The presentation of the book "Cities" will take place October 1 at 20:00 on the ship "Bryusov" on the Crimean embankment.
Archi.ru:
It will be a solid, almost monumental publication - 400 pages. What's her goal? Why was this book published?
Andrey Asadov:
- To release such a book was ours with Ivan Ovchinnikov [co-founder of the festival "City" - approx. Archi.ru] a long-standing desire - since the time of "Zurbagan" in 2008. We wanted to collect and show all the experience and all the energy of the festival. At first we thought about making separate issues - about each “City”, then there were so many of them that we wanted to collect them under one cover, and we all thought at what point it would be right to do it. And then we put a historic point: after the 15th festival, which was held for the first time in the center of Moscow, in the Muzeon park, we announced that the festival went down in history.
At the same time, the genre of architectural open-air festivals captured the whole country - from Vologda to Irkutsk, and teams born in the "Gorodi" played a significant role in its origin. The ideology of our festival was not only the achievement of the result - the implementation of projects, but also the process: communication, generation of ideas, joint discussion of projects, joint work on the site. And all this accumulated experience - and the results too - I wanted to collect and show in the book as a big piece of life. Including - the lives of all its participants, which we have not forgotten! We have been preparing this book for about three years, together with the wonderful publishing house "Tatlin", which, as it seems to me, has itself imbued with the energy of "Cities" in its striving for breakthrough cultural projects!
There are a lot of documentary photos in the book, it is connected with …
-… with vivid memories of the participants. We wanted to show how the process went from the birth of an idea to its implementation and presentation, the process of translating an idea into reality in the format of a physical object. At that time, we ourselves and our friends, young architects, were not often able to implement serious things in nature in a short time, and during the festival we ourselves decided to fill this gap by offering architects, within the framework of a common theme, to create a real object in a matter of days. …
- You are presenting your book at Zodchestvo, and the result is a roll-over with its theme - New Industries. Cities are an initiative, to some extent a creative industry based on activism, that is, exactly what you say in the manifesto
- Moreover, we can say that during the "Cities" in a playful way, architects received the skills of real work with the surrounding space, with the theme, with each other. And now, after ten years - and this year marks exactly ten years since the first festival - the authors of these installations have already grown up, gained professional experience and are able to transform real cities. Therefore, the roll call of "Cities" as a festival and the transformation of real cities is very correct: after all, at "Zodchestvo" we demonstrate an active life position of an architect as a space transformer, an initiator of real urban changes.
Therefore, we invite all participants and friends - both old and new - to the presentation of the book, which will take place on October 1 at 20:00 on the ship "Bryusov", moored on the Crimean embankment.
