It would, of course, be ridiculous to expect that the changed course of the era will bring a heap of platbands, but we had certain concerns about how the crisis would affect the formation of the premium. However, the long list collected a record number of works - 176, whereas last year there were 167, and in the first year of the award, in 2010 - 145. Of course, I would like to think that in a situation of gathering darkness, people's hearts are especially kind to projects with good reputation, not degraded over the past year in any direction and thus giving some kind of hope (or illusion). But in fact, the consequences of the crisis have simply not yet reached us: the award is determined by the construction projects of the last year. And the next year will be truly indicative.
In the meantime, you can innocently celebrate success, which is beautiful not only in number, but also in quality. Among the nominees for the award are legendary "wallets" (Alexander Brodsky, Totan Kuzembaev, Andrey Chernov), masters of wooden architecture (Nikolai Belousov, Alexey Rosenberg, Peter Kostelov, Roman Leonidov) and just stars such as Evgeny Ass. But the appearance of new names is no less pleasing - and this year there are 15 debutants on the short-list, more than a third! For the first time, Samara aces Valentin Pastushenko and Vitaly Samogorov participate in the award: their luxurious villa looks outrageously European and modernist in the context of the current retro-Rusification. However, the authors are a little excused by the wooden paneling, which gives the house a rustic charm.
The house of the newcomer of the award, Tatiana Beloborodko, is based on the traditions of the avant-garde: tightly knitted from cubes into a dynamic volume-spatial composition, it also touches with green roofs. The glass-wooden ingot by Sergei Nasedkin, erected in three months thanks to industrial design and construction methods, which are not common in private housing (all house sizes are multiples of the sizes of glued panels), also dissolves in nature. ANTONHOUSE by ARCHPOLE bureau is just as modern, but much more aggressive: gray and hard on the outside, however, it becomes white and fluffy on the inside, which is facilitated by the excellent quality of detailing. Which is also understandable: before taking on the houses, ARKHPOLE spent a long time honing (polishing, burning and tormenting) furniture in every possible way. Having won in the nomination "Subject Design" last year, they also took the lead this year - with two objects, of which the experts were especially pleased with the table, whose legs are glass blocks.
It would seem that much more traditional than ANTONHOUSE, the house was built by another debutant of the award - Denis Taran. However, the unusually sharp angle of inclination of the roof, coupled with the miniature size, makes his house more Dutch than Russian. The quality of workmanship also works for this feeling, which, in particular, made it possible to leave the joints of the surfaces open. From the same typology - Evgeniya Assa's house in Kratovo, where the main architectural feature of the dacha - the terrace - was elevated to a cult and repeated (with variations) four times. The interior space of the house is no less ingeniously solved, the zoning of which is brilliantly handled by the staircase hovering exactly in the middle.
But if this object delicately hides its fullness of light, in a country-style way, then Nikolai Belousov's house has been turned into a powerful hymn to the light, and it is not without reason that it is called "A trap for the sun." Belousov's many years of experience in combining traditional chopped technologies and modern forms (implying a large glazing area) found here some kind of almost heroic embodiment. The "Ark" by Vladimir Yuzbashev is not like anything familiar, although the author of the peculiarities of his house derives precisely from the national specifics, about which he even wrote a whole manifesto. "Our houses should be one-story, but we have a lot of land."“Russia is a northern country … modern Russian design … is close to calm Scandinavian design. Hence the simplicity of this house. " “And finally, Russia is a country of forests. Of course, our houses must be wooden. It is necessary to continue the great tradition of wooden architecture, saturating it with new technologies."
And the snow-white club house of Antonio Miche (bureau TAMMVIS) looks completely alien. As, by the way, the surrounding landscape, which, however, is understandable, since all this is the territory of the golf club. Floating roofs echo the pattern of the surrounding hills, while glass and a translucent screen made of slats create the image of a landing cloud. White, transparent, feathery (the original double columns help to increase the span), it absorbs the shades of the sky at different times of the day and changes with it.
Finally, a bus stop for Alexander Brodsky has already been built in foreign lands. The Austrian land of Voralberg, already famous for its wooden architecture (both old and new), invited seven world stars (Japanese Su Fujimoto, Finn Sami Rintala, etc.) to build at a stop. Nobody hit the face in the mud, and the village of Krumbach with a population of a thousand people is now an absolutely happy village.
Much more dramatic was the construction of the Drama Theater bus stop in Vologda. First, young local architects (they were among those who "activated" the city three years ago) conducted a large-scale sociological study. The residents of Vologda wanted it not to blow or drip, that the windows would not break and the announcements would not stick. And more light to read. In general, the terms of reference were drawn to a full-fledged TPU … The implementation changed a lot, nevertheless, the stop turned out to be extremely vandal-resistant (which the city authorities consider the main success) and the next one should appear in Velsk. But if Brodsky's elegant "stool" is listed as a "Public building", because it stands almost in an open field, then this stop is in the nomination "Design of the Urban Environment", because it is all "about" Vologda, about its tree and its modernism (an example of which and is a drama theater).
The ribbed modernist pavilion of Fyodor Dubinnikov at Strelka looks at the same era. The supporting structures define the image of the building - ascetic, sharp, rough, which is quite consonant with the spirit of the 1970s, which preferred everyday deeds to exploits. And the pavilion was just the “case” for the exposition of the works of Strelka students on the theme of “Everyday life”. Another exhibition is “Model for a New Life, 1: 1 scale. Vanguard on Shabolovka”- became the object of the competition, not as a shell, but as a content. The constructivist monuments surrounding the new Center of the Avant-garde were presented here in the form of plywood metaphor models (which also served as exhibition stands). The house-commune of Ivan Nikolaev was logically depicted by a rack, a school on Khavskaya Street - a stand with round windows, as in the school, Danilovsky Mostorg - an arc of the enclosure, and the crematorium symbolized a plywood cube that wrapped around a supporting column. All this was witty (designed by Ksenia Yankova) and informative (curated by Alexandra Selivanova).
Almost also, with one stroke of an I-beam, the gazebo of Maxim Dolgov, magically (as always, however,) taken by Yuri Palmin is solved. A strong move - and in the house "Fairy Tale" by Dmitry Mikheikin, which competes with the gazebo in the nomination "Small Object". The house surprises with its small-scale French windows, which have grown imperiously through its body, and as a result have created a very original image. And the dashing bathhouse of Oleg Volkov represents a whole "village of architects" in the village of Klyushnikovo: they built it for themselves, they themselves live here. That there is a worthy response to the screeching of the brakes of the era: they go into themselves and survive in communities. Another village, already in the Tver region, is famous for the highest quality architecture, which is designed by only two authors - Alexei Rosenberg and Petr Kostelov. One of their houses in the Konakovo River Club already took over ARCHIWOOD in 2012, now the no less elegant Dom-Depot is entering the fight. In this case, the authors will compete with themselves: in the same nomination "Wood in decoration" there is another object of theirs - an unbearably beautiful house in the village of Dukhanino, where Rosenberg's favorite theme of "vibration" is brought to a ringing with the help of a two-layer facade - metal and wood.
![«Сказка» [баня&гостевой дом]. Проектное бюро НЛО, Дмитрий Михейкин. Фотография © Дмитрий Михейкин](https://i.architectureprof.com/images/003/image-6272-13-j.webp "«Сказка» [баня&гостевой дом]. Проектное бюро НЛО, Дмитрий Михейкин. Фотография © Дмитрий Михейкин")
The coachman found himself in an even more awkward position at the Bryanchaninovs Estate Museum, who remained in the "Restoration" nomination in not too proud loneliness. Initially, it was adjacent to a Vepsian barn in the Karelian village of Sheltozero - a thing that seems to be themed by the department of restoration work. But in fact, this is an absolute remake - a masterful, professional one, made with the same tools and using the same technologies used by the same people (Ethnoarchitecture) to restore the old. Nevertheless, in order to avoid the vicious ambiguity rooted under Luzhkov, when the word “restoration” was used to describe anything, including “complete demolition with reconstruction”, it was decided to move the barn into the “Small Object” nomination.
The cart, which has been competently restored by the "Electra" company, is located in the Vologda region, and the nomination "Art Object" has become the most diverse in terms of geography. It features elk, booth, Easter cake, tabloid and ziggurat - from Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Tomsk and Kaluga regions. From the latter stands, naturally, the most famous village of modern Russia - Nikola-Lenivets, and Vladimir Kuzmin and Nikolai Kaloshin erected in it the "Lazy ziggurat". Cut down "in dir", that is, with a gap between the logs, as the ancient Russian belfries were made (objects that did not imply a long-term human stay), it kind of jumps over the centuries during which those belfries came to a picturesque state, and demonstrates this quality on the fly. At the same time, the "Ziggurat" was felled out of a forest that is not suitable for construction, which is especially cool, because it is not even a recycle, but substandard materials.
And Andrei Chernov, a resident of Novosibirsk, builds from driftwood, paradoxically combining the simplicity (even wretchedness) of building materials with the pathos of design: this time, the Maly Theater BALAGAN became the main venue of the Yolki Palki festival. An equally impressive gap between opportunities and results is in the “House-Kulich” of another Siberian, Ivan Dyrkin. In three months (and almost three kopecks), an original object was built, in which the themes of Buckminster Fuller, beloved by the author, are realized in an economic way, but extremely inspired. The Krasnoyarsk benches “Moose are floating” raise the issue of fleeting rest to a new level, and the walls of the Nizhny Novgorod “Tabloid” - an abandoned garage that has become an interactive panel for communication with the world - turn into an unexpected side.
The bridge over the "largest skating rink in the country" - at the Moscow Exhibition of Economic Achievements, looks like an echo of a bygone era. Its spectacular appearance in the form of iridescent waves of light, inspired, as the authors (AI-studio) assure, by the arctic landscapes and the northern lights, amazingly rhymes with the "lightweight Stalinism" of VDNKh. True, this version of the style is also called “resort”, so that all together begins to seem like some kind of surreal landscape in the spirit of Vladimir Sorokin: “Skating rink in Magadan. Northern Lights. 1940 ".
One could say that he continues the theme of wooden bridges, which was so brightly started by the bridge in Gorky Park, if he had not closed it. And along with it - and a whole era of hope and renewal, in which urban wooden architecture played an important role. Gorky Park and Muzeon, Bauman and Perovo Gardens, Sokolniki and Sadovniki - the renovation of these parks has always been accompanied by stylish wooden objects. And now it returns to its usual place - in the forests and fields.
The 2015 shortlist is published on the award's website, and all 38 works will be presented in the Peripter pavilion at the entrance to the Central House of Artists as part of the ARCH Moscow exhibition. The general partner and organizer of the award is the Rossa Rakenne SPb company (HONKA). The winners will be determined by popular vote (it will start on May 18) and a professional jury. This year the editor-in-chief of the Internet magazine "E. K. A." Larisa Kopylova, four-time winner of the ARCHIWOOD prize Ivan Ovchinnikov, last year's winner in the main category Sergey Kolchin, vice-president of the Union of Moscow Architects Nikolai Lyzlov, chief architect of the Support of Wooden Architecture Monuments Foundation Alexander Nikitin, head of the WOWHAUS bureau Oleg Shapiro and Czech master of wooden architecture Martin Rainisch.
The solemn ceremony of awarding the winners will take place on May 29 at 19:30 in the conference hall of the Central House of Artists.
