In early October, Alexander Rappaport gave five lectures at the MARCH architecture school. We publish video recordings of lectures accompanied by a short interview.
What did you expect from this course? What were you preparing for?
- I decided to take these lectures for the reason that for the last three years I have been working very intensively in almost absolute isolation from any public and student youth, while my thought very quickly moved towards the realization of the radical changes that await architecture in the next century … And it seemed to me that it was time to get out of hermetic seclusion and tell everyone what comes to mind.
But how to prepare for five lectures, which would like to accommodate 1000 different and mostly concise articles written over the years?
As we approached the lectures and immediately after the first lecture, it became obvious that it would not be possible to present even the main ideas, and even more so their logical connections. This requires not five, but 500 lectures. Therefore, I decided to constantly stick to the main lines rather than particular ideas in the proper sense of the word.
These lines are as follows.
A premonition of a new turn in architecture, which will be much deeper and more powerful than the avant-garde of the twenties of the last century, and which will simultaneously continue and radically reject the principles of the first avant-garde.
The main thing in this turn, in my opinion, can be considered the rejection of the traditional division of Being into the earthly world and the other world, on which the culture of the past millennia rested - from belief in the afterlife of spirits to belief in communism.
In this regard, faith in truth disappears, as a kind of knowledge that belongs to eternity.
Whether this knowledge was proclaimed by prophets or acquired by philosophers. This absolute and unattainable truth is replaced by reflection, that is, the awareness of the limitations of all knowledge and opinions and the growing responsibility of thinking people for what they take as the basis of their actions today.
This reflection rests on the problems of conscience, intuition and magic.
And all these problems have not even been properly stated in the theory of architecture.
Magic was renounced as a prejudice in the light of positive science, conscience was abandoned, shifting responsibility to authorities or mass opinions, intuition was abandoned in favor of knowledge.
And all this led, in the end, to the depletion of creative thought and the loss of its originality and objectivity, both in architecture itself and in its theory. Although you cannot escape the magic of architecture, it shines through in every structure, you cannot hide from conscience in the face of children and parents, and you cannot hide from intuition if there is even a weak creative interest in the matter.
Therefore, all lectures were under the tension of two forces - attempts to convey some ideas and meanings and attempts to keep the audience alive in the intellectual and creative atmosphere of communication itself. The first task remained in the declaration of the new triad - the substance, the norm, the scale, which it was possible to explain only to a very small extent. The second problem was assessed by me only by the tense silence that reigned in the audience and the expression of the listeners' eyes, so whether she really decided to judge not me, but them. ***
Nikita Tokarev, director of the MARCH school:
We began the academic year with a series of lectures that open up new perspectives of architectural thought, sets the mood and direction for the whole year.
We are convinced that MARCH should be not only a school, a place where students study, but also a growth point for architecture in general in Russia. MARCH is a platform for discussions, for discussing new ideas.
That is why the speech of A. Rappaport, one of the leading theorists in Russia and Europe, is very important for us. The result fully met our expectations. Rather, he overturned all our expectations and offered a completely different perspective and view of architecture, its place in the world, its history, present and future.
What I remember most was the discussion about dignity. One cannot but agree that dignity is an essential category for an architect, which has been known since ancient times, from antiquity and the Middle Ages.
This includes the dignity of the architect himself, the dignity of his goals and motives. We value architecture for its virtues. But what it is, how to achieve it - this is the subject of discussion. ***
