"Russian Wooden" is an educational and exhibition project covering different dimensions of Russian wooden architecture. I think today it is important for the entire cultural community of the country. When times of trial come, thinking about your own cultural identity helps you fight them. The country's national landscape is shaped primarily by its architecture. Native birches and aspens are found in Canada and Finland, and when you say Kizhi it is immediately clear that here it is - Russia. Wooden architecture is a fundamental component of the Russian national landscape, which, alas, we are losing year after year. What to do with the monuments of wooden architecture? How and with what means to save them? These questions usually provoke asymmetrical answers. So, for the 800th anniversary of Kazan, it was decided to rid the city of the unsanitary quarters of the old wooden housing. The wooden architecture of the 18th – 19th centuries was used as a bulldozer, which gave the city its uniqueness and special charm. The city authorities with one radical gesture got rid of the problem that tormented everyone. The inhabitants of the demolished houses, tired of living without basic amenities, celebrated the victory - they were relocated to standard new buildings with running water and sewerage. The cultural community of the city and the country, though having no experience of living in dilapidated huts, perceived this act as an unforgivable vandalism. Whose truth is truer? As the famous Spanish urbanist Jose Acebillo, who developed a strategy for the development of the city center for Kazan, said: “In the global world, the most valuable is what makes the city unique and inimitable”. In the long term, the loss of historic timber buildings for the city takes on a gigantic scale, exacerbated by the irreparable loss.
The project brings together three exhibitions, accompanied by lectures and public discussions, designed to expand the community's attention to wooden architecture in order to realize its importance for us, people of the 21st century. The focus is on difficult issues: the attitude towards wooden architecture in Russian culture and how it has changed throughout history, the problem of preserving the wooden heritage of the Russian north, as well as the main directions of the development of wooden architecture today. And, if the historical review reveals the vector of degradation, and the topic of saving the surviving wooden masterpieces sounds depressing, then the latest architecture is so encouraging that it requires separate consideration. The space for wooden construction today is a Russian suburbia. The closest examples in the literal and figurative sense are in the Moscow region, where you can find whole "enclaves of modern wooden architecture", in which the main directions of its development can be traced. A happy coincidence - an enthusiastic customer with good intuition and the gift of friendship with quite outstanding architects, a sparing approval regime in the Moscow region, an atmosphere of creative competition - became the prerequisites for the transformation of the former Pirogovo boarding house into a unique territory uniting unusual wooden buildings. Each is an unprecedented architectural solution focused not only on functionality and artistry, but also on the statement of the ethical program of the relationship between man and God-given landscape. This is the architecture of dialogue, where the author reserves the right to artistic understanding and transformation of the natural environment, based on the comprehension of its laws and using natural materials. All this allows us to speak about the emergence of a "small-sized avant-garde", which is also uniquely wooden.
One of the most consistent and faithful "Pirogov" architects, who largely shaped the character of this "enclave", is Totan Kuzembaev. Each of its construction is a declaration of a design method based on professional knowledge and an intuitive sense of the possibilities of wood. This is how the First Office of the Yacht Club appeared, finished with a waste croaker. The use of material, which from time immemorial was considered a waste, gave the facades of a small building the expressiveness of an art object that organically blended into the natural environment. The facades of the Second Office are formed from a noble timber, the constructive capabilities of which allowed the architect to bypass living trees that fell into the construction zone with an artistic broken line, and thereby protect them. It turned out that a bar can be used to write words, even such difficult ones as “yacht office”, which became the theme of the main facade and an expressive architectural solution. Among the large number of residential country houses built by Totan at different times, including quite recently, the "House-Bridge", which is thrown over the ravine, stands out. The wooden bridge structure has merged with the living space so simply and organically that the development of a new type of housing in rugged terrain suggests itself.
Totan is an innovator and artist who, like no one else, understands the possibilities of wood and generates innovative ways of revealing the constructive and artistic properties of wood in architecture. That is why he was invited as one of the three heroes of the conceptual exhibition, presenting the main directions of the development of modern wooden architecture in Russia.
Svetlana Golovina is the author of yet another "enclave of modern wooden architecture" in the Moscow region. This is a sports club with a recreation center "Lisya Nora", the territory of which unites several outstanding wooden objects, designed by the XYZ workshop under her leadership. "A gazebo for tea ceremonies" on a half-sunken pontoon in the surface of a small lake, the object is not so much functional as landscape-artistic. The openwork construction, assembled from thousands of wooden cubes connected by rods, does not protect from the weather, but creates the feeling of a miracle. The customer instructed Svetlana to design a "tea house", she decided it as an art object in which, of course, you can drink tea, but its true role is much more important - it has become a land-mark that sets the semantic code of the entire club territory. Another attraction is the Motel, code-named "Worm" - a winding reinforced concrete structure covered with a ploughshare. The combination of industrial building technologies with a characteristic Old Russian coating creates an innovative image that refers to the ancient national tradition.
Golovina uses wood primarily as a walling and decoration material. She prefers a metal or reinforced concrete frame as supporting structures. But it is precisely the subtle understanding of the special qualities of wood that helps Svetlana to generate architecture as a work of art. This approach outlines an independent vector for the development of wooden architecture, presented at the exhibition by the work of Svetlana.
The fate of the traditional log house in the 21st century was developed in the architecture of Nikolai Belousov and his design and production association OBLO, specially created for the revival of chopped architecture, deeply traditional for Russia, but by the end of the 20th century, practically disappeared from domestic construction practice. The first houses of Nicholas, more reminiscent of modernized huts for the creative intelligentsia, paradoxically combine the design features of the Russian hut with the European idea of the comfort and aesthetics of modern dwellings. However, they, as well as its later constructions, are distinguished by a pronounced articulation of the characteristic features of a log house, indicating the genetic belonging of Nikolai Belousov's objects to central Russia. Belousov is far from stylizing. Having mastered the secrets of building a Russian log house, he gained freedom of interpretation and new understanding of the centuries-old tradition. His houses in recent years are bold experiments in the field of constructive and figurative solutions of "author's" chopped architecture. Nevertheless, each of its new buildings is a step in the development of the typology of the Russian wooden house. Nikolay Belousov, who consistently promotes and develops the traditions of Russian chopped architecture, is the third hero of our exhibition.
Three architects: Totan Kuzembaev, Svetlana Golovina and Nikolay Belousov, will present three projects implemented in construction, which most accurately express their creative concept, within the framework of the exhibition "3x3", with its name referring to the period of the emergence of the avant-garde in Russia. The irony of this parallel is obvious: the exhibition does not pretend to be objective and does not seek to cover the whole variety of daring searches in the endless Russian expanses, "3x3" is much smaller than "5x5" (5x5 = 25 - that was the name of one of the first avant-garde exhibitions in 1921), and the development of innovative wooden architecture in our country today can be called "avant-garde" only conditionally, but certainly "small-sized". One thing is clear - the potential inherent in this movement is so great that it promises to develop into a new Russian architecture based on an innovative rethinking of the traditions of both wooden architecture and the Soviet architectural avant-garde.
