Online architects are arguing again about Russian competition policy. An interesting discussion took place on the Facebook page of Project Russia magazine, which, by the way, has a new website that is still in test mode. The reason for this was an article by Denis Leontiev, who is in charge of competitions at Strelka, in which the well-known and sad things are set out in the form of an ironic competition task: we do not have contests for a fair distribution of orders or improve the quality of the urban environment, but for organizers, who, therefore, increase their capital, political and financial.
For architects, conversations about competitions are always painful, and this time they did not stay away from the discussion. Alexander Lozhkin, for example, believes that Russia has long needed a national standard for holding competitions based on international experience: “The national standard is applied on a voluntary basis. That is, no one bothers to modify it when using it, at least in tenders for private objects. It's like with sausage: you can buy one made according to GOST, or you can according to TU. Your choice, your stomach. However, Alexey Muratov fears that such a standard can be applied only to typical, mass objects, while it is not clear what to do with those “that go beyond the limits of averaging”, because it is on them that competitions are held in the first place.
Mikhail Belov in his blog continued the topic with a small essay "Swan, Cancer and Pike in Competitive Fever." With bitter irony, the architect writes about the dominance of foreigners in competitions, who, according to him, come to us for hack, as once Moscow architects went to hack in monetary Uzbekistan. Mikhail Belov is sure that the competitions will not become fair as long as there are architectural firms operating in them, and not architects personally exercising their author's supervision over the project: architects - separately, designers - separately, Belov believes, and architects must be Russian. But Alexander Lozhkin, in turn, stood up for foreigners, recalling that he himself works "with excellent professionals." And even companies such as NBBJ or RMJM, which, writes Lozhkin, go to any country in the world for "hack-work", "will give our civil projects a head start in terms of technology ownership for many years." Levon Airapetov is also sure that our architects are not greatly offended by the authorities, but the fact that in all recent times not a single Russian architect has been able to win a single international competition on a foreign territory speaks for itself.
The architect Sergey Estrin also recalled his European colleagues the other day - an article about the first foreign contract in Ireland appeared on his blog. Sergey Estrin liked working in an architectural bureau in the center of Dublin: “In shaggy 1991, I enjoyed the unthinkable and inaccessible life of a real European. During the day, he developed an urban planning project for the reconstruction of the area adjacent to Smithfield Square in Dublin, in the evening - a pub, at the weekend excursions. Along with the memoirs in the blog of the architect, you can find his Irish drawings.
Members of the RUPA Facebook community and the method-estate.com blog, meanwhile, tried to understand the impact that urban development can have on the psyche of citizens, on their ability to imagine and think. The architects recalled the surveys of the residents of homogeneous building areas, who guessed the window of their room on the flat grid of the facade of the 12-storey building, and the unique master plan of the city of Brasilia. However, according to Nikolai Vasiliev, “the beautiful graphics of the general plan are as much a trap in modern architecture as a beautiful facade in classical architecture. In both cases, except for the author and his superiors, no one will see him in this form. You can also get lost on orthogonal streets, agrees Alexey Symmetrichesky; the master plan is visible only from a bird's-eye view, while on the ground the eye still has to cling to the landmarks, the user believes. It is these dominants and accents in the development, most likely, that shape the spatial thinking of the townspeople, the bloggers summed up.
"Architecture is more important for the survival of mankind than the urban form of settlement," says Alexander Rappaport, "although, apparently, it was she who gave birth to architecture." In recent days, the famous philosopher's blog has published several interesting materials on the theory, including the article "Architecture, Memory and Photography", where Rappaport reflects on architecture as a dying art, the flourishing of design and the most important revolution in understanding architectural space with the advent of photography.
Meanwhile, the new team of the Moscow mayor was seriously concerned with the spatial strategy of the city. As the chief architect Sergey Kuznetsov said the other day, an ideological chapter called the master plan is being added to the already existing general plan. This initiative continues to be discussed in the RUPA community: “Moscow pulled out everything valuable and the best from the Perm experience - all the stylistics, our ideology; and we'll see we will build a severe panel-monolithic Ivobakharevka ", - quotes the first deputy chairman of the Perm City Duma Arkady Kats Alexander Lozhkin, adding with pride that in the Perm document really" a lot has already been done for future Russian master plans. However, to comprehend Moscow as a "spatial product" and describe it, some seem unrealistic - it will turn out, as Vitaliy Drobilenko writes, an amazing literary and philosophical work. Almost in the spirit of Rustam Rakhmattulin's Metaphysics of Moscow, adds Nikolai Vasiliev.
At the end of the review, there is another fascinating online discussion on the Belarusian portal onliner.by around the rating of the world's most interesting libraries in architecture, compiled by blogger darriusss. And the reason was the ongoing conversations around the new building of the Minsk National Library, which some consider the new symbol of the city, others - ugliness. The blogger gave the first place in his top, apparently due to the phantasmagoric appearance, to the building of the National Library of Kosovo in Pristina - "a monstrous heap of cubic volumes covered with domes on top." And the Minsk "diamond" is in second position, leaving behind such world famous buildings as libraries in Cottbus and Seattle. The audience approved of the author's choice: “As for me,” writes mrGLUK, “of all these incomprehensibly gray-ugly buildings,“diamond”is one of the most beautiful.” “Seattle proves that American builders and architects drink as much as ours,” adds Pane_Kahanku. - Ours even somehow equal and symmetrical library was drawn and built.
