors - Maria Fadeeva, Sasha Radkovskaya and Vera Reuter - helped to collect all the illustrative material, and Natalia Shendrik came up with the design of the exposition.
The inner space of Peripter is conventionally divided into four thematic sections: “A book in search of a place”, “A book forms space”, “Libraries of the world: new trends” and “Competitions”. However, the boundaries of each of them are conditional, and entry plates with information about the project are placed at both ends of the pavilion, due to which the exhibition space is oriented not only to the main entrance of the Central House of Artists, but also open from the side of the river (and the new ramp by Evgeny Ass). According to Nikolai Malinin, this was done in order to clearly demonstrate the main trend of the newest reading rooms - they destroy the hierarchy of urban space, promoting openness and accessibility of information. The curators were also determined to collect from books and install in the middle of the Peripter something at the same time expressive and functional - a table, bar or bench, for example - but they were urged not to do so. The argument was simple: the reverence for the book in our society is so great that such "book formation" will inevitably be interpreted as blasphemy. “In many ways, it is precisely this attitude to the book that prevents us from seeing new opportunities for interacting with it,” says Natalya Babintseva, who hopes that the exhibition will help break this stereotype.
The exposition really provides a lot of opportunities for this. Probably, even if the curators limited themselves only to showing new Western libraries, it would have an effect - the 21st century reading rooms that are being built “there” have moved away from the large-scale book depositories we are accustomed to and closed from the outside world as far as a high-speed car is from a horse-drawn carriage. But they also included in the exposition many other typologies - at the exhibition you can see libraries at public transport stops, and mini-reading rooms at airports and train stations, and all kinds of book exchangers, and bookcases that have turned from furniture into full-fledged (and, importantly, practical !) Land art objects. No less extensive is the section devoted to the use of books as an element of decor or even construction - here are facades laid out from books, pieces of furniture, installations, and examples of the use of books in scenography. The curators tried to give each collection its own name and accompany it with a short annotation; and although it can be seen from these titles and texts that some topics are slightly far-fetched (“Book as a Trauma” is, for example, art objects dedicated to books, but they themselves do not consist of books and do not contain them), one cannot but appreciate them poetry - you immediately feel that the exhibition was made by people who adore not only reading, but also writing.
The most important thing, perhaps, is that Knigostroy also covers the Russian context. Here, however, some things are also attracted almost artificially: for example, showing foreign buildings of recent years, the curators suddenly weave into the exposition a tablet about Soviet competitions for projects of book houses of the 1930s and modernist implementations of the 1970s - apparently, I really wanted to hold a proud a parallel between the "books" on Novy Arbat and the National Library of Paris (architect Dominique Perrot). And talking about the competition for the project of a new library in Prague, curators from all 760 participants choose two winners and the work of their friends from the Totement / Paper bureau. There are also two competitions in the organization of which ARCHIWOOD and Books in Parks were directly involved - the Gogol-module and the competition for the project of the book club in the Muzeon park, as well as the friendly Microdom award.
What is definitely not here is the few library projects that have been implemented in the post-Soviet space in recent decades. The organizers rightly considered that these buildings are too far from both the ideal and the current trends. Actually, there is only one really functioning Russian library here - the city library of Vyborg, the only building by Alvaro Aalto on the territory of our country, which has recently been carefully restored. However, the fact that sooner or later reading rooms of a new type will appear at least in Moscow, hope is given by the last two tablets of the exhibition - the project for the reconstruction of the MISIS library (bureau Manipulazione Internazionale) and the concept of the development of Moscow libraries, implemented jointly by the bookstore "Falanster" and the architectural bureau SVESMI …
