- Why did Yekaterinburg become the next point in your photographic journey through the national monuments of avant-garde and modernism?
- Quite by accident. The Sverdlovsk Railway, a division of Russian Railways, ordered me to shoot the buildings of its chief architect, Konstantin Trofimovich Babykin, who worked in Yekaterinburg and in other Ural cities: this year marks 135 years since his birth. He is also the founder of the Yekaterinburg architectural school. Babykin began even before the revolution, with neoclassicism, and then, at the behest of the times, turned to the vanguard: one of his main constructivist buildings was the Zheleznodorozhnik club. But this club - with echoes of the classics, and there is also a whole wing with a colonnade (although it was no longer he who built it). And then he again returned to classical forms, a vivid example is the building of the Ural Polytechnic Institute in the 1930s.
In parallel, I met Eduard Kubensky, who at that time was preparing his guide to constructivist houses, to the vanguard of Sverdlovsk-Yekaterinburg, which is to be published this November. And I also shot for this edition, and Edward provided me with a map, where many objects were marked.
I walked around the city and photographed buildings for Russian Railways, and on the way I took pictures of the avant-garde, which was not difficult, because wherever you look, everywhere you look. I was very lucky with the weather, so I shot a lot, from dawn to dusk. Yekaterinburg is a very interesting city in terms of the avant-garde, because there is really a lot of it and it is diverse. Moreover, it is in a fairly good condition, in Moscow the buildings of Melnikov are found in some places in a worse condition than there - the massive construction of constructivism.
And how is this explained?
- As I understand it, there is an active architectural community in Yekaterinburg that loves and appreciates the avant-garde. In addition, there is the Tatlin publishing house - a center for the propaganda of architecture. Apparently, this is what affects it.
- That is, the townspeople appreciate this constructivist heritage
- In fact, yes. And if you compare, I filmed in Zelenograd, and in St. Petersburg, and in other cities. In Moscow, it is most difficult to shoot, because people do not care what you shoot and why, they just think that this can cause problems. For example, in Zelenograd, a story more typical of Moscow proper happened when I entered the industrial zone, where the unfinished skeletons of the future high-tech production are located. There, the guards were afraid that some kind of "blogger" had come and that they would cause some harm to their object. It struck me: people who are far from the Internet due to age and other reasons are afraid of bloggers. I tried to communicate with them, ask questions, but our conversation ended with the fact that I ended up in the police station, where an investigator and a representative of the Zelenograd FSB department came to me. We talked to me, found out when I was born, how many children I have, where my wife works and how I met her. And after about an hour and a half, since there were no complaints against me, and I also have no history of relationships with the organs, they let me go.
This is a very Moscow story, since here every security guard is afraid of a person with a camera and immediately forbids taking pictures, but he cannot explain why this should not be done. When I was filming "Tsentrosoyuz", a guard came out of the building opposite, to which I was standing with my back, and said: "Do not try to shoot our building!" And in Yekaterinburg or St. Petersburg, people who are interested in what you are doing come up to you, they ask questions, offer to look around the corner, where there is also an interesting building. They offer to remove their parked car so as not to spoil the frame. This is radically different from Moscow.
Returning to Yekaterinburg, people there appreciate the architectural heritage, a significant part of which is precisely the avant-garde era. The modern buildings there are very controversial, classical and eclectic - there are not so many left. That is, the avant-garde is the main architectural phenomenon of the city.
What buildings would you single out from those that you rented? What impressed you more?
- The town of Chekists and the "sickle" of the former Iset Hotel, which closes it. This is definitely a very interesting building. The tenant, this hotel, moved out, and this building, all nine floors, was used this year for an art biennale. It is not yet known what will happen to him next: new tenants have not yet been found. And across the road there is a recreation center "Builder". This building was at first a workers' club, a recreation center, then a cinema factory, now it is a shopping center. The owner is the state. Since this is an architectural monument, there is a partial lease with strict conditions. This was the only place in Yekaterinburg where the security guard did not allow filming without the permission of the shopping center management, which explained to me the reason for such caution. They rented a building from the state, and six months ago it raised the rent rate throughout the city by one and a half to two times. As a result, some of the buildings are empty, since the tenants had to move out - there was not enough money - and the authorities themselves are forced to pay for utilities at these facilities - very large sums, since these buildings are not small, and are engaged in maintaining them in good condition, instead to get millions for rent.
And the tenants of Stroitel filed a lawsuit: in Yekaterinburg they lost, they filed an appeal higher and still won. The authorities were ordered to leave the old rates because the increase was unreasonable. But, in the end, the situation is tense, the city administration is looking for something to find fault with, and such a clue may be that they do not take enough care of the architectural monument. In the near future the publishing house "Tatlin" will publish a book about the recreation center "Builder" with my photographs. The layout is already ready.
The Builder Club is very textured, cubic, constructivist, with interesting findings. For example, the "colonnades" on the roof are taller than human height. Or a semicircular staircase. And the historical "carpentry" on the stairs is well preserved there.
Besides Eduard Kubensky, did anyone direct you in search of interesting monuments?
- Eduard introduced me to Lyudmila Ivanovna Tokmeninova, an architectural historian from the Museum of Architecture and Design of the Ural State Academy of Arts. She told me a lot about specific buildings, helped to highlight accents. She advised me to go to the regional hospital on Bolshakov Street - it is abandoned, and this is a favorite place of leisure for schoolchildren and students. There are abandoned elevator shafts, there are basements where they go with flashlights.
This is post-constructivism: seemingly also strict, but with "ruffles", Italian arcades. Why it stands abandoned and slowly collapses - I don't know, maybe because it is far from the center and is not interesting to anyone. Although one wing was recently painted and slightly restored: there is now a private medical institution.
A very interesting sports palace-ship "Dynamo", which is sailing into a bright future. It reminds me of an avant-garde apartment building with a youth club in Kronstadt - it also has a nose. Dynamo still has a deck, a wheelhouse, a captain's bridge, it stands on the bank of the pond and directly cuts into this pond. Hence there is this water theme.
There are also houses of the transitional type of Moses Ginzburg. They have a bridge to the roof with a solarium for people to sunbathe there. In one building people work, and during the working day they go out on the roof, sunbathe there, and live in another building. Now there are apartments everywhere, and in the administrative part too. There is a terrible graffiti by Yuri Gagarin, which looks at people through the window. Terrible because the artist did not succeed at all in Gagarin's face, it turned out to be unpleasant, with little evil eyes.
A separate story - the Town of Justice and the snail kindergarten there. Part of it is crumbling, but life goes on in the "tail": apparently, there are offices, because there are plastic windows. There are still courts in the town, and it is also quite scary, because around them there is a real zone that grows and absorbs constructivist buildings, everything is covered with barbed wire. However, next to it is the stadium, which is now being destroyed in order to build a new one in its place for the World Cup. Therefore, as I understand it, this zone will be moved somewhere by 2018.
Yekaterinburg looks very attractive in your photos. You liked him?
- Yes, my overall impression is very good: there are so many interesting buildings that when you walk around the city you hardly hide your camera - you always have something to shoot. The facilities were easily enough for a week spent there, and my original plan expanded significantly. But, of course, I still have to go there, because I have not covered a lot.
