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In our Moscow, more broadly - Russian architectural and near-architectural get-together, the conventional statement that “we have no architectural criticism” has taken root for a long time. Whoever you talk to, no, no, and she will complain: there is no criticism. For some reason it seems to me that this maxim is addressed primarily to you. That is, when they say that there is no architectural criticism, they want to say that there is no Revzin, somehow take you out of the brackets. What do you think about this? I have long wanted to ask
Grigory Revzin:
- Some very personal question. Hardly everyone, saying that there is no criticism, means that it would be better if I were not. Hopefully not everyone. But, of course, for Moscow architects I have never been "mine". And he didn't. I am not an architect by education and not from their crowd, not a marchish. They had their own type of criticism - I don't think they read it a lot, our architects don't read it very much - but they heard it orally, first from teachers, then from colleagues at their councils. They don't find it in my articles. That's right, she's not there.
Archi.ru
What does “your own type of criticism” mean?
The Moscow school has an ideal of criticism, expressed, say, in the late Soviet Architecture of the USSR. There was a period, the 80s, when its editor-in-chief was Vladimir Tikhonov, an extraordinary, albeit broken man. Andrey Barkhin, Andrey Gozak made covers, Evgeny Ass wrote reviews of Western architecture, Alexander Rappaport shone with theoretical paradoxes, there were Ikonnikov, Ryabushin, there was Glazychev … Italian postmodernity. But the covers, at least, Gozak did in such a way that it was obvious inheritance of the tradition of the twenties. Criticism there did not appeal to society, not to the authorities, it turned to colleagues. In terms of genre, this is somewhat akin to a speech at an arch council, but in writing, for example: the composition of the facade is dry, the rhythm is lost, it would be more correct to use other materials. Or vice versa, dignity was somehow subtly emphasized. In fact, it is a great Soviet tradition to criticize in this way.
It does not begin in the twenties, when fragments of a very original architectural theory were interspersed, especially in the speeches of the VOPR, with purely political accusations. It appears in the thirties: "Architecture of the USSR" of this time, if you read it all over, is a very high-quality product, art history in fact. You just need to skip about socialist realism in architecture. They - Arkin, Matza, Gabrichevsky, Bunin - of course, they were all formalists, for them Hildebrandt, the golden ratio, compositional analysis was important. They read Wölflin too. Not exactly a Viennese school, but let's say, early formal art history. For example, when Zholtovsky was given the Stalin Prize for a house at the beginning of Leninsky Prospekt, Alpatov wrote something like this: the use of the golden ratio pleases the eye, as the euphony of the classical harmony of Viennese music pleases the ear … Yes, in this sense we no longer have architectural criticism. It's true.
This is due to the situation in art, where the criterion of quality has been canceled and the judgment of taste is not legitimate. It would be funny to look for the golden ratio in Kabakov's installations, and once found, on this basis, declare that they are good. Architecture, of course, is not reduced to art, but in the aesthetic sense, it is. We still have two assessment criteria - the master's personal drive and his relationship with the context. You can work with this in different ways. But as a result, you cannot analyze Asadov's work from the position of Skuratov. Asadov is a more verbose architect and not as clean as Skuratov, but it is absurd to say that one is correct and the other is not … Just as it is impossible to criticize Skuratov from the standpoint of, say, Evgeny Assa. There it will turn out that its architecture is too glamorous in terms of social message. But to say today that building luxury is unacceptable because of social responsibility is wildness. Now I call architects very close: Skuratov, Ass, Asadov - these are the same berry field, but even in this field, judgments of taste are, to put it mildly, dubious.
Exactly the same in classical architecture. From the standpoint of my friend Filippov, in the works of my friend Belov, there is no visual relationship between classical architecture and European classical painting, and this makes the classics inferior. From the standpoint of my friend Belov, in Filippov's works there is no understanding of the combinatorial nature of an order, an order as a constructor. Filippov perceives architecture as a backdrop for a picture, which destroys the very nature of ordo - order. From the position of Atayants, Filippov does not know antiquity, he relies only on the Renaissance, on the Florentine and Venetian experience of the classics - with its shallow breathing. The greatness of his designs lacks the simplicity of language. From the position of Filippov, Atayants is so carried away by Rome that he does not see everything that happened next, and Rome is such a powerful and simple-minded understanding of architectural composition, general's, without paradoxes.
I don't quite understand why there is a "professional criticism" of the Soviet type in this situation. These people are not doing the same thing. They are valuable for each of them, and not for the general position of architectural truth. Well, and, accordingly, such a magazine as "Architecture of the USSR" - in the sense of a collegial discussion of a common cause called "architecture", a common platform, a common taste - is of little meaning to me.
Another thing is that the architects would like to be stroked like Alpatov Zholtovsky. With a sublime intonation. They were brought up that there is a level of correct, real architecture, and now they have somehow approached, they are this level, and somewhere higher - the critic must record this. Perhaps this is where they complain that "there is no real architectural criticism."
Thank you, very comprehensive. If we continue with the theme you have outlined, when did the erosion of the dominant style that you are talking about began? After postmodernism, that is, after the end of the eighties?
- If you are asking about Russian criticism, then postmodernism has nothing to do with it, it started with the end of the USSR. The idea that there is one correct line is the thought of the state. The state supported these very uniform - not styles, but trends - and they competed to become the only ones. This is a model when the state determines the correct line as a whole, and professionals fight for the nuances. Soviet power would remain - postmodernism would be the official style, we would fight for the purity of socialist postmodernism. As under Luzhkov, only centrally.
If we go beyond the Soviet paradigm, then the last attempt to create a unified style was the avant-garde. Surrealism in architecture was poorly realized, pop art as an architectural style did not happen (with the exception of a few things of American postmodernism), modernism as a style is just the second edition of the avant-garde, there are no ideas of its own, there is a scale of technology. The critic in our sense, that is, defending the correct line, was Siegfried Gidion. It also relies on CIAM, on a collective organization, on a charter - this is a group criticism of a manifest type, criticism as a weapon in competition. Its logic is clear, here you mainly criticize the enemy, well, you gnaw at his attacks.
Postmodernism has already given rise to criticism of a different type - by the way, it was very verbose, all its leading architects were writing authors, sometimes brilliant - like, for example, the same Koolhaas. But this is not the criticism I was talking about. These are mostly free philosophical reflections on architecture that do not force anyone to do anything. This option is implemented by Alexander Gerbertovich (Rappaport - editor's note). In our terminology, this is not a criticism at all, it is a philosophy of architecture.
How would you define yourself?
- I don't even know how to define myself, I did a lot of things. The topic with which I started as a critic was the question of how to write about architecture in a general political newspaper. So that it would be interesting to people. I started doing this in the newspaper Segodnya, then in Nezavisimaya Gazeta and then in Kommersant. There were two of us, focused specifically on the newspaper: Kolya Malinin and after him me. Olya Kabanova also tried to do this, but she is a student of "Architecture of the USSR", she did it from the point of view of the correct taste and it turned out, in my opinion, somewhat emasculated. Lyosha Tarkhanov is from DI, although he is also from that real criticism, but he wrote in a completely different way, a little in Kharmsian style. In general, he should have become the main architectural critic, he is from Moscow Architectural Institute, and with impeccable taste, and fantastically talented he did it … The architecture did not match him somewhat in quality. No, it turns out quite a lot, four people.
For me, my personal ideal was Georgy Lukomsky. He wrote in "Apollo", "World of Art" in the 1900s, he wrote a book about the contemporary architecture of St. Petersburg, about neoclassicism. And a few books on the history of architecture are not strong. This is Benois's version of architectural criticism. It seemed to me that this is the best criticism in Russian. This is what I wanted to do. This was my personal project. In fact, very archaic.
So your ideal is architectural essay?
- Yes, essay, and if it were not for the nervousness of the 90s, I would think that it would be best to write like Walter Pater or Vernon Lee, or Pavel Muratov. This option was implemented, by the way, by Gleb Smirnov, but he lives in Venice and is somehow isolated. To make criticism interesting to people, it was necessary to establish links between architecture and politics, economics and lifestyle. These are three topics through which people read any information in the newspaper. If you want to write about an insane asylum, compare it with the Duma, with the stock exchange or with a fashionable club. If you want to talk about a washing machine - the same thing, say that in this device the washing organs work an order of magnitude slower than the spinning organs, and this ensures the stability of the state system. But these areas - politics, money and glamor - are far from the intonations of the English essay of Ruskin's heirs, which actually gave birth to the architectural essay genre. So I had to adjust.
The goal of criticism at the Arch Council is to get a project of better quality than the one that was brought to the experts. In terms of purpose, what is the purpose of your work as a critic?
- I would not say that the Arch Council has a lofty goal. I was a member of various councils for a while and decided that I would not do this anymore. There, criticism is used for political, commercial or career purposes. If you don't have them, then there is nothing to do there.
If we talk about my goals … Well, actually, I was just interested in doing this. If the goal lies outside the bounds of the text you write, it turns out to be crappy. In addition, I have a significant personal disadvantage - I am a person with a short planning horizon. I don’t set myself tasks for many years to come and I don’t know how to consistently solve them, it’s not interesting to me. I don't have long goals, I have more or less stable values.
It seemed to me that we have excellent architects - the generation of "wallets". Brodsky, Avvakumov, Filippov, Belov, Kuzembaev … We must give them the opportunity to realize their ideas. And all the orders went to the generation of late Soviet partocrats, completely mediocre architects and, by the way, also terrible managers. For some reason, everyone said that they were good managers, but I did not observe this. I wanted - and to be honest, and now I want to, it has remained so - to explain what are good architects who, in my opinion, are good and what are bad those who, in my opinion, are bad. In principle, in order for good ones to receive orders, but the process of explanation fascinated me a little more than this "in principle".
You know, architecture as an activity has a complex asymmetry. The customer, when he turns to an architect, entrusts his money to a person who, in case of failure, will not be able to return it. Hopeless, budgets are incommensurable. Therefore the customer needs credits. The credibility of the architect is the most fundamental issue. Where can this credit of trust come from? Society comes up with different institutions in order to create these loans. It can be professional organizations, insurance organizations, reputation, premiums, personal acquaintances, position in the administrative system … Criticism is one of these tools for generating trust. She competes with others. With a system of personal connections, for example, or with an administrative resource. If the system is more or less free, criticism is a very strong tool, if authoritarian, it is weak. For 20 years we have had different options and one way or another the architects whom I have actively promoted, well … they have achieved something.
Through your articles or through your connections?
- Actually, most of all not through my articles or contacts, not through me at all. And if we talk about me - articles gave rise to connections. Developers, officials who have ever consulted with me - they all read my articles. And they turned to me, saying: listen, well, you know everyone, you write about everyone, can you recommend someone to me? Then consulting begins, people are different, and often they cannot formulate their wishes for themselves. First, you find out for a long time what a person needs, and then you look for an architect for him. But I earned all my authority on articles - so in this case criticism played its role, completely traditional.
The role of preparatory shelling?
- Sounds dubious. The preparatory shelling assumes a further main offensive, and I did not fire articles in order to get an order later.
Okay, you are promoting good architecture against bad. What are your criteria?
- I have an architect friend, friendship did not happen, but the acquaintance has survived. He called me, introduced himself, and said that he had read my articles and realized that he was my ideal hero, and was ready to send materials tomorrow, even today, so that I could write about him. I, he says, do not like to be imposed, but from your point of view, my building is what you need. And I was terribly surprised when I stalled, and then completely dodged. There is such an idea that a critic is a person who has criteria, and he can present them separately from the work. And even someone else can take them too, see if the work fits these criteria. This is naive.
I started out as an architectural historian - do you know what is the main difference between a historian and a critic? A historian, when he writes about something, always looks at what others have written before him. It has fulcrum points. Even if some nonsense was written before him, he must somehow relate to it. You can recall the endless discussions on completely stupid issues related to the fact that someone once threw a stupid remark. Remember how Choisy casually remarked that Russian architecture is related to Indian architecture. And so many generations each historian must necessarily point out the groundlessness of this point of view.
In this sense, the critic is a bit like a shaman. He should simply, without relying on anything, feel: this is a talented thing, and this is not. It is impossible to rationalize how it feels. All experience works for this. You organized your eyes so that you see something is there. Or, conversely, you feel dead. Then there is rationalization, you start asking yourself why you liked it. And when you answer this to yourself, you begin to convince others of this, you have a rational language.
For example, I never had the idea that classics are a priori better than modernism. It was attributed to me a thousand times … But I just saw that Filippov has talent, life. Especially in the early things it was over the top. Conversely, some of our modernists, with all due respect, had a hopeless melancholy, felt that these were stillborn things.
In the beginning there is a sense of living life, talent. It is impossible to convey this in words or define the criteria, it must be learned. I understand that this sounds incorrect, arbitrary and subjective, but you know - in the same way, a music teacher hears whether a boy has a hearing or not, whether it will succeed or not. When you teach a child, you understand that this one has a taste for football, and that one for mathematics. You must be able to catch talent. Those who will tell you: I will now show by tests that these children need to go there, and this one here are charlatans, it seems to me.
I am very subjective here, no methodology, sheer shamanism. I feel the movement of life. Of course, if human closeness arises, it is easier to feel. I was reproached a lot for the corruption of friendship. I was less reproached for monetary corruption - well, there were, of course, people who claimed that I was bribed by Baturina, Vasily Bychkov spread such rumors about me, even ordered a PR company - but there is nothing to talk about. But friendship really, yes, of course, because I always really look at the work of my friends. And it seems to me that the stories about the fact that if an architect is your friend, then you cannot promote him, seem completely wrong. Yes, I am friends with him, because he is talented, and therefore I am friends, because he is interesting! This is exactly what a person is important to me. This does not mean that I cannot see talent in others - I can. Some people who are very far from me humanly, seemingly cold relations - and suddenly, like a battery, he licked his tongue. She seemed to be shrunken, but how she will bite! Well, let's say Skokan …
Did it happen that your friends did not very successful projects?
- It happened many times. There are many things of my friends that I have not written anything about. True, I never wrote about them that they are bad. But he also did not say that they were good. If they asked me: what do you dislike? - I told, privately, yes. By the way, it would be better not to tell.
Offended?
- Of course they are offended. Real architecture is creativity, and creative people are touchy by definition. They work from themselves, from within their human content. If you tell them: listen, this is rubbish - then for them it sounds like - listen, you rubbish. Of course, this is insulting. And then.
In our conversations on Archi.ru about criticism, many journalists complained: if you criticize an architect, he stops “being friends” and sharing materials
- I don't understand that by friendship. But this aspect - well, of course, this is their right, they must somehow defend themselves from us. But this is not a serious defense. They are ambitious - they will not let you publish, they will publish elsewhere, and criticize yourself for health.
You cited a music teacher as an example. The music teacher is a musician himself. Should a critic be an architect, or, conversely, an art critic? Or a journalist?
- According to my observations, a critic can be anyone. I said that Lyosha Tarkhanov influenced me a lot. He is an architect by education, but it was difficult to understand, it was necessary to specifically know that he graduated from Moscow Architectural Institute. Usually you can feel it, people from this institution … well, they still need to study. And Lyosha is a man of a delightful level. But Kolya Malinin is a journalist by education, but now it seems that he did not just graduate from an architectural university, but that he graduated from the Petrozavodsk Institute in the Opolovnikov department. As if on purpose I sat in a seminar on wooden architecture for five years. What brought him there - I don't know, but it turned out that way.
There are quite a few people who begin their speech by saying that I am not just a critic, I am an architect, and therefore listen to me. I have always listened and never heard anything sensible. As a rule, when a person says this, it means that he wants to get a head start before saying something. The desire is understandable, and I easily give a head start. But there is little use. They are poorly taught at the Moscow Architectural Institute, it cannot be said that they know or understand something. Or maybe they can't tell.
In general, it seems that when a person begins to engage in criticism or the history of art, he ceases to be an architect, changes his profession
- Well, that he continues to build at the same time - rarely. Evgeny Ass, I guess.
And Kirill?
- I can hardly assess Kirill adequately. I had a case, I wrote an article about the Venice Biennale, which was done by Evgeny Viktorovich, I did not like it, the article was sour, but still within the bounds of decency. The newspaper came up with a disgusting headline for her - "Urban Development Project". A play on words, then in "Kommersant" they loved so much. It was just outrageous. Since then we have not communicated with the editor who joked so, my classmate, but it was signed by me, and I feel embarrassed all my life in front of Yevgeny Viktorovich. He more or less paid me off - he published an interview about my biennale "This is a monstrous defeat of Russian architectural thought." Although against my rudeness it was a gentleman's understatement. He paid, but Kirill did not. It's okay, I would behave the same way. So I'm talking about Kirill … However, in ten years he has grown very much, it became interesting. As for him as an exhibition designer, for me these are diligent, clean, but not very individual works. Cyril, it seems to me, is so afraid of substituting himself that as a result, as an artist, he does not allow himself anything personal.
To be honest, I don’t know the critics who are building at the same time. Sometimes it sleeps and when there are no orders, it can wake up. For example Felix Novikov. His fate was strange, for some reason he left for America. He writes well. Not worse than building. Malinin will not agree, but for me it’s better than he built. It seems to me that he is the only one of his generation who, in the nineties, did not use connections and pile up terrible Luzhkov buildings, but instead sat in America and wrote wonderful texts about architecture, quite at the level of his teachers. But this happened due to the forced cessation of architectural activities.
But among today's architects this is not accepted, why - I do not know. Corbusier is an excellent critic. Platonov, who built the Academy of Sciences - we went with him in the late eighties to some sessions of the union of architects in cities. As a critic, he was an order of magnitude, if not stronger, then faster than me. He saw mistakes and absurdities instantly and formulated it. A minute before I noticed anything at all. In a quick conversation, this is important. Another thing is that he clearly saw the shortcomings of others and did not see at all in himself. But it happens with creative people.
So I remembered Novikov - and in late Soviet times he published high-quality articles, even exquisite ones, in the "Architecture of the USSR". Pavlov wrote quite well. And Burov! In general, these are almost the best texts written in Russian about architecture. This does not work for the current ones, I do not know what happened to them. We sat without orders after the crisis and at least some essay was given birth to. However, they say that Andrei Bokov writes something important, and it may be interesting. Let's wait for the publication.
Let's go back to the modernist classics. How do you combine the search for any good architecture, and raising the classics to the flag? Project Classic magazine - was it created for this purpose?
- The Project Classic magazine was about the dialogue between classics and modernity, and it was written there. It was not a means of agitation and propaganda for the classics. You see, we have an archaic architectural community, since the sixties it has a vivid feeling that the classics is Stalinism. This is the dismal provinciality of decent people, to whom the darkness of dishonest people has stuck. It did not occur to them that there were some professional values behind the classics. And I must say, high. In my opinion, the highest intellectual level of the Russian architectural school is Zholtovsky-Gabrichevsky. Knowledge of languages, the scale of erudition, understanding of the nature of space and form … This is the peak, like Kurchatov in nuclear physics. Above no. Classics is not a question about Stalin.
“But in the West,“Prince Charles”architecture is also unpopular. In particular, the Russian American Vladimir Belogolovsky once wrote me a letter stating that it is necessary to support modernism, not the classics … And the feeling is that he is not alone. And Western classics, on the contrary, say that there was a conspiracy to oust them from the construction business
- Volodya Belogolovsky - he, of course, is a great boss … But with all sincere sympathy, can I not obey him? Yes, he is not the only one, but I am the only one - and now what?
In general, there is a point here related precisely to criticism. Architectural criticism of the classics in the West is very undeveloped; there are practically no classicist journals. There is a main center - Scientific Notes of the University of Notre Dame; Papadakis tried to do something, the Italians did something in the eighties, around Aldo Rossi. But in principle, there are no magazines that would normally relate to classical architecture. There are a large number of commercial magazines like Interiors that endlessly litter classical architecture - hotels, villas - but decent people don't write there. Well, it happened.
Western intellectuals are leftist, while the classics are conservative. But this is their conservative classics, while ours, on the contrary, was terribly conservative modernism. It so happened that since I am a Westerner and a liberal, I must speak like Belogolovsky. And I, when he enthusiastically publishes the Brezhnev district committees and KGB sanatoriums - here they are, the high traditions of modernism - I think not. It won't work that way.
So you would not want everyone around to become Palladians?
- Yes, where did you get it? I love avant-garde architecture. I once, about thirty years ago, walked all Moscow constructivism with Volodya Sedov. In general, I get physical pleasure from good architecture. And I cannot imagine Plotkin, Khazanov, Skuratov as Palladians. I know examples when our best modernists worked in the classics - it would be better if I didn’t know.
There is, however, the question of the city. Not a single convincing modernist city in Europe or America has been built. The city is being destroyed by modernism - this is the alphabet. Andrei Bokov proposed not to compare historical cities with modernist ones at all, not to judge one by the standards of the other. But people live there, not plastic values, people compare where it is better. Corbusier's logic is meadows, there are sculptures on them, and all this is connected by roads - this is the destruction of the city. Here I agree with Alexei Novikov, who recently wrote very vividly about this. Corbusier in this sense is evil, and Joseph Brodsky is right, he has something in common with the Luftwaffe.
Only I am not proposing to arrange a show trial, to dig up Corbusier's corpse and hang it on Kalininsky Prospekt, this is not so. It must be understood that a traditional European city did not know how to answer the question about mass housing. We know very well what housing for the poor looked like in the most wonderful, most beautiful European London of the time of Dickens. It was a humanitarian catastrophe, the existence of the level of Auschwitz: three meters per person, lack of all kinds of amenities, epidemics. Inhuman existence. Modernist architects answered the question: how to save these people. What can they be accused of? Saving people and preserving the morphology of the city are things of a different order, saving people is more important.
But they have already saved everyone. You no longer have this indulgence that you are building housing for people. You are building square meters for money, which is a completely different story. A classic city with streets where there is a red line, a facade as an institution of communication between those who walk along the street and those who live in the house; the courtyard as a separate space - all these are the most complex civilizational institutions that modernism destroyed, not having time to understand what they are. These are the values that I would fight for. There is, however, one avant-garde city made without the influence of Corbusier - Tel Aviv, the city of the Bauhaus. It is much more convincing. But the traditional morphology of a European city is preserved there. From the point of view of Corbusier - some kind of passéism.
There was a time when you wrote a lot about architecture: in the magazine, "Kommersant". You are now working at Strelka. Somewhere you wrote that you are an urbanist. Are you an urbanist?
- I am not just an urbanist, I am a professor at the Higher School of Urban Studies and a partner of KB Strelka, which I am sincerely proud of. Urbanism, you know, is a vague area. There are four types of people who are classified as urbanists - cultural scientists, urban activists, politicians, and urban designers themselves. In this vague sense, I am an urbanist.
Culturologist?
- Well, for example.
And yet why did you write less about architecture?
- It happened. Has ceased to be interesting.
Well, I explained that my idea was to project architecture onto politics and economics. But this is necessary for politics and economics to be somehow interesting to people, and in a positive sense. Architecture is about love, or at least respect for the present and the future. And now this is somehow not observed. Against the background of what we do, the present is difficult to respect. Now the news that something has been built raises only one question for people - how much was stolen to build it, if the building is private, or how much was stolen at the construction site, if the building is public. This is not for me, this is for Navalny.
Further. I once taught the history of Russian art of the 19th century at Moscow State University. And there was insultingly little material. Well, here is Titian - there are more than a hundred portraits alone. And we have, say, Perov. Or Savrasov. Well, okay, that in general it is not Titian, and you can hardly scrape together a dozen paintings. And here are my heroes-architects. Everything they came up with, they came up with before 2000. Not a single new idea. Over the past five years, there are no new buildings. And new figures are somehow not formed. Kolya Malinin once published a whole magazine - "Made in future" - about young architects. So in the end he went into the woods to study the huts. Indeed, somehow they are livelier. For the whole of Russian architecture - only Choban and Kuznetsov, and even then in co-authorship. True, there is Grigoryan.
Still. In 2008, the crisis began. The architectural paradigm has changed. Gone is the architecture of attractions and stars. Restraint, invisibility, environmental friendliness, sustainability became the ideals. But you see, one cannot be a genius of inconspicuousness, one cannot be "the most outstanding architect." That is, it is possible, but in this case, an article about an architect is a disqualifying sign. How invisible he is, when he was noticed, articles are being written?
Then it is important that Yuri Mikhailovich disappeared, development perished - the order for architecture disappeared. Instead, urbanism emerged. The idea is similar - to build Europe in Russia. But in architecture, this is the author's Europe - the Europe of Grigoryan, Skuratov, Assa, or, conversely, Filippov, Atayants. The important thing is not that it is modern or old Europe, it is important that it is personal. She may be talented or not. It doesn't work that way in urbanism. The bike path is either there or not. There are ceremonial bike paths, lovely bike paths, sad winter bike paths, bike paths to nowhere. There are no talented bike paths.
And finally. In 1998, they took me to the culture department of the Kommersant newspaper. First as an intern, a month later - as a journalist. With a salary of $ 3 thousand per month. I received it once - then the crisis came, and since then I have never been able to reach this level of salary there. Now I am a special correspondent for Kommersant - this is the highest position a journalist can achieve - with a salary of $ 400 a month. I pay my assistant secretary so much. Journalism has become an uncompetitive field. This can be done for the soul, for eternity - but it cannot be done as a profession.
And what should architectural critics do in the situation of the crisis you described?
- Well, I personally have a lot to do. Actually, I started doing something else three years ago. In 2012, together with Choban and Kuznetsov, I received the Biennale prize, and to be honest, it seems to me that the exposition we did about Skolkovo was generally the best in the history of the Russian pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. It is not the prize that is important, I have received them several times, but my personal assessment. And I thought that it was necessary to finish with this, it would not be possible to do it better. This coincided with the fact that I received the GQ magazine's Person of the Year award in the journalism nomination, and immediately the Jankowski Prize, also as a journalist … And I thought that as a journalist I also reached the ceiling, it's time to finish, it won't be better … And he began to engage in consulting and teaching. As a result, I rather quickly became a part of the process of urbanistic, shall we say, transformation of Moscow myself. We started to do something with Kapkov, with Skolkovo, with Strelka. And then I became a partner of KB Strelka and a professor at the Higher School of Economics.
It seems to me that this is more a question of what architects should do. Although I may be wrong, and they are doing well.
When I started doing this, I was outraged by the fact that society does not understand: our good architects are our national treasure. By the way, about the goals … When I "grew stars" by watering the beds in "Kommersant" - I first of all instilled in people respect for the architect as a figure. Failed.
The culmination of this cultivation was the 2008 Biennale, the Party of Chess exhibition, when I pitched sixteen Russian architects against sixteen Western architects to show that today's Russian architecture is playing in the big league. Show first of all to Russian businessmen and officials - I brought a lot of people there. This, by the way, was the apotheosis of hatred towards me on the part of the architectural community. It was then that Vasya Bychkov organized the company, Lena Gonzalez, the same Kirill Ass, and the darkness told other people that I sold myself to Baturina, Luzhkov, that I sold the Biennale to developers - it was a funny episode … It doesn't matter. But I remember.
Failed to prove to society the importance of the architect. In this sense, today we are back to the beginning. Today they are less respected than in 2006; today they are treated the same way as in 1996. And in this sense, Mikhail Mikhailovich Posokhin, as the director of the renowned institute "Mosproject-2", looks more reliable than Grigoryan or Skuratov. And Seryozha Kuznetsov, as the chief architect of Moscow, is simply beyond any competition, which, however, is not so bad. But it is bad that the master's personal creative reputation does not exist again. Neither business, nor officials, nor society know Russian architects, do not respect them. The directors are known, the actors, the athletes, but the architects are not. This is very bad. It is unlikely that architects are able to learn anything, but purely theoretically, this could help them realize that there is a certain meaning in architectural criticism in newspapers.
And all the same - what is the way out of this?
- This is definitely not a question of the current generation of politicians and businessmen, and perhaps not the current generation of architects. They may not get a second chance.
But as for the next generation … You know, once Evgeny Viktorovich Ass asked me to evaluate the essay competition for MARCH on the topic “I want to be an architect”. There the winners learn from him for free or on preferential terms - not the point. So, thirty-five out of forty write that they want to be architects because an architect is a person who changes life. There are, of course, applied design tasks, but this is not the main thing, the main thing is to change life. And so they decided to become architects. You read and think: what's in your head? Baby, can you put the door in okay? Draw the facade so that the windows in the apartments do not end up under the ceiling? Well, why on earth are you going to build my life?
Not that kids are bad. This is instilled in them by education.
For example, Gazprom explained to Europe for a long time that it is not just supplying it with gas, but that it will determine how it will live. Europe eventually adopted a program to reduce energy dependence on Russia … It seems to me that if our architects are constantly thinking about how they will rebuild life, then society and the state in response begins to think how to defend against this. We need to drive them into such a position in order to get rid of the danger, because these are violent abnormalities. You never know what kind of life they will arrange? Let's defend ourselves with codes, SNIPs, approvals, advice - the more, the better, the more powerless the architect, the safer. It seems to me that until the architects reconsider their position, the state and society will react to them unreasonably harshly.
And our architects are not imitating Western ones in this desire to remake life?
- Not. This is our domestic revolutionary romanticism of the 1920s. Sour leaven of VKHUTEMAS.
Kirill Ass in an interview with us relatively recently said that Russian architecture has lost its meaning, and therefore there is no criticism. Do you agree?
- This is a very good interview. And the thoughts there are interesting, and the sensations are accurate. About the protection of monuments is ideal. It is difficult to start yourself and others to start about the loss of a secondary monument against the background of the fact that we are destroying a neighboring state and shooting down Boeings - there is not enough emotional charge.
Perhaps, I am not sure there that the meaning of architecture can be formulated only by the architects themselves in the form of manifestos and other forms of professional reflection. Well, take, say, the architecture of five-storey buildings, panel typical industrial housing construction. Thirty years ago, when we first met Alexander Herbertovich Rappaport, he told me that architecture is dead, there is no longer any sense in it. Now the five-story buildings have been demolished. Then we realized that this architecture was filled with colossal meaning: the modernization of society through progress, the feeling that we can create life in a factory and fly into space, social equality, achievable and realizable. The last rise of the romance of communism. Architecture absorbs the meanings of civilization, and at the moment when civilization disappears, it remains the bearer of this meaning. You see, there was no point in the carriage shed of the noble estate at the moment when it was being built besides the fact that it was a carriage shed. Today we find a lot of meanings there. Harmony, the special spirit of Kaluga, in which the barn stands, and so on.
Of course, it happens when the meaning in architecture is created by the author's effort of one person who feels the meaning of our present presence in Being, finds it a form and creates space with this form. But this is rare, and it is not at all necessary for the architect to create this meaning at every moment. Moreover, he pronounced it in a manifesto. Out of hundreds of Zaha Hadid's projects, the meaning of an era - a world that has lost the certainty of physics, flowed in all directions without directing progress, but at the same time somehow seductively flowed, with the flavor of what Vitruvius called venustas - this is found in one or two projects while she was looking for. Then I found it, and it became a technique. Not that every time, in every new thing, every architect caught this meaning.
The first kind of meanings, probably, is determined by an art historian and over time
- Well, a critic can try right away. The historian is obliged to do this, but the critic may take the risk, or may say that there is no point. This means that he did not invent it. Or he came up with it, but does not want to risk it. You know how Galich said about the same five-story buildings - "over block-panel Russia like the camp room Luna …". Well said, and then what to do? Just leave …
