Daniel Dendra, founder of the anOtherArchitect bureau and the OpenSimSim project, will take part in the Art-Ovrag 2013. Garden City festival of new culture in the city of Vyksa, Nizhny Novgorod Region. In the spring of 2013 he was a member of the jury of the Balancing Pavilion competition, during which the best art object project for this festival was selected.
Archi.ru: With your projects for cities, you are trying to improve the living environment there, to increase its comfort. How do you measure the level of comfort?
Daniel Dendra: We are engaged not only in cities: in Russia, we have discovered the relationship between the needs of the city and the adjacent territories, therefore, when solving urban problems, we must not forget about the countryside, we must think comprehensively. In terms of measurement, many of our projects include web data analysis. If we use ordinary opinion polls to study the situation before and during work, then the number of respondents is always limited, and their answers cannot be extrapolated to the whole society. In this case, a certain average value is obtained, and the extreme values are overlooked, although often they are the most interesting. Therefore, now we are exploring "big data" from the Internet, huge amounts of information that we, architects and urbanists, learned to analyze only recently, although commercial companies are already making money using this analysis.
Big data is so vast that you can investigate in detail and extreme values or use different filters. The sources of this information are any geolocated Internet services that people use on their mobile devices: Instagram, Twitter, Foursquare. With the help of this data, it is possible to analyze urban life, obtaining indicators for any moment in time, therefore, urban planning can now be viewed as a process. We do not have to wait several years after implementation to understand whether the project is successful, information can be read in real time, observing changes in people's behavior, finding out what is comfortable for them and what is not.
Archi.ru: So social media is a useful tool for the urbanist?
D. D.: Yes, this is one of many tools. Urbanists are beginning to understand its importance and develop iPhone applications that allow residents to input information themselves, ultimately improving the urban environment. We have several similar projects at the stage of development, for example, in France we have proposed a water flow control program acting like Foursquare, a service where you have to register at different points in the city and get points for it. People love the playful, competitive moment, so the program works better than the exhortations “save water - save the environment”. Better to say, "Look, your neighbors are using a lot less water than you." In addition, such programs allow people to monitor the situation in real time.
For example, in my old apartment in Berlin I receive a water bill once a year, and it always turns out that I spent more than I bargained for, even though I have a meter. Therefore, it is necessary to create an environment that informs people in real time, including about their possible mistakes: there are already systems that read the data of the weather station and the temperature in the apartment, and inform the user on the iPhone when and how much to open the window to support at home comfortable temperature. This operational data is needed not only by experts, but also by all residents, and it is necessary to provide them not in the form of harsh dials with arrows, but in an interesting and attractive way.
Archi.ru: Many of your projects are crowdsourced. Are any of them connected with Russia?
D. D.: We are now doing "architectural Wikipedia" - site
Architectuul.com, where there are many participants from Russia. For example, one of them published all the Soviet circus buildings there. We have a very large database there on constructivism, Soviet modernism, etc. This topic is very important for an educational project like Architectuul.com, because there has always been a “wall” between Eastern and Western Europe: in the West you could recognize about Le Corbusier and other Western masters, perhaps also about constructivism, but never about wonderful Soviet modernism. Last year, at the invitation of the Goethe Institute, I traveled around Central Asia, and there I was struck by the modernist buildings of the Soviet era. This is a huge array of architectural heritage that is now in danger: these buildings are not considered valuable and are being destroyed. But there you can find the principles of "sustainability", useful for us, and for that time - advanced: for example, the widespread use of sun-protection devices on facades. Or: I have just returned from Yekaterinburg, there is also a lot of interesting architecture of the 20th century, about which not much is known in the West.
Archi.ru: And public participation in the development of projects, when residents offer their ideas and wishes - have you used it in your works for Russia?
D. D.: When we were doing our project for the city of Satka in the Chelyabinsk region, according to the competition assignment, consultations with residents were required. At that moment, I was somewhat tired of competitions, but it was very attractive: a town in the center of Russia is holding a competition with the participation of the population. However, in such cases, you cannot ask people directly about architecture and design, because everyone will talk about important, often small things (for example, dog playgrounds) that will not help work at the initial stage of the project or on a large scale. Therefore, we came up with a special game to interest residents and find out their opinion on issues important for the project. When we started playing, it turned out that almost every one of those present wanted to speak. Of course, the desires of people are not easy to truly understand and correctly interpret within the framework of a project, but we must learn how to do this as soon as possible.
In general, work with the population is very important: the Art-Ovrag festival in Vyksa is interesting precisely because it is addressed to local residents, it is for them that art objects are brought there. This year I was on the festival jury, which chose the best project of the Balancing Pavilion, and we talked about the fact that next time residents will be able to take part in the voting, because the choice of experts is often difficult to understand from the outside, and this ambiguity - especially in Russia - leads to accusations like "the results were known in advance." Therefore, the more transparency there is, the more people trust the system, and the more trust, the more freedom the planner has.
Archi.ru: Tell us about the Art-Ovrag festival and the competition for the Balancing Pavilion project.
D. D.: The Balancing Pavilion is an experimental building, and the brief was very loose: it was necessary to design something unusual and innovative. It is very important that the organizer of the competition and the festival, the industrial company OMK, based in Vyksa, gives architects and designers the opportunity they need to experiment and implement their ideas. And if these experiments make one or two local residents look at the world differently, that will be enough. Please note: innovations are more likely to take place not in large cities, but in small cities - such as Weil am Rhein in Germany, where Vitra invites architects to build experimental buildings on its campus. The automotive industry originated near Stuttgart, not Berlin. And in Russia such festivals as "Art-Ovrag" are transferring the focus of attention from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi to non-capital centers. These small cities need entrepreneurs, industrialists who are proud of their city and want to do something for the benefit of its inhabitants.
Oddly enough, industrial companies in Russia are much more socially responsible than in Europe. In Europe, a company like Nokia, having received a subsidy from the EU, builds a factory in a city like Bochum, but as soon as the EU stops paying, closes production, fires 1,000 workers, and moves to a cheaper country, in this case, Hungary, and then another somewhere. Such large companies have already broken away from the cities where they appeared and where their factories are located. Large Russian companies, like OMK in Vyksa and Magnezit Group in Satka, still feel their roots and belonging to a particular city, trying to develop their small homeland.
Archi.ru: There was a similar experiment in Perm, they tried to create a new "cultural capital", but this initiative met with resistance from some residents, obviously, these artistic initiatives and art objects seemed to them an alien, capital invasion of their city. Don't you think this is a problem in working with regions, especially with small towns?
D. D.: I myself participated in 2007 in the PermMuseumXXI competition, so I know this city, I've been there. In Perm there was a completely different approach, big investments, they invited “superstar” architects: these were attempts to change the city “with a hammer”. A more successful method is to start with small experiments. The Vyksa festival will now only be held for the third time, it began as a very small event and has grown since then. We ourselves use a similar approach all the time: Yaroslavl Agropark is our project in a rural area near Yaroslavl, Pioner-Resort is a former camp, also near Yaroslavl, in both of these works we treat design as a process. We have developed a development strategy for the customer for the next 40 years, since the agricultural area is very large, 8,000 hectares - the size of Manhattan. And we create a concept for it for 2050, so that it is clear in which direction to move, but this is precisely the concept, it can change at any time. And the implementation process consists of small steps, each of which requires a point investment and implies benefits for local residents; each such step is an experiment, if it fails, it is not scary, because it is a small scale, and at the next stage we will try something else; and if it is successful, then we can increase its scope.
Likewise, at Satka, together with Magnezit, we have developed a corporate identity guide for the design of industrial buildings that will be used by its employees and visiting artists. All these projects are completely different from the situation in Perm, where there were grandiose projects, where they wanted to completely change the city, inviting the KCAP bureau to develop the master plan, held a competition for the museum building, and
the chairman of his jury ended up designing another museum there: a strange story that shows that this should not be done. Because the design process is also an opportunity for the public to participate in it: residents can understand any idea, they are not at all stupid. And the result is work from the bottom up, in contrast to the Perm route, where all projects were planted from above.
Archi.ru: Your project in Satka with the participation of residents in the form of a game: is it a project for Magnezit or for a city square?
D. D.: This is a project for the square in Satka, with which we won the competition, but now we are working with Magnezit and other objects in this city, and everywhere we invite residents to participate.
Archi.ru: And so you are gradually changing Satka?
D. D.: I am gradually changing Russia!
