Association of AVO! Is a team of young professionals in the field of environmental architecture, design and programming of social communications, founded in September 2011. The first ABO team! formed during the work on the "Activation" project, which took place as part of the "Days of Architecture 2012" in Vologda, but unofficially, many participants were friends and worked with each other for many years. (Two of the five facilities built for Activation, Red Beach and Triangular Garden, won the ArchiWood 2013 award in the Urban Environment Design category.) builders, designers. But they all have one thing in common: the desire not only to discuss and design, but also to bring projects to their final completion, to participate in construction, to see a practical result. The team of a separate project today is 5-10 people; The team is curated by Mikhail Priemyshev.
The program of the festival "Days of Architecture" this year, which took place in Vologda from May 29 to June 2, 2013, in addition to the main events, included a parallel program of AVO! - "Active Weekend", aimed at the development and popularization of objects built within the framework of the "Activation" project. We talked with young architects about how citizens today interact with objects and about the difficulties in communicating with the administrative structures that arise on the way to the development of modern urban spaces.
Archi.ru:
- A year after the "Activation", have the townspeople become bolder in using these public spaces?
Mikhail Priemyshev:
I think yes. But not at all sites. The object "Red Beach" has become very popular among the townspeople (authors of the project: Nadezhda Snigireva, Margarita Ivanova, Tatyana Belova): it is located by the water, it offers a beautiful view. It is used as a dock, fish is caught on it, and it has also become a very popular place for photo shoots.
The Triangular Garden site (curator: Vera Smirnova, she also supervised the entire project "Activation" last year), located not far from our Polytechnic University - VSTU, was originally designed as an open university: a place intended for student life, for open discussions, lectures … We dream that someday architectural defenses will be held here. Now students sit here between couples, at breaks, and have mini-picnics. This is a very comfortable space. It is not easy for you to sit in the rows, as in the audience. You can choose any position that is convenient for you: you can lie down, lean on the parapets.
Vera Smirnova: When I arrived in Vologda a year later (Vera has been studying at the University of Kansas, USA for a year already - approx. Archi.ru), the grandmothers sitting on benches on the Kamenny Bridge on the Boulevard of Folding Cots immediately caught my eye (architect Lev Anisimov + students). On such a long and empty transit, it is very convenient to sit down and take a break if you are tired or take food from a nearby cafe and have a snack on the way to work. This was the idea of the whole project.
Svetlana Popova-Znamenskaya: Another very interesting object next to the Drama Theater is the "City Stage". At that point, there is a transit from the street through the Drama Theater to the river. In winter, the ramp of this object was used instead of a ladder, which, of course, is much more convenient. We noticed that the janitor no longer even cleans the stairs, he cleans the ramp.
Do you continue to supervise the objects built within the framework of the Architecture Days in Vologda 2012, follow them, develop them?
Michael: Yes. We have one project - "New Pager" - there is a real problem with it: it has one closed corner and it starts to turn into a public toilet. We want to transform this corner, to open it. It is in our interests that these objects do not create problems and do not worsen the places in which they are located.
Tatiana Belova: This year we decided to modernize the Triangular Garden site - just recently a canopy appeared here. During events, under this awning, a screen is stretched from behind, against the background of which speakers are speaking.
Michael: The rest of the objects also have a lot that needs to be completed. Now we are fighting with the administration: we want them to sign electrical projects for us, allocate funds and put the facilities on the balance sheet. At the moment, objects are not being cleaned - this is a serious problem. Basically, we do it on our own: we organize subbotniks, we call caring guys.
That is, the interaction, mutual understanding that was established between you and the administration last year, during the construction of facilities, is now lost?
Michael: It was short-lived.
Svetlana: We were just allowed to do it. We went to agree, showed, they agreed. This was our initiative, and the administration did not oppose it. Therefore, when the facilities were delivered, the administration did not know what to do with them. They just didn't think that there might be problems with the same cleaning.
Michael: We cannot constantly maintain these five objects at our own expense. It is also very difficult to endlessly search for sponsors for any updates. And there is no dialogue with the administration yet.
– Did the townspeople take part in the development of the facilities and is there an interaction between you - architects and city residents?
Michael: At the Architecture Days in Vologda 2012, we did not have direct contact with the residents. We did not set such a task. Research, questionnaires, questionnaires were carried out. We watched the residents a lot: where and how they walk, where they turn off, which steps they like to go down.
Svetlana: It seems to me that at first people did not even understand why this was being done. We exhibited models of objects in the city administration and in the library. Our layouts were made at a high level, but, nevertheless, the townspeople asked: “What is this? Are these benches? Do you make benches?"
Nadezhda Snigireva: Yes, journalists call our objects “creative benches”.
Michael: The concept of "public space" seems incomprehensible and wild to people. Now, of course, there is an abyss between us, our facilities and the townspeople. Despite the fact that there is no negative, there is also no particular understanding of what to do on these objects. Maybe people have not yet developed the tradition of spending time on the street actively and creatively.
Hope: When we were building these objects, residents came up and asked us: "Will this be free?" In the minds of people there is no understanding that you can come to any site to hold some kind of event and you will not get anything for it. People are passive, they do not want to have anything to do with active transformation of the environment. Apparently the "collective" was too imposed before and the townspeople were simply tired of it.
Vera: But in other cities of Russia, young people are also working to involve residents in urban processes and activities. Now there is such a powerful wave of urban complicity and social projects, people are beginning to slowly get used to and adapt to a different, at first not familiar to them, way of life. So the culture is slowly changing. But nevertheless, these advances are already a great success for Russia, for our culture.
Michael: We see the TPS social institution - Territorial Public Self-Government - as an ideal platform for interaction with the population. Residents rally in one territory, this is fixed at the legislative level and people are responsible for this territory: they offer the administration options for solving existing problems or projects to improve the territory. We would like to interact with this institution and work not just with the population, but with the already formed community. But we were not able to do this directly. We decided to try to do this through the administration: we offered, made presentations, developed a concept for the development of three TPSs in Vologda, but so far it hasn’t worked. Maybe it was kind of a political moment.
Hope: CBT is a very administrative structure. We failed to arouse the interest of TPSG managers in our facilities. This is surprising, because we did not offer them to pay us money, we would have found sponsors ourselves. The goal was to do a good thing together.
Michael: Vologda has not yet been covered with a wave of modern approaches to working with the population and designing public spaces. Environmental design in Vologda is now trusted by one commercial design organization, which, of course, does not benefit from the intervention of guys who do everything practically for free.
Hope: We want to work out methods of interaction with the administration through people, through society. Usually complicity arises when the community begins to demand something from the city, from the architects, then the design policy changes. We have it differently: there are no active communities, at least not yet, and we think we might try to generate them ourselves. We are afraid that if we carry out exactly the same “Activation”, without working on errors, without interacting with residents, then in a year or two these objects may be demolished as morally obsolete. Therefore, the strategy needs to be changed.
Are you going to organize any new public spaces in Vologda?
Michael: Yes. Right now we are working with an interesting place - a children's library and the space that surrounds it. The library is located in a wooden house, an architectural monument. In September he will be 100 years old. The very word "library" is associated with something uninteresting, with an atavism. We want to fill the courtyard space with new meaning. We also want to integrate several library rooms on the ground floor into this space. We see in this place a potential for communication of creative youth in Vologda.
Hope: We have a lot of people who do really cool things with their own hands, but they don't know where to go with it, where to show it. And there will be a place where you can demonstrate the fruits of your creativity free of charge.
The library is really old, and its grounds are a tasty morsel for developers. City advocates of course talk and write a lot about the value of this building. But besides that, we wanted to make him really necessary, to raise the public to defend him.
Michael: We have this project under the motto "Less words - more action." While we are working on it in the DIY (Do It Yourself) format, we have not attracted any sponsors yet. Now we have cleared the area, we are uprooting stumps, making a pile foundation. We are helped by students-architects and everyone who wants to do something with their own hands. When people see that we are not only ready to share theoretical knowledge on how to make a public space, but are also ready to build it with our own hands, people light up and come to help us. This gives rise to a great responsibility for the object: you did not just come to everything ready, but you yourself participated in the appearance of this space.
Are you interested in working only with public spaces?
Michael: Of course AVO! not only public spaces are interesting. But so far we are not planning to build something large-scale, global. With small projects, we want to "gain mass" so that both residents and the administration have more confidence in us. Since the moment of “Activation” last year, we haven’t built anything else yet and have begun to forget us.
For example, from 5 to 9 July, Vologda hosted the international festival of young European cinema VOICES, and we worked with them in partnership. As part of the festival, on Sunday, July 7, a picnic was held, for which we developed environmental branding, built small forms, interesting objects.
Hope: We would like to make our next projects taking into account the mistakes that we made on the previous ones. For example, interaction with residents, their active involvement from the very first stages of design. Then it will be more difficult for the administration to renounce the project - there will be control on the part of the townspeople-participants.
Michael: We do not have a task to fill the whole of Vologda with public spaces. These spaces appeared as a reaction, a response to the fact that in our city there is nowhere to gather on the street, except on a bench or in a cafe. There were ugly negative spaces here, but now - cleanliness, greenery, wood, pebbles, birds are singing.
Are the new projects you are working on now also made of wood?
Michael: Mostly yes. We try to work with wood.
Svetlana: We, in some way, even propagandize it.
Michael: Vologda lost its status as a wooden city a couple of years ago, and we are trying to return it, to show that it is possible to build modern architecture from wood, we are trying to destroy the myth that wood is not a durable material.
Svetlana: The townspeople believe that if wooden architecture is certainly an old rotting barrack. People are trying to demolish these buildings and build in their place buildings of brick or monolith. We have city defenders who are active in trying to preserve the old wooden architecture. We are trying to demonstrate that in addition to this, it is possible to develop new architecture from wood.
Vera: The most important thing is that we see that a tree is a powerful image of our city, and with reasonable development we can support the spirit of Vologda as the wooden capital of Russia. But the most interesting and unique thing is that by preserving the historical wooden heritage and creating new modern wooden buildings, we will create an extraordinary style that will attract tourists from all countries and change the attitude of citizens towards the city. But such a serious idea of the new and the old in the tree is possible only with a reasonable urban development, the close-knit work of the authorities, private business, residents and creative young professionals. Which, of course, is very difficult, but, nevertheless, it is possible.
Your victory in the award ArchiWood, in your opinion, will it help to make your activity more effective in interaction with the administration and popular among the townspeople?
Svetlana: Ordinary people, I think, do not care. And in a conversation with the administration - yes, we hope that will help. Only now, it seems, the administration was not aware that we were awarded the prize.
Michael: The ArchiWood Prize is recognition in wide architectural circles, Russian and maybe even foreign. It is a tool for internal interaction, for finding partners and sponsors.
Hope: When we went to ArchiWood, we saw that there is a group of wooden architects: this is a very close-knit community, they communicate, compete with each other at special awards. And this is an incentive for the development of wooden architecture. In Vologda, there is no such community united by one interest.
Vera: I think that the attitude of the administration and people to the victory at ArchiWood will not be particularly noticeable, but the most important thing here is help from the other side. For example, “famous wooden architects” may receive respect and help if we ask, and then the administration will be interested, since such contacts are important for them.
