The teachers of the studio “Clean up the trash” Oscar Mamleev and Natalya Bunkina justify their chosen topic in the following way:
“The average city dweller throws out 360 kg of waste per year. If everything that the residents of Moscow throw away in a year is distributed in an even layer throughout the city, the thickness of this layer would be about 10 cm. Having studied the ideology of consumption (the linear system of Annie Leonard: natural resources - plant - sale - consumption - utilization), one can suggest ways to eliminate an ecological catastrophe.
The topic "Removing the trash" seems to us very interesting and multivariate. A small butt, a candy wrapper is gradually turning into mountains of garbage, giant landfills, the growth and development of which is more and more difficult to stop. There are real problems reaching critical mass: oil spilled in the ocean, plastic clogging river deltas, car tires….
People who are deprived of the essentials for existence become garbage.
Garbage penetrates the human consciousness - violence against the environment occurs, cities are filled with architectural garbage - monstrous monsters that enslave the once cozy places of residence. These problems make professionals think about their solutions; there are experimental projects that cleverly interpret the answers to them.
Reincarnation of old oil platforms, ships, "dead" structures seems to be very interesting. The recycling of various materials, in addition to the unusual solution, brings significant savings.
The garbage theme is reflected in the artistic culture. Using various wastes of civilization, breathing new life into them, artists professing the ideas of Dadaism, constructivism and metaphysical realism created paradoxical and optimistic art."
Oscar Mamleev:
- Children from different cities who graduated from different institutes study at MARSH. Traditional education, which is given in all Russian universities, is built according to the old traditional system and, in a certain way, preserves thinking. And when people are faced with completely new methods and educational approaches, it is very difficult for them. But after going through a certain period of adaptation, they get the opportunity to use their potential reserves.
We have chosen the topic "Garbage" for the semester work. This topic, in contrast to plots associated with more realistic, understandable problems, requires a gradual "entry" into the material. Therefore, at first we gave the children three independent weekly projects: an object in a landfill, garbage as an art object, and garbage as a building material (including recycled materials). In the future, having chosen their direction, students must substantiate the concept, propose an architectural solution and constructive development. It seems to me that we are gradually finding a common language and mutual understanding.
Natalia Bunkina:
- For everything about everything - one semester, which is much more intensive than in Moscow Architectural Institute. It is also very interesting that all students have a different education, level of training and outlook. There are "more artists" and "more designers". And the geography is diverse: everyone is from different cities, there is a girl from Yakutsk.
Oscar Mamleev:
- It is very important in the learning process to conduct presentations and discussion of works with the invitation of critics from outside. The problem is that some students sometimes take offense at comments and take criticism badly. I keep repeating that these discussions are necessary. The task of the commission members is to notice shortcomings in projects at an early stage, to suggest how to fix them. In addition, the very process of defending a project is a good training in the ability to explain your idea.
Natalia Bunkina:
- At the beginning of our work there was a very joyful moment. It so happened that there was neither me nor Oskar Raulievich. We invited the students to act in our role. The guys got together and conducted the lesson themselves - discussed, worked fully. The work never stops.
I really like the fact that both they learn and we, the teachers. Here such knowledge is given, for example, infographics - modern subjects that were not there when I studied. We didn't do analysis, etc. I really like to study myself, I pay attention to interesting things, remember and, perhaps, I will also use in practice. For me personally, teaching at MARSH is also a kind of learning process. Here I give everything that I can, but I also try to take everything that I can take.
Archi.ru asked the students of the studio about their studies at MARSH and their projects on the topic of garbage.
What surprised you the most at MARCH that you did not expect to meet here - in comparison with the previous university? What did you like the most, and what turned out to be difficult?
Oleg Sazonov:
- Compared to MARCHI, here you immediately feel your value, here teachers are interested in your opinion and what you yourself want to do. The second is a huge amount of information that you get here - precisely in communicating with interesting people. These are both the practitioners with whom you discuss at the defense of projects, and the students of your course, with whom, after studying literally six months, you really get along: I have never had this. Here work in a team is constantly going on, here they teach very necessary things in terms of future work: they do not give abstract knowledge, but teach to submit themselves and their project, to the formal components of the profession, which are not spoken about in other universities. They teach many aspects of the profession, and this, of course, is a huge burden. I am in MARSH every day from 9 to 21 o'clock, sometimes I come also on weekends, when we, as a rule, carry out collective tasks.
Very often, practical and more abstract subjects overlap, which is very important. Every project should have a philosophical rationale, but it also needs to be thought out from a constructive point of view. At the defense, any question can be asked - both in terms of design, and in terms of function, and in terms of the economic component.
When I started studying here, the world had some boundaries for me. And the longer I study, the further these boundaries move. I understand how many things are not covered, and I want to know even more. When I studied at the Moscow Architectural Institute, I had the feeling that now I would get a "crust" - and become a professional. And here you realize that you don't know anything yet.
Let's move on to your project. Do you have a common base?
- Each student of the studio needed to form his own attitude towards garbage. In this problem I was hurt by the attitude of a person to garbage and to things in general. We constantly consume, this provokes an endless production of faceless things, which are then thrown away. And when we throw them away, we no longer care about them.
I had three projects. The art object is a guard post from oil rigs and barrels on Red Square. I attributed this to the fall in oil prices, which makes oil rigs become trash. Since order is needed there, it is necessary to set up a guard post from the oil rigs. And to make it look expensive, it needs to be painted with gold paint. Of course, this is a project of irony.
My next project, an object in a landfill, was a garbage truck "Nadia". It is not garbage that comes to the factory, but the factory goes to the landfill. This plant is the waste chute "Nadya" - "hope". He comes to the landfill and disassembles it, working on the principle of a 3D printer. Above are buckets and escalators, which take it all apart, and inside there is a conveyor, where all this is briquetted and taken for recycling.
Oscar Mamleev thinks that this project is my best, but for me my favorite is the third one.
I am embarrassed by a person's indifference to a thing, I myself often cannot fix some thing, because I do not have the necessary tools - say, a very thin soldering iron, a machine to grind out a part for broken furniture. I have to either hand over the thing for money for repair, or throw it away. I suggested creating a flexible system, which could include a collection point for old equipment, an exchange center, and a workshop with materials, machines and tools that can be rented. I contrasted all this with the standard leisure in the form of a bottle of vodka and therefore I assembled a fencing structure from these bottles so that light was refracted at different angles (some rooms need diffused light, some need direct light). It looks spectacular: during the day - from the inside, and at night - outside.
Dmitry Alekseenko:
- I studied at the Voronezh University of Civil Engineering for six years, received the title of a specialist and then entered MARSH. Once you get here, you immerse yourself in a completely new, dynamic world, where projects need to be done not in six months, but in a week. Here is a constant voltage mode, all the time you have to do research. And, since the structure of the school is competently built, even if there is no more strength, it still makes you think, read, look for a solution. The process is gripping. It is also worth mentioning the high degree of "integration" with teachers and other students, you can communicate on any topic, there is no hard boundary between teacher and student. Everyone here is like colleagues in an architectural bureau. MARSH has become a very important platform for me, which gives me an insane amount of knowledge. This is an important stimulus for development, I began to read a lot of books that I would hardly have picked up before. The most difficult thing was to get used to this system, because in Voronezh everything was more relaxed, but here MARSH became a part of life. And, of course, Moscow has a completely different pace of life and study. A very tense regime, when the teacher changes every six months. Each time you have to get used to it, to understand what they want from you. You need to be constantly collected and at the same time give good results, and prove your worth at each lesson. You always have a chance to prove that I will do this and this is how I see it. I really like that in this topic everyone chose a project for themselves, but at the same time it was necessary to prove its relevance.
My garbage art object is a fresh air pavilion. We live in a city and no longer feel that the air is polluted here. We get used to it, and only when we get to nature can we feel the difference. My idea was to show the contrast between city and nature. At the same time, a problem was discovered that one of the main types of waste in our country is waste paper.
I decided to make a monster that filters the air in the city. From the outside, the pavilion looks like crumpled paper, but inside it you can take a break from the city noise and breathe fresh air.
The next most difficult project for me was the project of the building in the landfill. I had a lot of different ideas, but in the end I came up with the idea of a trash museum. We know what a landfill looks like from the outside, but we don't know what it looks like from the inside.
It is based on the image of an ancient temple, which was erected from garbage in a landfill. Then this project was called the "trash Parthenon". People come there and can see the layers of debris.
I named my project on the topic of garbage as a building material "Vertical farm". For me, the ends of buildings, bare and useless, are "rubbish". Sometimes they try to paint them somehow, but this is extremely rare. Therefore, I decided to combine them with a vegetable garden, a greenhouse. Now everyone wants to consume fresh food, and I suggested making a volume of recycled materials that will be placed at the end of a residential building, and residents will have the opportunity to grow vegetables there.
Access there is carried out only from the roof, so this will protect it from ruin: some try to arrange vegetable gardens in the yards, but they are usually trampled down. It will also provide a variety of facades, and in winter the space of this vertical farm can be used as a community center.
Grigory Tsebrenko:
- I studied in St. Petersburg, at SPbGASU. Regarding MARSH, I will say that the process here is arranged in such a way that you are in an eternal state of motivation. The very environment, the environment motivates you to productive creativity. This is the main advantage of MARSH in comparison with other universities. There is an environmental element in MARCH - the atmosphere of the Art-Play space, the authority of the teachers whom you trust, you have known them for many years in absentia, and now you interact directly with them. Moreover, this relationship is on an equal footing, this is an inspiring moment that provokes you to do unusual and non-standard projects. Since I am a newcomer, I do not know what it was more difficult for me to get used to - to Moscow or to the MARCH. It was difficult to enter the constant tone, non-stop mode. In a traditional college, you lived from serving to serving, and between innings you could afford to relax. And here the process is so focused on you that you answer first of all to yourself, and this develops a sense of responsibility. Here the student decides for himself what he needs, you yourself are interested in your project being of high quality.
When I approached the topic of garbage as an art object, I remembered how my relationship with garbage developed. As a child, we handed over bottles to buy ourselves pies in the dining room. I looked at the garbage as a situation, a process, and it all came together in a specific project - a collection point for glass containers in the Arkhangelsk region.
There is an abandoned village where few people live; it is on the railroad, which is hardly used anymore. The only connection - with Severodvinsk - is carried out only along this road. As a result, debris permeates all areas of life. It is in memory, it is also in experience, since the narrow-gauge railway was built in order to transport wood, but this forest has already been cut down. On the other hand, this place is on the sidelines. Acceptance of glass containers - because in this village nothing can be done except drink. The eternal binge, doom, the feeling of a dead end - all this came together in this project. Rails and sleepers became the building blocks for this pavilion. Of course, outside of this project, neither forest nor rails are garbage, but here it is.
The narrow gauge railway has not been used for a long time and turned into trash. As for the forest, the inhabitants have been cutting it down for a long time. Deforestation is destructive for this place, it contributed to the transformation of this place into an abandoned one. In this environment, a pavilion appears, which captures all the hopelessness of the situation.
Since this is an art object, I allowed myself to be not fully functional and admitted that there are many holes in the roof, and sometimes rainwater flows inside, sometimes the sun's rays. Bottles start to clink or shine in the sun. You come there drunk with a bottle, put it down … The doom of the village and its inhabitants is fully expressed in this project.
The second project is a landfill facility. I made a dormitory: this is a Catholic term - a monastery building where monks live. This concept implies something pure and sublime. When we went to the landfill, I contrasted this image with garbage at the level of touch - clean and dirty. In the context of a landfill, dirty prevails over clean.
And in the environment of the city - the clean tries to displace the dirty, and from the consciousness - too. I contrasted the dirty clean in the hope that this object will become a habitat for landfill workers - and these are former criminals, a very dysfunctional contingent. I placed them in a clean environment, alien to them. For them, the dormitory is an object of close study. And it remains alien as long as the landfill worker is there.
And here there are two ways out: he either leaves the landfill, choosing "clean" for himself, or remains. And we know that the landfill workers are unlikely to leave, because, in principle, they are satisfied with everything, and the dirty will swallow the clean.
The third project is garbage as a building material. The deeper I dived into this topic, the more I focused on what is garbage. Trash is a very broad category, and I had to focus on one thing. I made myself safe by saying that garbage is a side effect of everyday life. I opposed being to being. Life - physiology, life support. And if garbage is a side effect of everyday life, then why not make the house a household? All repair shops, ateliers, etc. are the very life that is fixed in a specific space. This is a typology familiar to everyone.
Since the garbage was supposed to be a building material, I needed to figure out what exactly could be used. Garbage does not work well as a load-bearing structure, so I found a metaphorical image of a household that became garbage. I take the skeleton of a home, fill it with traditional functions - ateliers, repair shops, rental centers that allow you to get rid of garbage and throw away less. I figured out that on one of the floors there are creative workshops that deal with garbage as with recyclable materials.
They rent premises and are forced to fill their front cell. If this is a production of ceramics, then the artist can use samples of ceramics as recyclable materials. OSB is also recyclable. If put on an edge, then this material can serve as a supporting structure. Instead of insulation, you can also use recyclable materials, for example, foam glass. There is an atrium, and along the floors there are bridges, which can be made of OSB. And it can turn out to be a community center, a renewed and improved home of everyday life, because there were no creative workshops there before.
Ekaterina Kurylenko:
- Unlike other students, I am already getting my third higher education. I already have a specialist diploma, and my first education is engineering. At the beginning of my journey, I was not completely sure that I would study here for two years: if I don’t like it, I’ll leave in a year. Now I understand that after studying for two years, I will be very sorry that my studies have ended. I join every word that was said about MARSH by the guys. The only thing I regret is that I totally do not have enough time. I would like to have at least 48 hours in a day. I want to do a lot, but there is simply no physical opportunity.
I chose the topic "Garbage" because the work on it is proceeding according to the methods of Western architectural schools. We spent a lot of time, more than half a semester, researching and understanding what trash means for everyone. My main question was the attitude to garbage in our country. It seemed to me that in our country, unlike in the West, people do not think about garbage at all. It does not exist in our minds. We throw it into the trash can, and it “disappears”. Nobody worries about its processing, except for those companies that are directly involved in this. And in my first project, an art object, the main task was to draw attention to the issue of garbage, but in a positive way.
This is a cube in front of the main building of Moscow State University: each of its cells is filled with garbage, which is produced by one of the faculties of this university. This is an attraction, a background for photographs: everyone can find a faculty where he is studying or where he is going to enter.
The next project is a landfill building. Here, especially after an excursion to one of the Moscow test sites and an analysis of world experience, I formed two ideas. The first is life in a landfill, which is a special world with its own laws and rules, where people live according to feudal laws, where there is a very strict hierarchy, and where there is no access to outsiders. There is an association with a medieval castle town surrounded by a fortress wall.
The garbage recycling plant is associated with the main building of this castle. The second thought is that nothing is happening with garbage in our country. Less than 10% goes to recycling, and the rest just lies at the landfill. More than 100% of waste is recycled in Sweden, becausewaste is brought there for processing from other countries. And in Moscow there are large and small landfills, dangerous, harmful, legal and illegal. I identified the largest landfills around Moscow and concentrated on one of them, in Khimki. For this landfill, I have developed a project for an incineration plant. As an image for this plant, I chose buildings that have appeared in Moscow in recent years that imitate Stalin's skyscrapers. By this I want to emphasize that any architecture has its time, architecture must be honest. And such factories, like replicas of the Seven Sisters from the 1950s, landmarks in the capital's landscape, can be built in landfills around Moscow.
The third project is a waste collection point, workshops, etc. Each apartment has a box full of wires, old chargers, etc. And while this is a small percentage of waste, if you put it all together, you get a huge pile. People usually do not throw such things away, believing that all this may still be useful. The wires gave me the image of a jellyfish. The result is an object, the fences of which consist of wires, chargers in sockets, to which you can connect and charge your gadget. Inside this are electronics repair shops and a collection point for this kind of waste. It is a small facility that should be in every area.
Leonid Voronin:
- I got to MARCH quite spontaneously - after MARCHI. I went to the Museum of Architecture. A. V. Shchusev to the presentation of MARSH, which was conducted by Evgeny Ass, and fell under the magnetism of this man. And the projects presented there impressed me a lot. In the Moscow Architectural Institute there were these giant tablets, and here there were small albums, and how they were made with soul - it struck me. I realized that this should be tried. But in MARCH I met my - as an architect - vices. At Moscow Architectural Institute, I thought about how to design competently, where to place a bathroom or a staircase correctly. This does not mean that in MARSH such moments have ceased to be important, but first of all here we are talking about the image, the idea, by which it is motivated. Of course, then a constructive appears - everything is like in Moscow Architectural Institute, but first of all - sensations and observations. I am very grateful to our first module, which was called "Metaphor", it gave me an idea of architecture - about the connection between images and what should be the result. It is important to convey your "I", your attitude to the issue. And even if, when the task is given, there is a desire to play against the rules, this will not be punished, the score will not decrease.
In the Trash module, you think more about materiality. In "Metaphor" everything was absolutely abstract, and now there is a turn towards reality. For a long time I could not understand what is garbage for me. The idea of the art object was to take the ruins of an old building, which keeps memories, but no one needed it, and imagine in them the ghost of this house, where the creak of the floorboards, the voices of people, like a chariot, and a pistol shot could be heard. After all, there are so many abandoned houses in Moscow, and each has its own interesting story.
The second project is a landfill facility. When you find yourself in a landfill, the first impression is a completely shapeless mass that engulfs you. And if she had a certain outline, then she would have, in fact, a "passport", recognition. How do we know, say, San Gimignano? He has towers that signal us. If a landfill had this outline, a silhouette, then they would start to think about it, they would not perceive it only as a landfill, it would become a semblance of a work of art. And there it would be possible to create towers that would collect themselves from garbage, would rise like memorials. And each tower would be composed of its own material. The functional tower program is housing for those who work in the landfill.
Third project. When I head to my home, I walk through solid garages - it's like a separate state. And I got the idea to make a "grove" out of garbage, first of all - from tires. It is a permeable structure where you can see how cars are repaired - it is also very interesting to see how at the Volkswagen Glass Manufactory in Dresden, where you can see the whole process of assembling a car.
Ekaterina Shvedova:
- Now I am getting a second higher education, before that I studied at the Institute of Design and Advertising at the Department of Environmental Design. During my studies, I worked part-time in an architectural bureau, and after graduation I worked for 3.5 years in a design studio. I felt a keen desire to work with large spaces, environments and buildings, I wanted to develop further and expand my worldview. I had a small choice - MARCHI, where there is no second higher education, and it would take me 5 years to study, and MARCHI, where there is a master's degree, where in 2 years you can get used to architecture and gain basic experience "in battle". The MARSH school was recommended to me by Oleg Shulika, saying that this is the only place where you can get an up-to-date education. And I was convinced of this: here you learn from practitioners, in parallel with your studies, seminars of leading world architects, workshops, master classes, excursions to leading architectural bureaus of Moscow are constantly held. The most important difference that I can name is deep analysis and complete immersion in the subject of the subject. This is the first time I come across this. Previously, I started from the terms of reference and working out the plan, in order to move on to the concept, but here, without ideology and problems, you cannot start designing. It is necessary to flip through a lot of magazines, read a lot of articles, dissertations and books to substantiate your idea. each line must be justified by something.
I chose the Trash studio, not the School, because this theme gives more opportunities for imagination, there are no hard boundaries and rules. In addition, lately I have been worried about the issue of ecology, especially after the design of the territory of the Yauza banks, which was in the last half of the year. If I can make my contribution to the problem of environmental protection, it will be an invaluable experience.
I would like to show my project on the topic "garbage as a building material", the third of the small works that we needed to do at the beginning of the journey, before choosing the main theme for the project. I wanted to design something useful and socially significant, a special sign to indicate the problem of garbage. This is a "press center", the main function of which is waste recycling, and which can be located anywhere. Its function is to sort and compact waste. It is made of old, exhausted ventilation pipes. The design symbolizes the complexity and importance of waste recycling with its many "twists" on the facade. Even duct pipes can be used for other than their intended purpose, in this case - as a garbage chute. They are painted in bright colors that facilitate perception. Making the topic of waste sorting and recycling a game makes it much easier to draw public attention to environmental issues.
People themselves throw garbage into different containers, having previously sorted it, then it goes through the air duct into the garbage can. After filling the tank, a specially trained person on-site compresses the collected waste into small blocks and stores them on the same site, preparing them for further transportation, which is cheaper than transportation of ordinary, uncompressed waste.
