The first year of study at the MARSH undergraduate program ended for the students with the work on the project “Home for a person“HOMO / HOME”. The leaders were Narine Tyutcheva, founder and head of the Rozhdestvenka architectural bureau, and her colleagues Alla Komarova, Yulia Andreichenko, Maria Kartseva.
Narine Tyutcheva
Head of the Bachelor's Course MARSH 2016:
“In order to understand and evaluate the results of this year, one must probably say that for the first time in many years, and maybe even since the times of VKHUTEMAS, the MARSH school made an attempt to create a fundamentally new system of architectural education in Russia. The main task that we set ourselves was to teach students not to simulate, but to create, generate architecture. Project practice is a priority in our program, the rest of the modules accompany it. Based on the results of the first year, I understand that the program as a whole worked and we approached the second year with more or less prepared students and will further develop their skills. What seemed unrealistic and almost impossible - to design a residential building at the end of the first year, and even such a complex one - worked out, we coped with it together with the guys, and the British commission appreciated our results quite highly. I can't say that everything was perfect. Of course, there were some inconsistencies between objects, but they are not fatal. These mistakes today show us the path along which we will move further, taking into account this experience and improving it for the next first year."
Continuation of the manager's story - below, after the projects.
House for the janitor
Ekaterina Tinyakova
The house is squeezed into a narrow gap between neighboring buildings. The facade is covered with fine perforations, arched as if from the pressure of brick firewalls. Behind the facade, in a space ranging from 4 to 2 meters wide, a complex play of stairs and windows, overhanging and protruding volumes unfolds. The inhabitant of the house is a Muslim janitor, and the building becomes a half-hidden metaphor, but filled with the content of the life of migrants in the metropolis that is not always clear to us.
*** Demidov fault
Anton Gribanov
The new house is located between two existing buildings, and itself, in turn, consists of two contrasting parts, separated by a narrow gap. In one part of the house, in the other - work, the inhabitant of the house runs a ballet studio. The contrast is emphasized both by the difference in volumes and the interpretation of the facade. At the same time, the entire building is united by the material of the walls - brick, which creates an organic connection with the surroundings, the unplastered facades of the houses in the alley. The most dramatic space of the house, the crevice, is the passage to the courtyard. The project is built on a delicate balance of unity and difference.
House-greenhouse
Pavel Chernyak
The home for an elderly couple with a passion for gardening is built into an abandoned ruin in the center of Moscow. By developing the ruins and placing a greenhouse in it, the problem of lack of space for a private house in the metropolis is solved. At the same time, the new building treats the old one as tactfully as possible, preserving the contrasting aesthetics of the technical structure. The greenhouse forms a single whole with the housing, and the adjacent spaces can be used for the needs of people working in the surrounding neighborhoods.
Red hangar for a female plane
Dmitry Mazaev
The author chose the famous designer and artist Olga Soldatova as a "customer". The house is leaning against the blank wall of the building in the courtyard and itself, as it were, becomes an extension of this wall. A deaf facade, devoid of scale, faces the courtyard, openings only in the end walls. The laconicism of the sculptural volume is complemented by the active texture of the walls made of concrete, the hostess's favorite material. Colored smalt appears in the interior in concrete, a reminder of Soldatova's design work.
*** Narine Tyutcheva, Head of Bachelor's Course MARCH 2016: [back to top]
“If we talk in more detail about what tasks were set and what result we wanted to achieve by the end of the first year of study, then, probably, first of all, it is worth briefly describing the entire program that the children mastered during the first year. First of all, we had to immerse them in the profession and teach them the basic approaches to design so that they looked at the methodology of architectural design several times with different examples. The main components of the methodology are the skills of analysis, conceptualization and interpretation. The program consisted of exercises that, in one way or another, allowed you to master these professional tools and take your first professional steps.
The program during the year consisted of three large assignments, in addition to small projects and workshops that accompanied the process. The first was called "Nakhodka", the second "House for a pet" and the third "Dwelling house". As a matter of fact, the second semester is a project of a residential building of at least two floors in an urban context. The first two assignments were the background to the third. On the first task, which was called "Nakhodka", the children were offered a kind of architectural quest, in which, in an almost game-like situation, they had to go through all the steps of the full cycle of architectural design, to understand in general how the professional process works. The second task is "Pethouse". Here we have already appeared, firstly, a customer or client in the form of this pet, and secondly, quite specific arguments about architectonics, materials and structures have appeared. The result of this task was not only a drawing, a project of this house, but a self-made model on a 1: 1 scale.
And the third task is a residential building. In the process of this exercise, the children mastered the basics of urban planning analysis, learned how to draw up a program and identify a typology. I must say that according to the assignment, a residential building that is in an urban context and responds to it must have had a non-residential function in order to actually get a multifunctional residential building. The children were asked to choose either real customers at will, or to form a portrait of the customer on their own so that they could define the program and substantiate some features of the life of this house from the inside. After the urban planning analysis, of course, followed the drawing up of the program, then - according to the sum of all the inputs that they received in the process of research, we had to create a certain concept of this house (I am talking about this when I mention the skills of conceptualization). A number of specific exercises also corresponded to this: for each lesson we write a separate task and very clearly write down all the steps that students must take. After the concept was developed, we did a series of exercises on architectural details such as windows and doors. As a result, they had to present the designed residential building, the portfolio had to include all the necessary components, such as: master plans, sections, facades, plans and, of course, justification of the decision made in terms of context through some kind of collage or drawing in Wednesday.
It is very important to note that all the work of the first course was done by hand. It was our requirement - work in manual graphics, in manual technique and a lot of prototyping in different techniques. The layouts were made in different scales: from 1: 500 and 1: 1000 to a window layout at a scale of 1:25. Working with the layout gave a lot of positive results.
Who did the best and why - the answer to this question is very simple. The students whom we accepted for the first year had different backgrounds and different life experiences. Nevertheless, those who worked regularly, carefully, clearly completing all tasks, all briefs, have a much more advanced result than those who missed or did not follow any of our recommendations very carefully. Those who were completely close to zero at the beginning of the year, but, nevertheless, methodically and actively worked, by the end of the year progressed very noticeably, and this makes me very happy. We realized that the method works.
Speaking about our results, I can say that the most important thing for me is that the guys realized that the profession of an architect is what interests them and what they want to do. The most important result is that we did not cause rejection in anyone, we were able to motivate students for further development."
