The exhibition is located in two small halls in the basement of the Aptekarsky Prikaz. On the walls of one of them, slides and videos of Ostozhenka's everyday life are shown: they are played at a slightly accelerated pace, projecting onto the rough relief of the 17th century white-stone masonry. Everything together looks like a historical chronicle, and the feeling of retrospection is complemented by a computer rarity installed in the corner, a real Macintosh of 1994 - the bureau had already existed for five years by that time, with a fourteen-inch screen and with a drawing opened in a fully working program - at least sit down and work, and behind the back, the shadows of imaginary colleagues will move along the walls, you can imagine yourself inside Ostozhenka.
In the other, main hall, the vaults and walls are completely covered with a carpet of color and black-and-white photographs, mostly amateur ones, accumulated over twenty-five years in the workshop's archives, as well as filmed specifically for the exhibition and posted on Instagram. Many employees took part in a kind of flash mob of preparation for the anniversary, although they were distracted only for a short time - preparing for the exhibition, the bureau was intensively working on a draft concept for the Moskva River, and not only on it.
Portraits, buildings, people, panoramas of construction sites are sometimes grouped around a project or a year, indicated by the characteristic anchor icon #, from time to time it is possible to make out familiar faces and famous buildings, but then everything again merges into a stream, similar to a friend tape, which, when superimposed on the ancient vaults, apparently reluctantly reified in space, although it did not lose the properties of a stream - the flow of life. For interactivity, there are copies of photographs laid out around them, which any visitor to the exhibition can take away as a souvenir - the authors promise to replenish the stock.
Opening the exhibition, Aleksanr Skokan said: “What is twenty-five years? This is a whole life for a young man. Half life for a mature person. And this is a third of life for an old man. And another twenty-five years is a good line, because the next term after twenty-five is only life. I just want to consider our anniversary in the context of the events taking place today, which are the background of our life, which someone perceives tragically, and someone - with pathos. But we will hold back and will not talk about it, but we will say "thank you" to everyone. Thanks to the museum, which for the third time allows us to frolic and walk within these walls. Thanks to MARCHI and Ilya Lezhava, who is the godfather of our bureau. Thanks to those who made this exhibition - the author of the concept Ksenia Berdnikova, Maria Dekhtyar, Vanya Voronezh."
Special thanks and applause from the public went to the Lik company, which constantly cooperates with Ostozhenka, and specially for the exhibition, according to the project of the architects, made and donated a staircase to the museum: a black metal staircase, similar to a fragment of a spiral staircase, now leads us from the courtyard to the basement, and it is installed directly on the vaults. Therefore, it was necessary to bring a model of a staircase on a 1: 1 scale to the site, try it on and modify it before making the final version. “You work with these people like in a fairy tale,” Alexander Skokan said about the Lik company, “you explain to them what you need, and they say: go to bed, the morning is wiser than the evening,“you get up in the morning, and they did everything, and even much better than you could imagine."
According to Alexander Skokan, the work on the staircase project is no less interesting than the urban planning projects with which the workshop has been working more and more often: “We are simultaneously working on a project of the scale of an entire city - the Moscow River, but also purely design projects such as this the stairs are no less interesting to us."
Andrei Gnezdilov, who now holds the post of chief architect of the Research and Development Institute of the General Plan and therefore attended the exhibition as a guest, said about the exhibition, in the preparation of which he could not participate, as follows: “Masha, Ksenia and Vanya found an amazing, very accurate language to show what are these twenty-five years. This is how we remember our life, memories crumble into pixels - instant images. I was dumbfounded when I saw it. It seems like chaos - but that's what I'm made of. We all consist of fragments, mixed in such a way that it is already difficult to distinguish where "I" and where "we".
Maria Dekhtyar compared the vaulted space decorated with photographs to a cave covered with mosaics and added: “Projects are already known to everyone, and we wanted to make this event more like a birthday. And such a photo album is the most suitable format. " Maria came up with the logo of the exhibition, in the form of crossed, vertically positioned Roman numerals XX and V: it is associated with the letter V - Victoria and with the windows of the house of the "Ambassador's House" in Borisoglebsky Lane.
Smiles, laughter, concentrated work on a project, enthusiastic discussion of some problems, tea drinking, a feast, architectural supervision - in the photo retrospective one can observe completely different, at times, seemingly insignificant moments in the life of Ostozhenka employees. But they all confirm the words of one of the co-founders of the workshop, Dmitry Gusev: “From the very beginning we had a friendly, semi-family atmosphere, which resembled a company of people who had gathered together to make a competition. She did not wear the shade of a formal team - everyone was good and interesting with each other. The atmosphere in the workshop gives a charge of informal creativity, when the motivation is not financial, but professional. Despite the fact that everyone works in their own style."
The resulting combination of a new staircase made for a museum - real and, moreover, design work, which will remain and will bring its small, but real benefit, with a deliberately non-pathetic, light and lively, friendly, and not a reporting exposition - turned out to be very, by and large, correct. The calm, slightly ironic attitude towards oneself and the desire to give others a present for their birthday - well, as is customary among the hobbits - on the part of a well-known bureau engaged in large Moscow projects - terribly captivates.
However, it was impossible otherwise to show all the things of "Ostozhenka" in a very small, albeit cozy, hall, and so it turned out: a quarter of a century as a stroke - the picture was motley, but monolithic. It exists only as a whole, it cannot be divided, just as it is impossible to disassemble a mosaic into pieces of smalt, rain into drops or a forest into separate leaves.
