Alexander Rappaport; Sergey Sitar © MARSH 1. Sergey Sitar: - During the five years of the existence of the "Tower and Labyrinth" blog, you have written and published about two thousand articles on the problems of architecture theory, urban planning, artistic perception, design methodology and architectural education. Obviously, the starting point for all these texts was the realization that world culture is entering a fundamentally new phase, requiring a radical rethinking of the mission of architecture, its place among other types of human activity and its historical path. The cycle of your five lectures, scheduled for the beginning of the fall semester at MARCH school, is thought of as a kind of "blow to the alarm" - an energetic professional manifesto, which, on the one hand, sums up a long and almost boundless theoretical work, and on the other - shifts it to a more open, inclusive and debatable format. Could you, in the order of the author's announcement, carry out and present here a preliminary content-orienting layout of your speech, scheduled for the first week of October? First of all: what, from your point of view, is the essential specificity of the modern cultural situation, and has your assessment of the current state of affairs changed since August 2009 - the moment you founded your blog?
Alexander Rappaport:
- Indeed, I would like to present the forthcoming five lectures or talks (“five evenings” at MARCH) as a result of the previous and at the same time a program of further work. Apparently, I myself began to feel that, working in the hermetic mode of the blog, I was losing some important connection with colleagues in the profession and with what could be called the situation itself, no matter how many texts I devoted to it.
If I try to describe in one word the main idea, or the problem that interests me now, then it will be the word "magic".
I understand perfectly well that these days the reputation of this word has turned out to be badly tarnished. Endless publications in the spirit of "New Age" - horoscopes, fortune-telling, healers, clairvoyants and fortune-tellers who clog the Internet and print, TV and the media - all healthy people cause justifiable suspicion.
Nevertheless, I believe that architecture, entangled in its theories and clutching, like a drowning man at a straw, for every new word in the philosophy of poststructuralism, synergetics, cognitive psychology, etc. - does this not only because her own subject and method over the past 500 years has been blurred by science and technology, but also because the nature of architecture as a magical practice is still not understood. And this magical practice, no matter how much they try to expose it in a funny form - even in alchemy, even in esotericism, even in intuitionism - continues to live in all spheres of culture, although it is in architecture that it plays a particularly significant role, since architecture is the heir of archaic magical practices. Although these days these practices have shifted from collective rituals to the area of individual creative intuition.
2. Sergei Sitar: - Why exactly with architecture do you associate hope for overcoming the systemic civilizational crisis in which we find ourselves? Why, in particular, not with contemporary art, to which, as it seems, today's international culture itself delegates the role of its principal diagnostician and conceptual leader? How do you think about the current and (hypothetically) optimal relationship between architecture and the realm of contemporary art?
Alexander Rappaport:
- The answer to the first question itself leads to the answer to the second. I see in architecture that link of culture, which, due to its archaic backwardness, precisely because of this rudimentary magicality, can become a point of growth for completely new initiatives and illuminate in a new way those civilizational problems that have now embraced global humanity, namely, questions about meaning life in the system of planetary existence. These feelings were aroused by the ecological alarmism of the Club of Rome in the sixties, but then the ecological topic somehow drowned in a communication explosion, and a new wave of this planetary conscience will begin to rise already in our century.
It is in this connection that I would like to consider the idea of progress and its shadow - the degradation of the activity of the spirit, pouring out into a feeling of urban depression and giving rise at the same time, at the turn of the sixties, to the Situationist International.
Unfortunately, contemporary art has recently become a form of political opposition to the bureaucracy and turned into a kind of private practice of symbolic Protestantism.
I think that such art can disappear as quickly as architecture. Both architecture and art are being replaced by design as an institution of a new consumer civilization, and its strategy of serving fashionable consumption is becoming a new threat to the preservation of planetary civilization.
Therefore, the question of the relationship between architecture, art and design remains among the main ones. But it makes no sense to solve it in some abstract form. The solution can be obtained only in the process of intensive development of creative initiatives in all three areas.
3. Sergei Sitar: - In one of your early Internet publications, you ventured to suggest that the expected global architectural breakthrough will begin in Russia - not because of Orthodoxy and the legacy of the Russian avant-garde, but as compensation for its innumerable suffering. Did the political events that happened in the Russian Federation over the past three years, and especially in the first half of this year, somehow influence this hope of yours?
Alexander Rappaport:
- The chances of Russian culture in the field of new ideas are growing today as the creative initiative in other countries is weakening. Western architecture, as I understand it, in recent decades has become a debtor to poststructuralism and postmodernism, but in itself it has not found any new perspectives in these movements. Russian architecture, following the path of direct inclusion of Western architecture in its landscape and Western ideas in its theories, practically loses to the West. At the same time, the productive assimilation of Western experience is proceeding too slowly. Suffice it to say that we do not have translations of such architectural theorists as K. Alexander, M. Tafuri, J. Rickvert, M. Wigley and many others. But closing the cultural gap is not enough. It is necessary to begin your own breakthrough, and replace the dreams of the Russian futuristic and space avant-garde with an analysis of the current planetary situation. If Russia does not do this in the coming decades, it will completely miss the chance that it was able to partially seize at the beginning of the 20th century, but which then almost fell out of its hands.
Eastern countries such as the PRC are at the start today and may soon be able to turn their thousand-year-old philosophical and cultural potential to the benefit of the new architecture. But in Russia, lying between East and West, that unique zone of active equilibrium may emerge, which will become nutritious for the most far-reaching programs. The young Russian language, which today so eagerly absorbs Anglicisms, in the 21st century can give rise to a new vocabulary of concepts of humanitarian culture, accessible on a global scale with the help of the Internet. But to an even greater extent, Russian architectural intuition, which began to break through in the "paper architecture" of the eighties - as if an echo of Russian oberiutism, will be able to create both in theory and in design,and in practical construction, new forms of urban architecture and new forms of settlement.
Of course, in such a perspective, the internal internecine conflicts of our days should be forgotten as a nightmare - it is important that our talented youth be able to devote all their strength to peaceful comprehension, design and construction of a new planetary civilization that knows no boundaries. *** Lectures by Aleksadr Rappoport "On the Eve" will be held at MARCH on October 1, 2, 3, 6 and 7.
Beginning on October 1 at 4 pm, on other days at 7 pm.
For more information, see the MARSH website and the MARSH Facebook page.
