Time runs fast. What was only present is already past. The so-called "Luzhkov style" defined the face of Moscow in 1990–2010. Today it is already history and has become the subject of two most interesting architectural books: the photo album of hyperrealist Frank Herforth published by the German publishing house Kerber "Imperial Pump" (post-Soviet skyscraper) and the monograph by the director of the architectural bureau Alexander Brodsky Dasha Paramonova "Mushrooms, mutants and others: architecture of the Luzhkov era" (publishing house Strelka Press).
Over the past twenty years, the intensity of the architectural life in Russia has been anomalously intense. The point is not only that the landscape of many cities (especially megalopolises) has changed beyond recognition by analogy with the accelerated scrolling of film. The fact is that the very reaction of the professional community to the changes taking place changed just as rapidly.
I remember very well that in the nineties such authoritative critics as Grigory Revzin and Nikolai Malinin were quite condescending to the style of post-Soviet vernacularity, to all these turrets, belvederers, ornaments in the spirit of awkward modernity, trying to be friendly towards the old buildings. Oh, that's very cute! Everyone exclaimed. This is our native postmodernism. Great original! You can even play literary associations with him (I remember in 1999 Nikolai Polissky, Konstantin Batynkov, Sergei Lobanov, who were then “Mitki”, reacted to Luzhkov's vernacular style with the Manilov Project, which assumed contemplative projection inside the new Moscow belvederes).
But time went on. And friendly acceptance, cheerful mockery, as the appetites of the greedy Moscow construction business grew, were replaced by irritation, anger, hatred. These emotions began to determine the professional attitude towards the increasingly arrogant and shameless "Luzhkov style" of the 2000s. A real war with the "mayor's architecture" began. In it (opuses of the Donstroy company, for example, or the creations of Mikhail Posokhin Jr.) they finally saw the hopelessly low quality in everything: from the concept to the shape of door handles and window latches. The "bearable company" also added fuel to the fire: when the monument was destroyed in order to recreate it later in the likeness of a Chinese plastic souvenir. Manezh, Voentorg, Moscow Hotel, Tsaritsyno we will not forget, we will not forgive!
But time went on. And today the time has come for reflection, a calm, without hysteria research of what has happened in the architectural life of Russia over the past twenty years, and how to live with it further.
Frank Herforth's photo album "Imperial Pump" is fascinating both for its visual range and the texts that frame it. The German photographer has photographed what, in his opinion, the most bizarre towers of Moscow, Ufa, Yekaterinburg and other cities of Russia, as well as the capitals of the union republics, for example, Astana, Baku and Minsk. According to the correct observation of the director of the Museum of Architecture Irina Korobyina, his impartial gaze of a hyperrealist saw post-Soviet skyscrapers as some kind of surreal mutants. They excite the imagination and the amplitude of the reaction to them is very wide. Negative reactions are concentrated in the article by Dmitry Khmelnitsky with the telling title "The Architecture of a Non-Existent Society." He speaks of a certain imitative essence of post-Soviet architecture, which tries to simultaneously be similar to the West and nostalgic for the great totalitarian style of the USSR. The psychology of those who order the architecture of skyscrapers in Russia in the 90s and 00s remains Soviet: primitive and antisocial, Khmelnitsky emphasizes. That is why, one must think, such a simulative result. Matthias Schepp has a more loyal attitude to the "sky-piercing" houses of the former USSR. He considers the heroes of Herforth's photographs to be something like an arch connecting the recently free Russia and the union republics with the civilization of the West, with its advanced technology and successful business.
Let's digress from the clever socio-political and economic connotations and look at Frank Herforth's photographs impartially. It turns out that looking at them is very interesting and exciting. They even inspire excitement. This can be explained, perhaps, by the argument that their referent is not only Stalin's skyscrapers and the creations of Norman Foster, but also architectural graphics on the theme of alien civilizations. Its origins are in the utopias of the Russian avant-garde, and its development is in the worlds of Soviet fiction, especially in animated films of the 70s and 80s.
Even the great avant-garde artist Georgy Krutikov, creating his "Flying City" in the late 1920s, took care of placing earthlings in the likeness of giant chandeliers floating in the air, somewhat reminiscent of the Moscow "Zeppelin", the Sparrow Hills towers, "Scarlet Sails". An even more striking resemblance of post-Soviet skyscrapers to Soviet science fiction will be revealed if we put next to Herforth's book the late drawings of the romantic artist of the first post-October decades, obsessed with the sky and speed, by Alexander Labas. And from the "Cities of the Future" Labas with their futuristic masts, spiers, multicolored volumes, balls, a few steps into the worlds of everyone's favorite Soviet fantasy cartoons such as "The Mystery of the Third Planet".
Most likely, the cultural world of future customers and architects of post-Soviet skyscrapers was formed thanks to several subjects. Due to our lack of a basic cultural tradition, they mutually influenced each other in a very bizarre way. The first plot: of course, so that it was, "like theirs." Nice, high, technological. The second plot: remembering the sovereign roots of the great empire, from the old Russian bell towers to the high-rise of Moscow State University. And here is the third plot, little noticed by everyone: to preserve and implement the images of Soviet science fiction books and cartoons cherished from childhood with unattainable and tempting planets and cities. This is perhaps the most valuable, deeply hidden, intimate. By the way, it has a rich tradition of futuristic projects of the Russian avant-garde.
Such a mixture of subjects of cultural memory, unrealized complexes of the Soviet person became the soil on which the wonderful and wonderful flowers of today's skyscrapers grew. They really look surreal. And Herforth honestly recorded it. The nature of this surrealism lies in the fact that almost every high-rise building becomes a portrait of a non-verbalized inner world traumatized by the absence of one's own identity, a person who really wants to find it. They are very charming and honest in their own way, these skyscrapers!
Dasha Paramonova carried out a good classification of the opuses of the first decades of post-Soviet architecture on the example of “Luzhkov's” Moscow in her book “Mushrooms, Mutants and Others…”. This is the first study to suggest using capacious and attractive terms when talking about certain groups of monuments united by formal and typological commonality. So, Dasha courageously proposed to divide the flow of Luzhkov construction into six canals. First: "Unicats" - show-off houses (like Tkachenko's egg house), created in a conscious opposition to the general development. Second: "Vernaculars", corresponding to the postmodern principle of "contextuality". The third: "Phoenix" - the channel most hated by the defenders of Moscow, in which clones of the vanished capital are born. Fourth: "Arrays" - a series of residential buildings in new areas. Fifth: "Identifiers" - elite residential buildings and complexes (such as "Scarlet Sails", "Edelweiss", "Seventh Heaven"). Finally, the sixth: "Mushrooms" - those nameless booths and stalls that multiplied at lightning speed in any crowded place - near the metro, shopping centers, train stations.
Agree that even the classification undertaken by Dasha itself inevitably refers to some transcendental worlds, if not Star Wars, then the Lord of the Rings. So the sci-fi component of the image of post-Soviet architecture is really important in its understanding.
Frank Herforth's book "The Imperial Pump" can be purchased from the author in Moscow: [email protected]
Book website:
The book by Dasha Paramonova "Mushrooms, Mutants and Others …" can be bought in electronic form, in particular, at ozon.ru for 30 rubles.
