So, the studios in the new academic semester were headed by the rector of the school Yevgeny Ass and invited teachers - Vladimir Plotkin and Narine Tyutcheva. The heads of the studios presented their concepts and, at the same time, design assignments in fascinating presentations. Thus, Eugene Ass demonstrated a number of fragments from films (starting with a scene from Quentin Tarantino's bestseller Kill Bill) and paintings “Allegories of the Five Senses” by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens. Following the results of viewing the presentations, the students, according to the already established tradition, had the opportunity to choose which studio to go to study.
Here are quotes from the speeches of the heads of the studios and teachers of the MARCH school.
City Dialogue # 1:
Body, feelings, architecture
Studio Evgeny Ass
Teachers: Rubens Cortes and Kirill Ass
Evgeny Ass:
“How does architecture relate to the senses of perception? We are accustomed to looking at architecture only with our eyes, forgetting that it can also smell, sound, warm … In the perception of architecture, at least five senses are always involved - sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. As a rule, too little attention is paid to this aspect. But when designing a building, we create by no means a drawing, a drawing - only its outline. And the house is not the layout of the rooms, but the creak of doors and the smell from the kitchen. Therefore, during the semester, we will explore the experiences and sensations generated by architecture, which, adding up to the overall image of the environment, create the atmosphere of a place - a city, a building or a separate room.
As an object of design, a space was chosen in which a person at a sensory level experiences many more all kinds of sensations than in any other. We are talking about a bath or therma - a place where all the senses are extremely sharpened.
Our research and design work should result in new design scenarios that bring out the special sensory characteristics of a building. I do not exclude that smell, acoustic programs, tactile experiments, etc. may become part of the project."
City Dialogue # 2:
Long-term housing?
Vladimir Plotkin Studio
Teacher: Vladimir Yuzbashev
Vladimir Plotkin:
“It would seem that the topic of social housing is well known to everyone. But in fact, in the realities of modern Russia, the concept of high-quality and inexpensive housing is absent as such. Typical panel housing construction, which was considered affordable, has turned into a commercial building due to the rise in prices for Moscow real estate. Poor and substandard housing, massively being built throughout the country, is doomed to a sad future. If they still look at him condescendingly, then in 20 years they will begin to turn away, and in 40 they will think about demolition. All this forces the city and architects to look for new architectural and construction strategies for housing development.
Today in the world there are several scenarios for the construction of social housing. First, the very panel construction. Secondly, temporary housing, which, focusing on the popular topic of sustainable development, initially has a programmed service life, after which it is disposed of. We will try to come up with something new - relatively inexpensive, easy to implement and stable over time. Here the concept of social housing is somewhat shifted towards adaptive housing, when society, changing over time, determines the changes in housing."
Vladimir Yuzbashev:
“The whole point of the task is to go beyond architecture, facing real design conditions, taking into account tight budget constraints, calculating the cost of a building to the penny. One will have to think not so much in architectural categories as in categories of life-building. In fact, we propose to design not a building, but its life in time and the life of people inside it."
City Dialogue No. 3
Childhood territory
Narine Tyutcheva Studio
Teacher: Ksenia Adjubei
Narine Tyutcheva:
“The general theme of the year is urban dialogues. It seems to me that children are special inhabitants of the city, with whom it is absolutely necessary to conduct a dialogue. And it is not at all necessary to explore this topic in the categories of playgrounds and kindergartens, it is much broader and more philosophical. Since Soviet times, children's institutions have become some kind of reservations, isolated from the city. This is understandable - it is much easier to create a small, comfortable and safe environment than to fix the aggressive surrounding space of the entire city. We will try to overcome the cliché of the reservation, thinking about how to create a territory of childhood among the noisy world of adults.
You can use the game as the main tool for exploring space. For a child, play is the main way of learning about the world and communicating with adults. Play, space and childhood are the key concepts on which the project of an "inspirational object" should be based, uniting both children and adults in play, in other words, places in the city as an impulse for its positive development. In my opinion, the Sagrada Familia by Antoni Gaudí is the quintessence of this theme”.
About the new Urban Curriculum, which will be launched this semester, said Nadezhda Nilina, a world-class urbanist and lead lecturer for the Problems of Urbanism module. Together with Yaroslav Kovalchuk, they will offer MARSH students to listen to an extensive lecture course on urban planning and large master plans, while the practical part is what is commonly called Urban Design, i.e. planning in terms of typologies, public spaces and urban environment.
School Director Nikita Tokarev presented his module
Professional practice, where the emphasis will be on the study of legislation, practical work with documentation and design contracts. A separate part of Nikita Tokarev's course will be devoted to professional communications. For the most complete disclosure of this topic, journalists and architectural critics Alexander Ostrogorsky and Maria Fadeeva are invited as teachers.
