The jubilee exposition unfolded in the Pharmaceutical Prikaz, but it is very far from the format of the traditional reporting review. Vladimir Bindeman's team decided to tell about the work done in the form of a general plan of an imaginary city, which is formed by quarters and districts built by the workshop over the past decade. And although Architecturium is primarily known for its townhouse villages, its portfolio during this period brought together objects of a very different caliber: from individual houses to large-scale residential areas, which are now commonly called multi-format.
“When we came up with the idea of a master plan that would unite our projects, and began to draw it, it turned out that all 50 objects fit together perfectly,” says Vladimir Bindeman. To locate its city "Architecturium" used a real geo-basis of one of the districts of the distant Moscow region, and the only geographic assumption here was the river, whimsically crossing the territory in several places. As the architect himself jokes, Skhodnya smoothly flows into the Desna: on the banks of the first, we recall, a constellation of villages is being built
"Olympic village Novogorsk", and the second sheltered the Andersen low-rise residential area.
As befits a real city, its outskirts are built up more sparsely, while as you get closer to the center, the quarter grid becomes stricter and denser. Found at the workshop and an object worthy of becoming the center of an imaginary metropolis is
competition design for the new building of the Maribor Art Gallery, which the architects interpreted as a giant glass ellipse, carefully inscribed in the newly created quarter. Before us is a city with a well-thought-out system and hierarchy of roads and a wide palette of public spaces that make it truly comfortable and viable. “Of course, not all pieces of this puzzle were actually designed and implemented,” says Vladimir Bindeman. "We only hope to work on some of them in the future."
However, the main goal of drawing up such a general plan was to show the possible path of the future development of the suburban areas of large Russian cities, which have been chaotically built up since the early 1990s with closed settlements, fenced with fences with security posts and completely isolated from each other. “We propose a positive scenario for the future development of the suburb, when the suburbs will unite into a space convenient for comfortable life and free movement,” the architects say.
The exhibition, the ideological and visual center of which was a giant master plan planner, was formed by ten of the most important projects for the workshop. Arranged in chronological order, they line up in a spectacular retrospective chain, demonstrating the gradual evolution of the workshop's approaches to the integrated development of territories and their transformation into comfortable residential enclaves with a recognizable appearance. In addition to tablets with drawings, renders and photographs, each object is represented by an elegant snow-white model, made specifically for the exhibition, in the spirit of the white walls and vaults of the Aptekarsky Prikaz.
Many famous architects came to the Museum of Architecture to congratulate the team of Vladimir Bindeman on the 10th anniversary. Alexander Asadov wished the City of Architecturium implementation and growth, and Mikhail Khazanov called the exhibition an excellent educational tool for young designers who should stop designing “35-storey settlements” for Moscow and the Moscow region. Nikolai Shumakov thanked the architects for a beautiful and high-quality environment, which they multiply with each of their projects, and Sergei Melnichenko noted that Vladimir Bindeman and his colleagues are fulfilling an important social mission, instilling in modern citizens a taste for suburban life in harmony with nature.
