This year, Zodchestvo is not the same as usual. The festival takes place not in autumn, but in winter, and practically on New Year's Eve, and not three days, including weekends, but only two days, moreover, Monday-Tuesday, and not in the Central Exhibition Hall "Manezh", which is perceived almost as a synonym for the main architectural festival in Russia. and in Gostiny Dvor. Such perturbations are not a deliberate work on changing the image, but more than forced measures: the dates of the festival were postponed three times. At first it was planned in Gostiny Dvor at the beginning of October, then it was transferred to the Manezh at the end of November, then a week before the planned opening, he was faced with the fact that he had nowhere to bring the exposition, since the work of the exhibition “Orthodox Russia. Romanovs ". Almost immediately after this discouraging change, the leadership of Zodchestvo returned to Gostiny Dvor, but the new dates for the festival were shaken down for several more weeks.
In general, architecture still needs to be found in the Gostinka. The festival is located in a closed courtyard, but there are no signs on the street that Zodchestvo-2013 is taking place here, so you literally pass through the dense ring of all kinds of shops and salons at random. And now, bypassing the heavy double doors, diamonds and furs, and then also the frames of metal detectors, you finally seem to fall out into the void - a giant flat atrium named after Yuri Luzhkov, in which it is relatively light even on the most cloudy day. And somewhere, far below, on the snow-white walls with light green paint, the cherished words are applied: “Zodchestvo-2013. National landscape ". Because white was chosen as the main color of the exposition, it is not that it is lost, but as if it slightly dissolves in the space of Gostiny Dvor, against the background of its white arcades and almost white floor. On the one hand, this makes it especially obvious that the festival exposition was forced to come here, but on the other hand, such a decision is paradoxically consonant, if not the theme of "Architecture" itself, then the way the curator Irina Korobyina understands it.
Korobina's manifesto is a whole article, and in order to make such a long text readable, the designers even had to space out its individual paragraphs with a "ladder". “The post-Soviet period has shown the obvious - the national landscape is not in any way stable value, it not only grows with the course of history, but is also rapidly destroyed. The new capitalism divided the country into a union of independent states and swept over them like a hurricane, bulldozing historical monuments, replacing them with golden square meters of "elite real estate". The national landscape has fallen into a zone of turbulent transformations - it bears irreversible losses, shrinking like pebbled skin, erased by the construction of commercial real estate that is the same all over the world, loses its uniqueness,”writes the Director of the Museum of Architecture and builds the exposition accordingly (the design project was developed jointly with the company "People's Architect").
The compositional solution, in general, is familiar: there is a central passage to the main media platform, and on both sides it is flanked by pavilions of various regions and design institutes. But if usually the stands were directed towards the "main street" of the festival, then Korobina turned them towards the promenade with blank facades - according to the curator's idea, the "city" and "landscape" do not intersect. And if in the first there is a variety of forms, designs and ambitions, the artificial turf of the "landscape" serves as a space for relaxation, reflection and art expressions. On the surfaces of the pavilions, facing the inner, curatorial, part of the exposition, frames of the chronicle about the architectural monuments of the Russian land are projected, which are shown clearly and brightly, sometimes blurred and almost fade, as if symbolizing the current deplorable state of the overwhelming majority of them. The fragility of the position of the national landscape has become the theme of most art projects. Arch group, for example, assembled a "hut" of typical concrete panels, and Valery Koshlyakov created a series of architectural watercolors on huge polyethylene canvases - a material more appropriate for a construction site than in an artist's studio, which gives this project such a piercing sound.
As always at Zodchestvo, there are a lot of purely reporting tablets and stands. The regions show themselves as best they can, and this feature will probably never be taken away from the national architectural festival. The Khabarovsk Territory demonstrates how to cope with the consequences of the floods, Bashkortostan, along with new buildings, presents paintings by its best artists, the Moscow Region is replete with territorial development schemes. Against the general background, the Research and Development Institute of the General Plan of Moscow stands out, its entire stand dedicated to the concept of developing the spaces of the Moscow River, and the pavilion of Moscow proper, with its technical equipment clearly demonstrates how far the capital has gone from all other regions of the country.
While standard nooks from tablets were being mounted around, Moscow built a round pavilion, along the inner radius of which a tape of monitors was launched, and the only exhibit was a control panel from which a variety of subjects can be called up on screens, from existing city panoramas to projects under construction and futuristic scenes of the future. … It is noteworthy that here, too, the river became one of the main heroines - not so long ago, the Moscow Space Agency and the Research and Development Institute of the General Plan launched the process of examining all the embankments of the main water artery of the capital (next year an international competition will be announced for the concept of their development), and if the institute presented a scrupulous report on the current state of affairs, then in the pavilion of Moscow a work of video art is shown - a dynamic video about a journey along a river partially frozen in ice.
Along the outer perimeter of the exposition, according to tradition, the works of students of architectural universities, young architects, as well as applicants for the main awards of the festival - projects and buildings of 2013, are placed, and a path made of artificial grass leads to the latter, so that you can immediately walk from the entrance to the "anthology". We will find out which works will be awarded to "Tatlin" and "Crystal Daedalus" today, on December 24.
