There are no canonical ink washes on the walls in this exhibition. In their works, MARCH students do not copy reality. By rethinking, they recreate it. At the press conference dedicated to the opening of MARCH V and the fifth anniversary of the School, Evgeny Ass repeats the word “re-thinking” several times.
“What you see should be processed, reflected and turned into an intellectual product that will form the basis of architecture. The artistic component of our work is extremely important. In this sense, we say that architecture is in many ways fused with poetry. In our opinion, architecture today lacks poetic content,”he explains.
In MARCH, the word "poetry" is used in a broad sense, as the comprehension and creation of sign systems in the context of culture. Not a single MARCH V exhibit is a complete architectural project, but only shows one of the stages of work. Moreover, almost each of them is a full-fledged and interesting artistic expression.
The choice of the site has become a kind of manifesto for the School. Instead of the obvious Museum of Architecture or CDA, MARSH student works are exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art on Petrovka. There are not so many exhibits, they fit in two halls, but, according to curator Kirill Ass, these are things that "take your breath away."
Drawings, paintings and collages make up about half of the exhibition. Another part of it is spatial objects that are closer to contemporary art than to design, as it is customary to represent it in the current practice of architectural education.
The project "Museum of the book" Moscow - Petushki "by Natalia Pirogova shows episodes of the great Russian odyssey of hopelessness in the slots of black Ikeev boxes. The exhibit without the title of this year's master's student Artem Polsky is an attempt to understand how inanimate metal interacts with living wood.
His classmate Anvar Garipov showed a mock-up of the Mozhga station: a wooden "crucifix" hanging on the strings of the platforms complements a flipbook - a small book in which page after page a storyboard of movement along the platform is drawn.
There are no uniform predefined formats at the exhibition. Here you can even see diaries with sketches, personal notes and tabs.
Students used different media platforms. For example, Katya Tinyakova's "House for the Blind Fish", which thundered last year at the defense of the first semester of the first year bachelors, is a gray clay ball, through the peephole of which a white interior with porcelain doll handles opens, complemented by a video performance.
The kind of fish that are born sighted, but then lose the ability to see, really exists in nature. The metaphorical nature of the works of MARSH students does not replace the essence, it is not a goal, but a way to create architecture.
“Many schools talk about architecture being related to art. In doing so, they tend to use simplified technical teaching methods, says Robert Mull, professor at the British University of Brighton, where he runs the School of Architecture and Design. - MARCH is unique in that it connects a practical approach with a very deep relationship to architecture. An example of this for me is the teaching of people like Alexander Brodsky at the School."
Students of Alexander Brodsky and Nadezhda Korbut presented the Transformer project at MARCH V. Thirteen people divided the space of the building of the former Central Transformer Center, which should soon be demolished, and each created something of their own: a prison, a farm, a bathhouse, a church and a casino, a greenhouse. The result was a city-utopia, doomed to impossible even before the birth of the idea, and therefore in a special way shrill. However, in addition to the poetic content, this is also a huge, well-made model, the details of which I want to consider for a long time.
The fact that this is the work of Brodsky's students can only be guessed from the layout. There are no signatures with the names of teachers, courses and groups here. It is easy to forget that March V is a student exhibition. It is not at all about how to complete the task, but about what exactly to say, this is not schoolboy obedience, but creative will.
“For us, the result of our activity is not work, but students. We work not for the sake of projects, but for the sake of wonderful, sensitive and well-trained architects leaving our school,”says the director of MARSH Nikita Tokarev.
The exhibition "MARCH V" in MOMA turned out to be convincing: students at MARSH are taught not only to comprehend reality, but also to be free in this comprehension - an unprecedented luxury by the standards of modern Russian education, and not only architecture.
