Archi.ru:
Is it necessary to teach children to love the identical (homeland), or is it better to teach to love the whole world?
Vladislav Kirpichev:
- Homeland is the notion of a starting point.
The feeling of homeland in any of us is formed by our personal experiences, and in this sense, if we build all the connections that unite us and are emotionally important to us, then in the end it turns out that our life is not fixed by the boundaries of territories, but will spread throughout the earth and into the depths of time and epochs. This homeland includes love for Bach, Giotto, John Cage, Tarkovsky, Russian icon, Malevich, Paris, for a small, God-forgotten Ural village … - an infinite number of connections that unite and form a feeling of homeland. Language, of course, determines a lot. What you can convey in your own language is difficult to express in someone else's. But it turns out that this is not the main thing either. It turns out that understanding occurs at an extra-linguistic level with people brought up by a different culture, a different homeland.
Another thing is that, having been born in your own country, you should feel the obligation to apply the best where problems are known to you best. And most likely it is by solving the problems of your country that you will be able to do something for everyone. As was the case with Japanese metabolists, for example, who solved the problems of the end of the earth in Japan, and in the end offered a way out for all overgrown humanity.
Loving something identical to what?.. It seems to me that we all live by smells from childhood. And if I remember the smell of a pine forest and the smoke of chimneys, then someone got the aromas of a nearby garbage can.
Actually, I don't really understand how you can teach to love … Love is active. Contempt for your country is not the best way to live life, not the most dignified and humane. In fact, this is a refusal to solve problems, a refusal to search for a way out at that specific point in which you yourself are. But only the solution of this difficulty, on the basis of the best that the world gives, will give both the originality of the handwriting and progress for everyone. You cannot refuse to work, you cannot refuse to love.
Teaching the best, teaching responsibility, teaching the structure of thinking, the project approach, we must teach understanding of our country, its historical capabilities and impossibilities, resulting in not powerlessness, but the power of awareness of reality. Love for one's country within national, linguistic boundaries is also love for its future, for its place among humanity, as well as a more accurate understanding of its past. But the future must be chosen.
If I ask if you use techniques that go back to the search for the twenties in teaching, the answer is likely to be yes - now almost everyone, except for positional retrogrades, uses them. And what are the main (favorite) techniques from that arsenal and what is their value?
- The question is posed as if borrowing is possible.
Yes, I studied with Ivan Lamtsov, who was himself a member of ASNOV, a friend of Ladovsky's and told me how he painted on Malevich's paintings for his exhibition in Moscow …
Yes, I remain a student of Ilya Lezhava, who is in himself a vanguard man. Under his leadership, I also won the UNESCO competition, which essentially set the stage for paper architecture in the USSR. And of course, Lezhava gave us an approach and thinking. We "went" to the vanguard. But it is impossible to talk specifically about any teaching methods. In general, there are no archives, we have not used any textbooks. The principles and understanding of them were more important.
Yes, like many now, this is all built around fine motor skills, a huge amount of exercise, on the important identification of the “building” and our “body”, where the child understands a lot on the basis of his own physics. But all this is not the main thing. The main thing is how we understand what we are doing.
Let's take as one topic for discussion - the "Cutting" program. There are a huge number of methodologies here. But the main thing is a seemingly simple idea: to cut is not to paint. That is, not to copy, but to work directly with paper, to see the form that you get when working with a sheet, directly from it. Fine motor skills are not the development of fingers, but the development of the brain, and through it we teach ourselves and children to abstract thinking, a pointless way of seeing. It is not the thing that needs to be seen, but the structure of the thing. This is what the child's brain turns on, this is what gives him pure logic, calculation, beauty without imitation.
There are about eight hundred programs in EDAS, and each is designed not for mechanical training, but for developing a view, for a "shift in understanding", for gaining self-confidence, because now the child learns to be confident not because something "looks like" something, - let's say an apple on an apple - but because he is fully responsible for the process of the appearance of an object, he rigidly builds the logic of what he could not see anywhere, but only create. This is the legacy of the avant-garde. His absolutely radical approach. All methods - follow from this, from a once and for all conscious leap into non-objectivity and acceptance of all the consequences of this leap.
Do you manage to come up with new teaching methods, and if so, which ones?
- Naturally. There are an infinite number of methods.
There are more than eight hundred programs in EDAS, but this is only what is described. In fact, there can be as many of them as you like. Each individual child, if he stays with us for a long time, constantly provokes new clarifications, new tasks for educating and preparing himself.
There is a compulsory course, which, however, is also given in the order that the child can perceive. We proceed from his capabilities and impossibilities, assessing how he will better master the material. Moreover, the same task at different levels of complexity can be performed by children of different ages.
But there is also daily work.
Sometimes the child does not need to do anything at all, but just needs to feel what it is about. He will examine himself for what is weight, balance, or "outside" and "inside" and so on. From each exercise, new ones can develop, in which two or three programs will be combined, and all this will lead to the creation of new objects.
The EDAS teaching method cannot be set out in the table, rather it is such a lattice of interrelated concepts, this is the type of thinking that a child can master in due time, making his efforts, going through his overcomes. And from this he will already choose his own path, and life and type of activity.
Do you strive to educate artists-architects capable of a breakthrough for a new renewal? What will this new be?
- We have no desire to educate only architects. This was stated at the very beginning of EDAS. Another thing is that those who want to become them, who really have this inclination, will collect in the course of work such a portfolio that, most likely, will help them look convincing in any good modern architectural school - anywhere, in London, Berlin, New York.
But EDAS is aimed at something else - it provides the very foundation, the structure under which a child (and then not a child anymore), no matter what he does, will be effective. It gives "design thinking", and it can be applied in different ways. For forty years our students have shown themselves in completely different fields. And this is also the legacy of the avant-garde - its goal was not the "things" that we produce, but the life that we improve, the "person" to whom we give new chances. Specifically, "things" are only manifestos.
Over the past ten years, we have somewhat moved away from our own established methods of working with children. Modern EDAS is not an EDAS of the eighties and nineties, it is a research laboratory.
What can the audience expect from your exhibition, what is its main meaning?
- Name of the exhibition EDAS: HISTORY OF FORMALISM AND 3D EDUCATION.
The exhibition is correlated with the content of the Tatlin magazine edition prepared by us and has a rigid formal structure. This is in the external and formal part of the exhibition, which shows EDAS as a complete cycle of training and education.
But the internal task of the exhibition is to show the philosophy of EDAS, its interpretation of form, and the basic concepts of architecture, its basic intellectual attitudes. This is a dialogue with the viewer - a dialogue about what form is, what the avant-garde is, what the process of learning and understanding is, and what our capabilities and our freedom are.
Who is your audience, who are you addressing?
It's hard to answer here. The question of the target audience is always meaningless for artists and educators, if we put it sociologically. The viewer, like the student, can come from any environment, anyone can be a consumer of your "message".
It is more correct in our case to ask not to whom, but to what we are addressing - to the desire to feel what is still possible, which is in every person.
When you see incredible work, a masterpiece of abstraction and ingenuity, done by a child of seven, eight or nine, it is overwhelming and unmatched. His power works everywhere and always.
This may be necessary both for those who need to feel a new breath in their profession, architects, and for parents who want to give new strength to their children - strength to walk on their own. But one can quite imagine how from any other place and point in the social field this response “I can”, which we love so much in EDAS, will be heard, the main message of which is absolute resolution: Everything is possible! For those who want to hear it, who want to feel it, this exhibition is intended.
Does it apply toWhat is your exhibition of this year's theme ("actual identical") and if so, how?
- From what was said earlier, it turns out that these concepts in our case pass by. They simply do not describe anything from the experience that EDAS deals with.
But perhaps EDAS itself, which arose under certain historical conditions, and has been going on for a long time within the framework of the native language, is evidence that it is in fact a Russian identity. In the words of Vasily Rozanov … this is just "universal responsiveness."
Do you think it is right to look for identity and uniqueness now, or it might be more logical to focus on the quality of life? Or, on the contrary, on common human problems, forgetting about the originality?
- I think I have already answered this question.
