The State Museum of Architecture named after A. V. Shchusev hosts a large-scale program dedicated to the wooden architecture of old and new Russia. Three exhibitions on this topic at once occupied the entire space of the museum. The main suite has installed the project “Russian Wooden. A View from the XXI Century”. It shows models and models of churches, civil architecture buildings from the 15th - 20th centuries, as well as structural details and design items. In the wing "Ruin" there is an exhibition "Renaissance. Wooden churches of the Russian North”. Curator Maria Utkina has collected live documentation about the dying and reviving churches, chapels of the Arkhangelsk, Vologda, Leningrad regions and Karelia.
The pharmaceutical order was given to the 3x3 project. Three contemporary architects, Svetlana Golovina, Nikolay Belousov, Totan Kuzembaev, showed their ecological architecture mainly for leisure purposes in a labyrinth of thin wood veneer.
The exhibition as a whole is very convincing as a spectacular installation. The exhibits in the Ruin and the main suite are housed on thin wooden planks that form fences through which perspectives are built. Photos, layouts communicate with each other. From wooden pallets - pallets in the main suite are built pedestals, on which objects, photographs and models are placed. Wooden pallets have long been introduced into the practice of exhibition design. And in this case, the exhibitors inherit the style of the famous architect Yuri Avvakumov, who creates whole galleries-museums from wooden nets. A labyrinth of veneer in the Pharmaceutical Order distinguishes three conventional "huts", which contain photographs and design documentation of three buildings of each of the three declared authors.
The most responsive to the feelings of the viewer, which does not leave indifferent, of course, is the project “Revival. Wooden churches of the Russian North”. The representatives of the dynasty of the architect Ilya Utkin, headed by their daughter Masha, made in Ruin something similar to the storyboard of a documentary about the dire situation of the dying churches and chapels of the Arkhangelsk, Karelian and other northern regions. Falling domes, empty eye sockets of iconostases, half-erased "skies" - painting of tents … All these material evidence can depress and even more hate the political hypocrisy of modern Russia with its propaganda revival of the nationalist triad "Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality." However, certain facts of recent times and the young faces looking from the photographs of those who volunteered to save the treasures of the Russian North from destruction are saved from despondency. The young generation of the Utkins is involved in the growing movement of volunteers every year, traveling to the northern provinces at their own expense and organizing rescue teams free of charge. Students canning, heal constructions, not allowing churches to collapse before our eyes. In some cases, restoration work is carried out under the guidance of specialists. According to statistics, about a hundred conservation works have been carried out in recent years. Several temples and chapels have been completely restored. The social mission of the Renaissance exposition is very important. Thanks to excursions, educational programs, demonstrations of films about the churches of the Russian North, there is hope to interest and involve many who no longer believe in the powers that be, but rely on their own strengths - their own and their like-minded friends - to create a normal life.
The central exposition "Russian Wooden" is most suitable for the definition of "model house of the history of Russian architecture." At first glance, we are offered to see the details of the constructor and diagrams, models of assembling various buildings from it in various styles. In the first halls, interspersed with models of hipped roof churches with onion domes and Alexander Opolovnikov's measurements of churches in the Murmansk region, we meet a part of a huge dome made of a ploughshare, a fragment of a carved cornice. This is followed by objects that were born in the workshops of the Art Nouveau era, Talashkino or Abramtsevo: hanging cabinets, chairs in the "Russian style", as well as Ropet's lithographs of country baths in a fabulous taste.
Then we mentally collect the artifacts of the Nizhny Novgorod art and industrial exhibition of 1896 and that Moscow exhibition in which the architectural avant-garde first tried its voice on a large scale: the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition of 1923, scattered throughout the suite. The avant-garde designs of wooden baths by Ilya Golosov and Alexander Gegello with diagonal roofs seem to be the chic of our modern design. In the ceremonial perspective there is a model of a wooden circus for three thousand seats for the city of Ivanov. The circus was designed at the very beginning of the 1930s by the architect S. A. Minofiev, engineer B. V. Lopatin. This is an absolutely stunning design, anticipating the newfangled Japanese in its boldness and beauty. Like Melnikov's clubs, this structure was transformed, turned into a cinema hall, then into a music hall. Due to the negligence of the Soviet authorities, the structure fell into disrepair, it was not possible to save it. The circus in Ivanovo was razed to the ground in 1975-1977.
Culture houses and clubs of 1930-1940s by architects G. M. Ludwig, A. N. Stelmashchuk, F. M. Ternavsky, N. Ya. Collies give some kind of unimaginable synthesis of traditional Russian architecture, Art Nouveau (that is, Art Nouveau with its fabulous hypertrophy of forms) and Art Deco (with its high-tech ambitions and orientation towards a grand style, grand art). It is then that you realize that in wooden designing the craftsmen felt freer, more liberated, they were more sensitive to experiments. The project of the wooden memorial "Moscow Region Borders - Guardians of the Capital" looks absolutely amazing. It was designed by an unknown architect in 1942. In style, this is a strange modification of the "Gothic taste" of the 18th century: a fantasy lancet pillar-shaped temple is surrounded by turrets in the manner of both ancient Russian fortresses and scenography of Bazhenov's time.
The exposition closes with a hall with models and dimensional drawings of monuments included in the museums of wooden architecture created under Soviet rule: Kizhi, Kolomenskoye, Malye Korely. Once again, we are greeted by graphic materials from the researcher of the Russian North, the founder of the Kizhi Museum, Alexander Opolovnikov, as well as materials about the scientific activities of other prominent organizers of wooden architecture museums: V. A. Lapin, P. D. Baranovsky.
The very model principle of showing the wooden architecture of Russia with the saturation of space with technical modules (pallets) and individual constructive, decorative fragments exactly fits the disclosure of the specifics of this section of the history of architecture: the most flexible to experiments, unleashing creative thought and at the same time ephemeral, vulnerable to the threat of social changes, natural disasters … Wood architecture can protect a society with a developed sense of historical identity and a special taste for the authenticity of the living of the time. Russian wooden is a storehouse of ideas and a witness to the accusation of our society in neglect of its own past.
