The Archi.ru editors asked me to compile a list of five buildings that I especially like. The task is not easy, especially since no evaluation criteria have been set. I thought: to be guided exclusively by my own taste is embarrassing, to rely on the Vitruvian triad is banal, to look back at the opinion of authorities is childish. I decided this: I will choose only from what I personally saw and photographed, judge - by the strength of the impression left. Here's what happened:
1. Region EUR (Esposizione Universale di Roma) in Rome.
A metaphysical area southeast of the center of Rome, painted by Piacentini in the late 1930s and built up with buildings by Libera, Quaroni and other remarkable Mussolini architects. I was lucky to be there at a time when the streets were almost deserted and "machineless". It seemed as if I was inside a painting by de Chirico - and I love de Chirico. He somehow incredibly elegantly "simplified" traditional architecture, transforming a real-life environment (the most illustrative example is Ferrara) into a metaphysical space, where, if you recall the words of the artist himself, there is no place for man. For some reason, in EUR you feel like an outsider, as if you shouldn't be here in principle, but the more acute is the experience of architecture.
2. School of Arts in Vyborg.
About this building of the little-known Finnish architect Uno Ulberg, built in 1930, I wrote seven years ago (see PROJECT CLASSIC №22): “The first thought that came to my mind when looking at the School of Arts was the following: how cinematic it is … ". I remember that I even begged the director Alexander Zeldovich, with whose son I was once friends, to shoot one of the scenes of the film "Target" in this entourage. In terms of style, this is such an upside-down house: the pot-bellied facade facing the bay is Art Deco, the side facades are functionalism (or "funkish", in Finnish), the blind brace-shaped facade with an elongated arch looking at the city gives Ancient Egypt. I was especially captivated by the view from the courtyard through the colonnade to the bay - it's fantastic! Thanks to the late Andrei Gozak for finding information about this Ulberg for me: it seems that he even specially went to the Finnish embassy about this, and without him that article probably would not have happened.
3. Villa Poiana in Vicenza.
In 2004, my family and I took a short trip around Italy - from Venice to Palermo. Our route passed through the Palladian places - Vicenza, Treviso, Mira … We visited the villas Barbaro, Emo, Foscari and many others. We looked at three objects a day. I was completely drunk with all this beauty and, I must admit, did not remember much. For some reason, only Poiana's villa, built in the middle of the 16th century and later, in the mid-1950s, was reproduced by Zholtovsky in the project of a typical cinema. The facades are designed in an extremely laconic way, with minimal use of decor. Seeing this building, I realized that there is "decoration", but there is a classic, and that they do not always go hand in hand.
4. Exhibition Center Vittorio Gregotti in Shanghai.
In 2008, a large company that included Evgenia Murinets, Nikolai Pereslegin, Maxim Khazanov (now these are all well-known names, and then we were still students) and others, flew to celebrate the Chinese New Year in Shanghai. When I arrived, the first thing I did was buy an architectural guide and hired a driver so that in the four days I had at my disposal, I could capture as much of the interesting things as possible. I looked at the eco-house of Kengo Kuma, the Pudong district - of course, and the city of Pujiang, which is being built 13 kilometers south of Shanghai, at 100 thousand sq.residents according to the project Vittorio Gregotti Associati. The environment, invented by Gregotti, did not touch any strings in me, rather inspired despondency, but the exhibition center with a tossing turret (very Italian in spirit) and a system of atrium courtyards formed by red walls raised on columns (very Chinese in spirit) impressed me incredibly. I don’t really like it when famous architects submit their ideas to a “foreign monastery”, but here we, on the contrary, are faced with the example of the so-called. contextual minimalism, in other words, “gestalt” is internationalist, and some fragments are very Chinese. This, of course, is not Paul André with his titanium bubble at the walls of the Forbidden City.
5. …
I decided to leave the list unfinished. Not for the sake of intrigue, but simply because I don't want to be limited to five objects. I have many more favorite architectural things. Then, opinion changes over time. Alexander Rappaport once said in a conversation with me: “Personally, in the 1950s-1960s, I hated order architecture. Then I fell in love with her. Perhaps in five years my preferences will shift towards something more innovative, and I will be ecstatic with some Koolhaas. And any list is a trap. Played as a judge, and then you will not get out.
Anatoly Belov - journalist, photographer, architect, and. about. Editor-in-Chief of the PROJECT RUSSIA magazine (since October 2013). Graduated from the Moscow Institute of Architecture (2009). Author of over 100 publications on architecture and contemporary art, including scholarly articles and interviews. At various times he collaborated with such publications as PROJECT CLASSIC, "Architectural Bulletin", Made in Future, "Big City". In 2006 he founded an internet magazine about architecture and design walkingcity.ru (closed in 2010). Laureate of the Prize of the International Festival "Zodchestvo-2009" for a series of articles on contemporary architecture. He is also actively involved in curatorial activities. In 2007, he curated the exhibition of "paper architecture" in Tokyo (together with Pavel Zeldovich). In 2009 he organized at the State Museum of Architecture. AV Shchusev exhibition "Let's Play Classics, or New Historicism". In 2011, he organized the New Workshops exposition within the framework of the Arch Moscow International Exhibition of Architecture and Design. In 2012, at the same Arch Moscow, he supervised the Skolkovo Big Competition exposition, acted as an editor and compiler of the catalog of the said exposition.
