The Strelka Institute is five years old, but it seems that it has existed for much longer: it is so closely included in the life of Moscow. In May 2010, I wrote about its discovery with restrained optimism. The idea of the founders of the institute was unexpectedly reasonable and noble, the new building could not but rejoice, but it was hard to believe that, like this, from scratch, we would create an educational institution in the field of design and architecture of an international level (which guaranteed the participation of OMA / AMO) - open on a competitive basis for everyone, with free training. Now it is clear that optimism could not have been held back: the institute deserves gratitude for its summer programs alone, involving the general public in the field of architecture, design, urbanism, and the problems of the city as a whole. At the opening of the Great Future exhibition, the co-founder of the institute and the chairman of its board of trustees, Alexander Mamut, said that one million people had passed through Strelka's yard in 5 years - a solid reach for a private initiative not of the largest size - both physical and “virtual”(the institute was originally financed by Mamut himself and Sergey Adonyev).
Considering the economic circumstances, the position of Strelka, as well as of any basically non-profit institution, is of concern today, but Alexander Mamut assured the audience gathered at the opening day that financial support for the institute would even increase in the current crisis. He also said that Sergei Gordeev, founder of the Russian Avant-garde fund, president and chairman of the board of the PIK Group of Companies, was included in his board of trustees.
PIK Group also sponsored the Big Future exhibition, which serves as a joint diploma work for Strelka students. how
wrote to Archi.ru last October, the theme of the 2014/15 institute curriculum was “the city of the future,” and the curator was Winy Maas from MVRDV. However, as the program director of the institute Anastasia Smirnova said at the opening day, his idea of the future did not coincide much with the ideas of Strelka teachers: obviously, therefore, now he is listed only as a “invited expert”.
Be that as it may, the topic of the future remained in the program, embodied in the form of a study of 11 important global development trends that are relevant for Russia, perceptible on a human scale and affecting the quality of space. Each of these trends, which could change life on Earth in the next century, has its own small student team. The result of this work was embodied in the form of a huge panel in the courtyard of the institute: a kind of "map of the Motherland" is divided into 11 pages, where students' ideas were visually embodied with the help of illustrators from the BANGBANG studio. All exhibition materials are posted on the website
bigfuture.ru.
Presenting the exposition, Anastasia Smirnova admitted that instead of a panorama of the future, students, rather, conveyed the spirit of the times, their fears and hopes. It is difficult to argue with this: the mass of topical details seems to be extrapolated for the coming decades. Thus, the theme of the economy of idleness generated by the "excess of free time in most people" is revealed on the example of Crimea, where the entertainment and lifelong education industries are fighting for the leisure of Russians around 2060 (among the details clearly inspired by our days, there is the following: in the Foros church for those who leave resort people are offered "express worship" and even indulgences).
Alternative forms of governance generated by the development of social networks and other mass information technologies, according to the idea of Strelka graduates, will not make ordinary Russians more “influential”, will not help them to unite and demand that the authorities take into account their interests at different levels. On the contrary, IT will become another "contour" of the state, providing a "dictatorship of the media" with a strong "patriotic" bias, reminiscent of the structure of the federal media today.
In the introduction, the authors of the exhibition seemed to say that they had rejected all the artistic pictures of the future: from the “flying city” of Georgy Krutikov to “Star Wars,” but the taste of Telluria is quite palpable in most of the subjects. Perhaps this is the main drawback of the project: despite the declared "understanding of the current situation" and consultations with experts, fantasy still dominates in the "Great Future", and in this field students noticeably lose to writers, artists, cinematographers. Therefore, the most convincing section seems to be "Biotechnological city" - due to the fact that researchers are already working hard on many of the innovations described there, and this facet of the future is closest to reality (for example,
The Design of the Year award was given this time for Organs on Chips, a Harvard invention that allows drugs to be tested on cultured human cells). Even with the Russian context, they acted logically: from the catastrophic situation with health care, it is proposed to enter the "private sector": not the most popular, but obviously the only real solution.
The baseline data for the China Expansion and Water Scarcity sections are also quite realistic. However, there is a lack of rigidity, which, for example, you find in the section about the "dictatorship of the media" (there Russia was denied even in the hope of destroying the conservative "estate pyramid"”): The authors“forget”about the Soviet-Chinese conflicts of the 20th century, and about the wars for fresh water that are already going on nowadays, and paint a surprisingly peaceful, though not too tempting picture of the next 50 years.
At the same time, "The Big Future" is captivating by the lack of orientation towards a happy ending, which is often so annoying even in quite serious, non-educational projects with great prospects. Despite the declared rejection of dystopias (obviously, this is why there is no section on global warming and catastrophic environmental pollution: is it really of little relevance for Russia?), Strelka students do not force themselves to look for “positive” in their trends. Therefore, even if they describe the fate of an 85-year-old woman, for whom blood cancer and the absence of one foot do not bring suffering and do not interfere with living an active life, it does not seem like a stretch. Yes, biotechnology will allow her to defeat the disease, but this does not mean that she will be happier than the average contemporary - ours or hers. On the panel you can find those dissatisfied with immortality, and tired of healthy eating, and criminals, and refugees, and poor old people in waning cities: everything is like in real life.