The ARCHIWOOD award was presented for the fifth time - a kind of anniversary, five years of work. All this time, the award has been systematically developing, and now, striving to more accurately reflect all the possibilities of using wood as a material, its organizers have offered participants and spectators an extended list of nine nominations. Compared to 2013, we have added “Interior”, “Wood in decoration”, “Object design” and “Restoration”. Out of 167 submitted works, the expert council selected 38 shortlisted ones; the jury, in turn, selected nine winners.
At the same time (as always) on the website of the award there was a popular vote for the objects of the short-list; it continued off-line at the stand of the exhibition under the colonnade of the Central House of Artists, where this year the audience was offered an ingenious ritual - the voter had to hammer a wooden dowel with a wooden mallet into one of the many holes in the perforated plywood panels next to each stand. So, right up to the closing of the gallery, the exhibition was accompanied by a resounding and diligent clatter that flew far over the Moskva River. In each nomination (again, as always) the prize was awarded twice: from the jury and “from the people”.
However, during the ceremony, Totan Kuzembaev noted that he personally was against the popular vote, as it turns into a competition on the topic "who has more friends." There were indeed many friends, the hall was full, the atmosphere ranged from benevolent to jubilant.
House in the range from Aalto to Mikhailovsky In the main category of ARCHIWOOD - "Country House" - the victory went to the house in Lapino of Sergei Kolchin, Anastasia Kolchina, Alexander Krylov and Andrey Adamovich (Le Atelier). The experts immediately recognized the compact and laconic house as “more Finnish” and “a house similar to Alvar Aalto,” but his victory in the jury meeting was not easy. According to experts, with the Lapino house in this nomination almost on equal terms competed: "the charming and ironic" estate of Nikolai Belousov "Hunting estate" - and the Deco Pattern House of Peter Kostelov, a modest modernist parallelepiped with an emphatically flat roof, but not devoid of signs of ornamental Slavic identity …
However, the "Hunting Estate", the house is in its own way very charming and accurate in the interpretation of the chosen theme (in which not only all the signs of the Empire style are reproduced, but even deviations from proportions and measures known in Russian estates; Alexander Skokan compared with a house in Pushkin estate Mikhailovskoe), did not remain without a prize: he received a special award from the general partner and organizer of the award - Rossa Rakenne SPb LLC (HONKA).
The leader of the popular vote for the best country house was the modular DublDom by Ivan Ovchinnikov (BIO-architects), who greeted the hall with his own manifesto, which left the audience in no doubt that affordable housing made of wood and, in general, a change in lifestyle on the Central Russian Upland is a real calling author. The manifesto circulated by Ovchinnikov on the global network largely contributed to the victory at home in the popular vote. The jury also liked the project, although it did not become the main winners due to the presence of foreign analogues of the modular solution; experts called the house "an excellent and necessary project to transfer European experience to Russian soil." On the site, many of the voters expressed a desire to immediately acquire the same house and asked about the price (the price is no secret - from 700 thousand to a million rubles).
Thoughtfully about restoration
One of the new nominations in 2014, "Restoration", caused the most controversy and doubt; several times it was going to be canceled or - evenly mark all the participants. The expansion of the chronology did not add any certainty either: usually the prize awards objects and buildings created or completed within one year, in this case, projects that were implemented within five years were considered.
Meanwhile, the emergence of this nomination within the framework of the award, which is already firmly entrenched among the professionals of modern architecture, is a fundamentally important step in growing up. Remains of a “former wooden” country, be it temples or wonderful, but less and less inhabited houses of the 19th and early 20th centuries are rapidly destroyed and disappear for many reasons: rotting, burning … The restoration of wooden architecture is a very special discipline (from the speech of the curator of the award, it was more which is obvious), and now it teeters on the brink of extinction, so any support - for example, from a prize, usually focused on the "new wood", any new conversation on the topic of restorers of wooden architecture will not hurt.
According to the curator of the award, Nikolai Malinin, the opinions of the experts-restorers, specially interviewed by him to make the choice more thorough, diverged radically in relation to each applicant: the work for which one expert spoke was completely denied by the other, and vice versa. Meanwhile, in the end, the nomination took place, and the decision of the jury coincided with the result of the popular vote - the Church of St. George won twice, the temple of 1685, moved to Moscow Kolomenskoye from the banks of the Yorgi River in the Arkhangelsk region. As we were told by Igor Shurgin (a historian who worked as part of the restoration team of the Karensi PRK), this church was proposed to be moved to Moscow by Ivan Glazunov; in the few years that have elapsed from the idea to the transfer, all roads to the church have completely disappeared, so it is possible that they managed to save it at the last moment.
Presenting the prize, the architect and historian Olga Sevan agreed with the choice of the jury and the people: she called the bell tower from the village of Kavgora "restoration of restoration", and the restoration of the church in Sviyazhka - "rather reconstruction". The restoration of the St. George Church, according to her, is the closest thing to the actual restoration.
Small, public, subject
The popular vote for the best "Public building" was won by "House on the Roof" (office and showroom of NLK-Domostroenie in the ARTPLAY design center) Maxim Nizov, Maria Surkova, designer Alexei Knyazev (NLK-Domostroenie). An expressive plastic object, the main façade of which is a curved wall made of woodpile.
The jury found the showroom not neatly assembled and not entirely innovative, so the professionals, quite unanimously, voted for Kazarma, a gloomy romantic hostel from Nikola-Lenivets. The hostel, black outside, white inside, despite its figurative resemblance to a state farm hangar, is actually the result of the reconstruction of a rustic, but large country house (the authors of the reconstruction are Sergey Syrenov and ARCHPOLE).
In the "Interior" nomination, the jury leaned towards a simple material - plywood: so ordinary at first glance, but turned into a luxurious moire, pearl canvas thanks to the art of Alexei Rosenberg. The winner of the popular vote was the family restaurant of the Sushi * Min chain of Stas Gorshunov and Anna Feoktistova from Ryazan.
The opinion of the jury and the people coincided in the Small Object nomination - thanks to the lightness and elegance of the concept, Clover by Fedor Dubinnikov and Pavel Chaunin (MEL) won in Nikolo-Lenivets. The competitors of the winner in this nomination were remarkably diverse this year: almost for the first time, according to the organizers, the short-list of the award included a log hut, the Vereya bathhouse of a staunch traditionalist Yegor Solovyov (the author's ideals were reflected even in the name of his bureau: Rezhen -project"). The hut liked the expert council for its world-class imagery, akin to Diaghilev's seasons and Bilibin's epic illustrations. But the combination of unevenly hewn logs with neatly cut towels introduced a dissonance. According to the definition of the jury member, designer Stas Zhitsky, she turned out to be "a little foolish", which is why she left the race, taking an honorable place for the hut in the shortlist of the award, entirely aimed, we admit, at modern trends in wooden architecture.
Opinions were divided again in the Urban Environment Design nomination. The jury, after a long debate, chose Ivan Ovchinnikov's MicroLoft, built near the Muzeon Park in front of the Central House of Artists (and having already left there) as part of last year's Mikrodomov festival, a house on three powerful supports. From a distance it seemed not wooden, but rusty iron, and resembled, according to the apt definition of jury member Alexander Skokan, a diving tower. This could be a hut on chicken legs, but space, from "Kin-za-dzy" …
In the voting by the jury, Mikroloft bypassed the project of young German architects STACK IT, a simple structure made of Euro pallets, burned by one of the residents who disliked the object a day after construction; The winner also left behind Mikhail Priemyshev's Vologda Modular Fair (by the way, the author of the project now teaches design at the Chinese University of Henan) - a set of typical retail outlets that painfully reminded some of the jury members of the Soviet and later Luzhkov fairs. Other members of the jury were inclined towards the "fair" because of its social and urban importance. However, the Vologda Fair won the Internet voting.
Out of five "Art Objects" the jury chose the HEIGHT object of the BuBl team built on the ice of Lake Baikal for the "BukhArt" festival; During the voting, the cylindrical tower made of wooden hexagons was ardently defended by the architect and author of many objects, Stepan Lipgart, who saw the flight of engineering thought in the constructive search for BuBly, akin to the engineering search for Shukhov and Tatlin's fantasies. The popular vote preferred "Cube-Ka'bah-Cube" in Kazan (Alexey Lazarev, Anna Nayshul, curator Guzel Faizrakhmanova).
The choice of the jury in the nomination "Wood in decoration" fell on the "Arbor-arch" by Totan Kuzembaev and Alexander Kudimov, built for the program "Dachny answer". Not quite a gazebo and not an arch at all, but rather a bridge between two massive pillars, which divides a small area into two halves: utility and garden, captivated the jury with the elegance of the solution and the fact that the tree played a decisive role in the design of the “arch”.
The contextual and laconic modernist bbq-hall "Kosogor" by Maxim Stepanenko (Karlson and K, ASB) won the popular vote in the nomination "Wood in finishing".
The Subject Design nomination has also become one of ARCHIWOOD's discoveries this year (text by its curator Yulia Peshkova, you can
see here). The jury prize went to Yaroslav Misonzhnikov, whose Corner lamp with its patented idea of putting it on the corner of the table fought against his own baby rocking chair Ratchet. The ratchet, which managed to charm Europe, in the eyes of the jury gave way to the lamp a little - however, the struggle between the works of one author must be considered rather virtual. The Internet Sympathy Prize went to the ARCHPOLE team for the FULLMOON chair, which, as they say, furnishes many clubs and restaurants in Moscow. So this subject has already gone to the people.
