Do not tell anybody, that you remember the first steam locomotive.
University saying
AFF School 2016 theme is Museum, Transport, Heritage. Three sites were chosen for the design - two Train Museums, at the Paveletsky and Rizhsky railway stations, run by Russian Railways, and the Moscow Transport Museum. The school was sponsored by the Polytechnic Museum, and the choice of theme is partly due to this collaboration.
What should be a museum and how should it exist in a city? The usual function of the museum is to preserve history with the help of information visualized in one way or another, authentic and new-made items. But the storage of information, even in a systematized form, today does not require special measures - any information can be obtained without leaving home. What is a museum for then? In order to immerse in the topic, to give a lot of experiences and through them - a new depth of understanding of a particular era, personality or phenomenon. And this requires new approaches to the formation of the exhibition space and modern technologies that allow the viewer to actively interact with the exposition, to use all human senses. A modern museum should be a cultural center to which a person returns again and again, each time finding new nuances and levels of perception. He has to update the context all the time. A museum is a script, an exposition of perception.
There are very few museum specialists in Russia who are able to implement projects at the high level required by the Polytechnic Museum. From the side of the Polytech, the AFF participants were asked about what the museum should be like today, how it should interact with the visitor and the city, what new scenarios are possible and have not yet been put into practice. To facilitate the search for answers, the experts of the Polytechnic Museum held a lecture for the participants of the school, in which they talked about the best world practices, and as part of the workshop, the classification of museums was carried out according to the directions of their actual interaction with the audience. ***
Old steam locomotive cluster
There are three Russian Railways museums in Moscow, the most significant of which is located at the Riga station … Trains of different types and years are exhibited there: ambulance trains and surgical carriages, pre-revolutionary, from the period of the Great Patriotic War. All of them carry emotional potential, the memory of great and tragic events, but the exposition in the Museum does not allow you to feel this, since the context is not set, the atmosphere is not created. If the museum carried out regular work, changed the scenarios of the exposition, trains “traveled” to different sites, the museum could attract much more attention. The team working with this location developed several parallel scenarios for the functioning of the museum, including moving thematic expositions - after all, all the museum's exhibits are on the move and can move along the paths - the creation of an art cluster and an extensive excursion program.
Get in the car
Museum Transport on Rogozhsky Val it also feels like a normal storage location that does not interact with the viewer: there is only one vantage point per car. you cannot sit in them, put yourself in the driver's or passenger's seat. “If you come to enjoy the form, you have to go around, look, and sit in some certain cars, tell that grandfather, father drove such a car, and let the child sit behind the wheel.” The students proposed expanding the existing exposition and transforming the museum into a full-fledged Museum of Urban Transport, where all types of it will be presented, from buses to fixed-route taxis. It is also proposed to introduce infographics and a city data system into the exposition.
Cult locomotive
Museum at the Paveletsky railway station poorly located. Few people know about it, it is not accented in any way, and its only exhibit is the funeral train that delivered the body of V. I. Lenin to Moscow - is in a mothballed static state.
How to show a steam locomotive, and how to open a museum to the city? This is exactly the question the SPACE VERSE team, consisting of Polina Aleshchenko, Aurika Kuslivaya and Ksenya Malushina, tried to answer, who chose for themselves one of the most difficult project sites requiring a rethinking of the “Soviet legacy” in today's urban realities.
This museum has many features that make it difficult to work with it: an unfortunate location, only one exhibit endowed with a complex emotional and ideological meaning, an association with the controversial historical personality of Lenin. The AFF participants had a task - to resume the conversation once again on a topic fundamental for the country. Vlad Kunin comments on its complexity and ambiguity in the following way: “The topic presupposes a fundamental rethinking of where the country is heading. 100 years have passed, and now we need to figure out that we have Lenin - not Lenin, Stalin - not Stalin, and how we work with this. We are a democratic and constitutional state, or we live according to some other laws. The answers to these questions cannot be found in one workshop, but that is why they must be raised over and over again.
The cult of personality, personified by the Mausoleum, is reflected not only in it. Everything that was associated with the life, death and movement of Lenin's body was preserved and mothballed. Memorial plaques are at the station from which the train left on its last journey. And the train itself, the first driver of which, like the first driver of the Soviet Union, is considered Vladimir Ilyich, is firmly embedded in the cult.
What is important, the participants of the AFF school in their project do not question the value of the place itself and the a priori of the museum, working only with scenarios for the use of this place in the future. This does not mean that the authors do not pay attention to the overwhelming layer of the Soviet legacy and its ideological baggage. On the contrary, this is, to a certain extent, a step towards recovery - if we assume that Russian society is sick with neurosis in relation to its own history and the cults of individuals in this history. The new quality of the museum will allow many to turn to their origins and help society and the state to get out of the authoritarian cycles of history. The authors propose to combine the “dead”, “granite” history of the memorial museum with an interactive exposition that will appeal to the “idols” of the last hundred years, not only in public administration, but also, for example, in music. The paradox thus created is unexpectedly deep - in the best traditions of Marxist dialectics: the future determines the past.
This topic is difficult in itself, and all the more difficult for an architect. Philosophical and historical problems are traditionally solved by theoretical methods, not practical ones, and an attempt to transform it with urban planning tools automatically entails the need to immerse oneself in work with a socio-historical background.
The function of the museum as a public institution - the preservation of heritage - is not questioned by the authors of the Museum of Cult project. They are aware of those distortions of the original design of the pavilion, built according to the project of the classic of Soviet architecture Leonid Nikolaevich Pavlov and suggest returning to the author's version through its new reading. First of all, not only visually, but also physically to open the glass facade, which was closed during the rework in 2011 with a blank wall.
For modernist architecture, solid glazing is the most important principle, and the project assumes to go even further: to make most of the stained-glass window turning, turning it into an open stage area. This moment is important not so much a return to the original appearance as an attempt to connect the interior and exterior, the museum and the territory, the exposition and the city. The second part of the proposal, environmental, working for the same result - the organization of communication between the station and the territory of the museum, now separated by a blank fence along the tracks of suburban trains.
The actual problem for most urbanists and city planners is that the main perception of the comfort of the urban environment comes from the point of view of physical space: to get from point A to point B, to relax here, and here to go to a cafe. And at the same time they forget about the identity of the place and the city dweller.
If we present a model of physical comfort, it will end up as a completely unsightly self-gratification machine. At the same time, we always perceive the stories and meanings of the city, even if we do it unconsciously and do not realize the meaning of this or that object. That is why we protect architectural monuments.
In the proposed project "Museum of Cult", the exhibit - a steam locomotive - makes an attempt to interact with the environment, to express itself in the urban space and to return to it the meanings that are embedded in it as an object of worship, an echo of fashion and aspirations of the past era. Conceptually, the museum offers both a recreation area for visitors and a place to attract residents of the area. Even if expressed in outline form, this project idea can become an effective step towards rethinking the Soviet heritage as a set of historical facts and formats of the urban environment. ***
Architectural design cannot be mechanical, it must be meaningful - this principle is at the heart of every course at AFF - The Foundation for the Architectural Future. For six years in a row, teams of experts led by the school's ideologist Vlad Kunin have been helping groups of young architects reach new levels of solving design problems. The goal of the school is not so much to transfer design skills, but to try to understand and comprehend the tasks and problems that architects will face tomorrow, to shape the architect's attitude to the urban environment, to awaken the desire for creative research, using an integrated spatial approach to heritage.
An important principle of the AFF school is work on a project, including preliminary research, data collection and analysis. Participants should have enough time to rethink the task, "reboot" the urban planning situation, get a new qualitative answer aimed not only at the final result, but also at an analytical concept, ideological and associated with a particular place. The tasks for the AFF school students are selected in such a way as to immerse the participants as much as possible in a real situation - with a different scale of design (from the city as a whole to the scale of a person, from the space of a quarter to an exhibition stand), with context, history, philosophy, sociology, and without given " correct answers”. And, according to the same principle, last year the architectural and design "therapy" of museums was built: within the framework of a ten-day training course, new museum and exhibition concepts were discussed, their future was rethought.
The theme for the School is chosen each time based on the current agenda of urban development. In 2011, when a series of large competitions for the design of the Moskva River embankments was held in Russia, the participants in the Nizhny Novgorod AFF session developed the “River in the City” issue. The AFF school on the theme "The Golden Ring of Moscow Squares" coincided with the launch of the program for the reconstruction of Moscow streets and squares. Each time the organizers select a different place, a different context of the prevailing historical environment, the composition of experts is adjusted.
Vlad Kunin comments on the principle of AFF organization: “The school team consists of different experts, based on the professional objectives of the course, i.e. from the subject area, there are also experts-experts in architecture who understand the tasks of organizing space, acting both as designers and as methodologists, sociologists, and philosophers. There are also tutors who know how to work with a group, are able to motivate, are able to resolve conflicts, help to establish a dialogue with interested people, feel the educational process and group dynamics. It is important for us that students join new teams every time. They may not work well at first, but in the end it gives a very important result. When you have a new team, it is more interesting for you to work with new people, to find each his own role, and this gives a lot of ideas in the process of work. Our task is to establish and maintain a dialogue between team members and teams."
