The winner of the competition, which announced the Archstoyanie festival last November, was architect Royce Mar H. Nicdao, design director of the WTA Architecture and Design Studio (Philippines).
Belvedere, which should become another symbol of Nikola-Lenivets and give festival visitors the opportunity to capture the beauty of the local landscape, Nichdao presented in the form of a lens-shaped mirror suspended at a height. The diameter of the mirror and the ability to turn it in different directions due to the cables will allow those looking into it to see not only a panoramic view of the area, but also themselves in the landscape.
Such an original play of the idea of the observation deck allowed the Filipino architect to abandon the construction, traditional for this typology, in the form of a high-rise dominant. The author himself explains his decision by the desire to break the usual course of things and the hierarchical relationship between nature and man: "The project connects people in a common act of observation, forcing them to abandon the selfish position of the observer."
The jury, which considered a total of 227 projects from 35 countries of the world, preferred the work of Royce Nichdao precisely for the originality of the solution and the relative ease of implementation of the project, which will make it possible to do without cumbersome construction in the forest. The curator of Archstoyanie and jury member Anton Kochurkin commented on his choice: “Personally, I chose this project also because there are already quite a lot of iconic monumental works in Nikola-Lenivets, but the Mirror object will be able to ironically and subtly polemicize with the context, starting dialogue between two different worlds, between other iconic objects of this part of the park - Brodsky's Rotunda and Bernasconi's Arch. This project is completely from another world, it turns everything upside down, doing it gracefully and easily."
Royce Nichdao's floating mirror will be erected in Nikola-Lenivets this summer and presented to the public as part of Archstoyanie 2013. The festival, which will traditionally take place on the last weekend of July in the Kaluga Region, this year will be dedicated to parks and will receive the subtitle “Three Belvederes”.
A. M.
