The photo exhibition is part of the festival of the same name, organized by the ARCHIWOOD project with the support of Project Baltia magazine and the Union of Moscow Architects (the general partner of the event is HONKA (Rossa Rakenne St. Petersburg), partners - the Embassy of the Kingdom of Norway in Russia, Velsky Les and the Rules Communication ). Enthusiasts of wooden architecture Yulia Zinkevich (producer of the festival), Vladimir Frolov, Maria Fadeeva and Nikolai Malinin (co-curators of the festival); over the past few years, who have instilled in the public, if not love, then at least a persistent interest in this genre, now they decided to turn to the experience of their Western colleagues. And not only to collect interesting wooden buildings around the world, but to acquaint the Russian audience with the choice of their colleagues - organizers of the “wooden” awards in the Baltic and Scandinavian countries. Actually, Nordic Wood is a shortlist of national awards in the field of wooden architecture over the past few years, which curators have added with new objects that are nominated for the 2013 awards.
The exposition is located in the foyer of the third floor of the Central House of the Architect. Those who have visited the CDA conference room probably remember this place - it used to be a rather dark dressing room, where buffets and snacks were sometimes held after exhausting meetings. Now, after the renovation, the hall has turned into a self-sufficient space with light walls, an expressive lattice of caissons on the ceiling and a small podium at the end, allowing you to combine the actual exhibition projects with all kinds of discussions and performances. By the way, the Nordic Wood festival, the opening of which became a kind of inauguration of a new architectural site, makes full use of its capabilities: almost every day round tables and lectures by specialists in wooden architecture are held here, and tomorrow, on March 23, Children's Day will take place, within which the most little fans of eco-farming will be able to build their own houses.
The exhibition, showing the achievements of the wooden architecture of Russia's closest northern neighbors, itself quite predictably turned out to be wooden. The authors of the exposition solution were architects Nikita Asadov and Elizaveta Fonskaya (MADETOGETHER), and Ivan Ovchinnikov and MAF (Workshop of Architectural Forms) were responsible for the implementation of their concept. The stands here are long and wide wooden boards, one for each object. The number of photographs and the length of the description of buildings may vary, but the boards themselves differ only in the nuances of the saw cut pattern. And they are not attached to the walls in any way, but simply attached, which gives the exposition a relaxed and temporary tone - it seems that the boards arrived here directly from the construction site and after the festival will go there to become part of some new structure.
These boards actually represent the friendly wood architecture awards. Each country has four to seven panels, one of which briefly describes the national characteristics of wood construction in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Latvia and Estonia, and the rest show the objects themselves awarded. And although Russia, thanks to ARCHIWOOD, also has something to demonstrate (a brief retelling of the three-year history of the award pulled ten boards), the difference in attitude to wooden architecture is obvious: in this genre art objects and small forms prevail, while Northern Europe uses wood to the maximum, building from it apartment buildings and public buildings, large-scale pedestrian spaces and even industrial facilities. However, we also have a tree from the so-called. "Folk architecture" more and more actively passes into the arsenal of simple architecture. And last year in this sense turned out to be almost more effective than the ten that preceded it: in particular, the School pavilion (Igor Chirkin, Alexey Podkidyshev) and Boris Bernasconi's Arch were built - the curators did not deny themselves the pleasure of showing them on exhibition.
Actually, the second part of Nordic Wood begins with them, namely the thirteen most interesting, in the opinion of the curators, new wooden buildings of 2012 from all countries participating in the exhibition. The "School" and "Arch" are here side by side with the majestic wooden bowl of the Chapel of Silence in Helsinki and the Astrup Feranley Renzo Piano Museum in Oslo. This selection is more monumental: to show objects that will only be able to claim professional awards this or next year, MADETOGETHER has come up with stands in the form of office tables. They are deployed in different directions, which allows not only to isolate each presented object, but also to give the whole structure more dynamics. Arranged in this way, these stands from a distance resemble houses with a pitched roof - neat and laconic, which perfectly matches the theme of the exhibition, which shows modern wooden architecture, fascinating with its Nordic perfection.
