The competition for the architectural concept of the NCCA museum and exhibition complex was announced on June 24 at the Strelka Institute, which acts as its consultant. The "New Art" foundation is announced as the organizer, the customer is the NCCA; the competition is financed by the NCCA Board of Trustees, established a few months ago.
Little is known yet. But the competition is declared international and - at least to some extent - more open than the recent major architectural competitions in Moscow. The organizers plan to make the conditions for participation in it, so to speak, hybrid: after August 20, it will be possible to submit an application on the newncca.ru website either in the form of a portfolio (if it is capable of demonstrating "relevant experience"), or immediately in the form of a concept that invented specifically for architects who have no relevant experience. Five participants of the second round will be selected by portfolio, the other five - by concepts. Only ten participants will advance to the second round. Applications for the competition can be submitted until September 20.
Of course, this approach must be recognized as a step towards the criticism of the recent Moscow competitions, starting with the Polytech competition, first of all - for the closeness and inaccessibility for young architects and, in general, the majority of architects of our country, where, as you know, museums and theaters have been built over the past 20 years. very little and there was nothing to replenish the portfolio with.
Announcing the competition, the chairman of its jury, Sergei Kuznetsov (the names of other experts will become known after August 20), commented on the new system as follows:
“We will have an interesting scheme of mixed selection at the portfolio level and selection from the presented concepts. We constantly polish our competition procedures and try to figure out whether the competitions we hold correspond to the goals we set. And these goals are to get good solutions, develop architecture and find new capable architects. Analyzing what we are doing, we decided to go for a new scheme.
Five teams will be selected from portfolios to ensure a strong pool of qualified participants. But realizing that such objects were built a little and infrequently, and our architects may have difficulties passing through the selection, we add five teams that will go through the concepts. They can be of any qualification. We hope that Russian architects will take this positively. Perhaps, novice architects through such a competition will get a ticket to the profession. At the second stage, there will be a closed part, where the finalists will make the final proposals and a decision will be made on them."
All previous projects of the NCCA Museum and Exhibition Center were developed under the leadership of Mikhail Khazanov. We asked Mikhail Khazanov if he plans to participate in the announced competition - the answer was evasive. The architect said that he had not yet made a final decision on this matter.
The history of the project of the museum and exhibition complex of the NCCA began about 10 years ago, when Mikhail Khazanov made a project for the reconstruction of a small building of the theater and lighting equipment factory on Zoological Street to house the NCCA itself. It was one of the first Moscow experiments in the reconstruction of an industrial building for a center of contemporary art, a contemporary of Artpleya on Frunzenskaya, but intended not for rent, but for a state center, the reconstruction of which was financed from the budget. The building is bold; It reminds of the Russian avant-garde with crimson stains on the facade, and with its outward structures it recalls Europe and, above all, the Parisian center for contemporary art Beaubourg (since then all talk about the projects of the NCCA buildings has been revolving around Beaubourg). Structures hold the upper floor; for more details see the article by Elena Petukhova. The NCCA opened in a renovated building in 2005.
While working on the reconstruction, Mikhail Khazanov simultaneously made the first
a project of the Museum of Contemporary Art at the NCCA - a tower in the spirit of Leonidov's "People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry". The metal structures brought out to the outside looked like scaffolding, the Shukhov tower and a hedgehog at the same time. Very bold consoles, growing out of a cylindrical hedgehog at different levels, hung terribly over the old factory building. It was a completely avant-garde project, in every sense: both modern and very much in the spirit of the historical avant-garde, you can't even tell right away what was more in it, historical or modern-avant-garde. Probably still more historical, the project looked like the embodiment of Ivan Leonidov's dream. Of all the options for the building of the NCCA museum, this, the first, Mikhail Khazanov considers the best, favorite and seems to regret it a little. In 2002, the project was shown at the Venice Biennale.
The fate of the project turned out to be the same as that of the flights of fantasy of the great Russian avant-garde artist. Around 2009, after the announcement of the tender and the decree on
the creation of the NCCA museum center, the project was transformed. At first, at the request of the Arch Council, its height was reduced by half, in the first version it was approximately 100 meters. Removed constructively complex consoles. The cylindrical tower has turned into a somewhat squat parallelepiped - an accumulation of glass volumes of a non-linear kind, reminiscent of Eric Moss's Mariinsky, but enclosed in a lattice of a metal frame and stairs crossed and collected by diagonals.
In another version, the structure was covered with an architectural fabric, projecting stairs onto it: a kind of flat version of the Pompidou center turned out. This is how Beaubourg could have looked in the process of reconstruction, covered with fabric with the image of its facades and entrails. The merit of the project was its translucency and the constant movement of the fabric, swayed by the wind, conceived by the authors.
The design of the tower on Zoological Street was accompanied (though not very active) by the resistance of Arkhnadzor, who defended the Theater House in 1916 (architect Osip Shishkovsky, but since the organizer of the construction was Vasily Polenov, his sketch is supposed to be). "Polenovsky" house, according to Mikhail Khazanov, was to become part of the new complex, retaining part of its facades; however, the house was heavily rebuilt during the Soviet era, almost made of silicate bricks.
Not at all because of the Theater House, but due to the congestion of the Zoological Street and the complexity of engineering communications in 2012, the construction of the NCCA tower was moved to the site of the Bauman (Basmanny) market that collapsed in 2006, where a new building of the Nekrasov library was planned before. The library became a part of the future complex, the center was to be a 16-storey tower, the continuity of the architecture of which with the Zoological project was quite clear. IN
In the redesigned version of the project, the tower was placed in a spacious area instead of the crowded Zoological, and ramps and the semblance of a straightened amphitheater appeared around it.
After the site was moved in April 2012, the project was approved by the Archives Council - but six months later it was finally canceled after criticism at a meeting of the Public Council under the Ministry of Culture (see Anna Tolstova's brilliant commentary in Kommersant; the main opponents of the old project were Garage director Anton Belov, trustee of Strelka "Alexander Mamut and Sergei Kapkov, now Anton Belov and Sergei Kapkov are members of the NCCA Board of Trustees, and Strelka is organizing the competition). At the end of 2012, it was announced that the NCCA museum would be located on the Khodynskoye field; then, for the first time, there was talk about an international competition chaired by Sergei Kuznetsov. In December, the press repeated the words of the Minister of Culture Medinsky that the building of the NCCA would become the "pivotal root" of the development of the Khodynskoye field, although not long before that there had been proposals to abandon the construction and provide the NCCA with one of the buildings available in Moscow. The complex on Baumanskaya was planned to be built by 2016, now the completion of construction is announced in 2018.
So, the acceptance of applications for a new competition for the architectural concept of the NCCA Museum and Exhibition Complex will begin on August 20 on the website newncca.ru.
