- How was the text distributed between the two authors? What did you write, and what - Professor Vladimir Sedov?
Sergey Choban:
- We both worked on the whole text. Some chapters were first written by me, and then Vladimir supplemented them, and some, on the contrary, were first written by Vladimir, and then I made additions aimed at revealing the main idea. In general, it was a completely joint work, the result of which was a text that was in tune with both of us.
You have already said that the book is not a manifesto. But it contains a call - well, or a recommendation, which corresponds to the genre of the manifesto, and does not correspond to the genre of the essay. The conclusion with his "we call" sounds exactly like a manifesto. So why isn't this book a manifesto?
- Honestly, the very word "manifesto" seems to me too loud, in some ways even pompous. Rather, it is a point of view based on my practical observations. At some point, I shared it with Vladimir Sedov, he accepted it, and so the idea was born to clothe our reflections in the form of a book.
Actually, the main idea of your book is not decor, but contrast. You argue that architecture has split, split into two, and this happened quite recently. That everything is fine in the first, iconic and stellar, part, it remains to tighten the second background, which should differ fundamentally because modernist architecture is built on the principle of contrast, but it cannot contrast with itself. The background suggested by modernism, a simple lattice, is boring for you. It turns out that you are proposing to learn how to create new historical cities, but not simply because they are pleasing to humans, as a kind of background or frame for icon buildings? Generate conditions for the parallel existence of two architectural "races"? Doesn't segregation and architectural estates arise here: one - icons, another - the creation of a new version of the historical city? It is clear that people are unequal, some generate ideas, others do the work, but is such a splitting productive, will not hierarchy and integrity take revenge?
- We in our book in no way call for segregation, and it’s even strange to me that you read it this way! Rather, we document the status quo: in the structure of a city, individual buildings always play different roles. There are houses that are destined to become key elements of an urban ensemble. And there are buildings that are designed to serve as a worthy background for these elements. Any urban fabric is made up of a combination of these terms, and its perception depends on the exact proportion of this.
Of course, both the most representative in their location and function objects, and buildings serving more utilitarian purposes, from the point of view of architecture, must be solved at a high level - so that they, at least, would not be inferior to their predecessors. In the architecture of unique structures over the past hundred years, there has been a colossal, including technological, leap - new materials, new designs have appeared, fundamentally different experiments with plastic and surface shape have become possible than before. It is to this breakthrough that we owe the appearance of buildings that assert themselves through deliberate contrast with their surroundings. The main problem, in our opinion, is that, on the contrary, no leaps have taken place in the field of background architecture design. These buildings still have simple, somewhat lapidary forms, and, accordingly, the quality of the surface of their facades plays the most important role in them. How and by what means should they be solved? This is one of the main questions that our book is devoted to. After all, if you imagine that from now on all the facades in the city are made according to the principle of contrasting coexistence with neighbors, then this will entail discord, which I demonstrated in my lecture with the help of a collage of a variety of modern buildings lined up along the same street. It is quite obvious to us that background buildings cannot and should not be created according to the same principles by which unique structures are created. They require other techniques - both in terms of dimensions and shapes, and in terms of the materials used, and, of course, in terms of the method of processing the facade surface. These techniques need to be rediscovered, they need to be learned.
In the chapter about Gothic, figures appear: 5% elite, 25% "middle", 70% - the mass of buildings, "based on forms of folk, folklore, amateur and traditional." The essay does not involve footnotes - but where did these numbers come from?
- These figures are taken from the master plans of cities that arose during that period. And these figures are intended to confirm that even then, at least 70% of the buildings were buildings that were simpler and more utilitarian in their meaning and design. That is, the tradition of solving buildings of different meanings by different architectural means has a very long history. And nevertheless, the background buildings of the era of the same Gothic that have come down to our time are endlessly pleasing to our eyes and make us want to explore them again and again. How does this happen? In my opinion, the answer is obvious: it's all about the nature of the surface of the materials used, the variety and tactility of the facade surfaces created by the masters of the past.
You exclude, transfer into the category of construction the architecture of slums and simple houses, which often did not differ in decoration, conventionally - vernacular architecture. Therefore, your 100% is not really 100%, and this is especially dangerous when talking about modernism, which has made this material part of its agenda and aesthetics. You take this third part in parentheses, which is why the logic of construction suffers. You are talking about a background building in Barcelona or Venice - but for some it was a palace, which is why it has survived and is aging so well. If you project onto the present, the feeling is that you are considering architecture within the Garden Ring, and exclude everything that is “outside the boundaries of the polis”. Are you really considering only relatively expensive architecture, elite by modern standards?
- Absolutely not. One of the key examples that I referred to in my lecture was background buildings, for example, on the former Basseinaya Street in St. Petersburg. These are buildings of the early XX centuries, which were built with the funds of cooperative communities and were by no means elite-expensive. And, by the way, at that time a huge number of such houses were built in St. Petersburg, not only in the center, but also in quite remote, for those times, areas. We see another surge of attention to the quality of background buildings in the 1940s and 1950s, when the surfaces of buildings began to become saturated with details again. And this was in no way connected with the elitism of the objects! That is why I consider it absolutely inappropriate to say that a change in the volume of construction (towards a sharp increase) will inevitably lead to a loss of the architectural quality of buildings. On the contrary, I am sure that this is just a hopeless impasse! When implementing new construction projects both in the already established districts of the city, and in the conditions of a "clean field", we must create mostly lower (the same 70 percent), human-scale buildings, carefully choosing the method of detailing the surfaces of houses. Let me emphasize: we are talking about each newly created building, because only this guarantees the creation of a visually rich, interesting for the eye of the urban environment. So we are not talking about any elitism here.
And by the way, it is a huge misconception that modernism today is architecture for everyone. Once he aspired to become architecture for everyone, but today it is very expensive architecture if done well. Because the saturation of the facade surface helps to hide possible defects that arise during the construction process, but when we try to make a building with facades deliberately smooth, deliberately devoid of details, these are the most expensive projects to implement. This I affirm as a practitioner. Even ordinary facing brick buildings, which were built quickly and often not of the highest quality, are nevertheless more pleasing to the eye and, as a result, more durable, since they have a finer structure of the facade surface.
Modernism itself has already invented many things that the eye can catch on: starting from high-tech elements, all these nuts and bolts that occupy the place of denticles in the volume hierarchy … a lot in your portfolio. This direction is developing. Your book is an attempt to accelerate its development or indicate a new direction, and if the second, then what is its novelty?
- Everything that you have listed is separate, I would say, such lateral branches that arise because more and more architects are aware of the lack of visual means of architecture of the last century, especially the background. And he is trying to find his own empirical answer. Nuts and bolts, which often have no functional need, do appear. I think this is a sure proof of the truth of what we are talking about in our book: a building needs a varied surface in order for the eye to want to look at it and can get enough of it. After all, this is already a well-studied phenomenon by physicians: the human eye physically needs the ability to fix itself on small details. If we look at the same smooth concrete surface for a long time, we lose the ability to fix our gaze, and this, in turn, leads to physically perceptible discomfort. That is why in a historic city, where every house is full of details, we feel very comfortable, but in a city consisting of smooth walls, we do not. And Vladimir Sedov and I found it important to describe and explain why this is happening. In the book, we are trying to systematize the view of the urban environment and understand what place in it can be occupied by buildings-challenges that have a pronounced individual structure, and what role is assigned to buildings that serve as a background, a frame for these precious stones.
Why are you annoyed by the insulation that has opened due to the destruction of the ventilation facade, and does not irritate the brick from under the fallen off plaster? Or is it not annoying a chaotic zabutochno, exposed from under a dilapidated medieval wall? Typologically, all these things are equal: a certain decor, if it is a deception in the formal sense, being destroyed, firstly, disavows the very deception of the viewer - it shows that rust is just a decoration, there are no full-fledged quadras behind it, and behind the "exposure" of the structure disappointment ensues. Habit introduces this disappointment into the category of culture - and now we are romanticizing the ruins. I must say that the annoyance of the ruins of the great cathedral began The 20th century, with its concrete and protruding formwork of a century ago, has already been replaced by a romantic look; there are more and more people, fascinated by the ruins of modernism with their brutal technogenic aesthetics of "Stalker". Maybe it's all about time, and there is nothing disgusting in the ruins of modernism, but this is just another step in the development of culture?
- Brick is a natural material that looks beautiful and ages nobly. And the insulation looks very ugly. And I would be interested to see a person whom he would not annoy in his naked state. For a city dweller, a historical building is aging attractively, enriching its surface due to patina and, in the extreme case, turning into a beautiful ruin, while a modern building is covered with mold and shedding shreds of a heat-insulating layer, and it is disgusting to look at it, so no one cherishes it. And if we want modern buildings to be appreciated and aged, we need to go back to creating massive walls or layering wall structures.
Frankly, the most utopian part of your constructions seemed to me just the recommendation to create massive walls. In your lecture, you mentioned that experiments in this direction are underway in Germany. Could you tell us more about them? Who is involved in this, how much more expensive is the construction? Today's ventilation facade technology seems to have come for a long time, at least until it is replaced by some other, more, not less, let's say, futuristic and new. I would like to understand whether you are calling for retrodevelopment
- As an architect who works a lot in Germany, I absolutely see that the ventilation facade technology did not come forever. Already today there is a huge amount of research related to two-layer self-supporting walls, when there is an inner layer - a supporting one, and an outer layer - a self-supporting one, which also stands on the foundation, and between them there is a heat-insulating layer. The same structure, by the way, can work in the opposite order: this is how, for example, our Museum of Architectural Drawing in Berlin was made. There is also a huge amount of research related to porous walls, which are both load-bearing and, in fact, the outer surface. Yes, so far these processes are localized mainly in Switzerland and Germany, but I have no doubt that from there they will eventually come to all other countries. That is why the current passion for ventilated facades in Russia seems to me, at least, not advanced.
Your statement about the reduction of energy efficiency standards, frankly, scared a little. After all, we will not freeze, we will warm ourselves, burn fuel, violate eco-bans. And then the question of the contradiction between ethics and aesthetics arises here: are you calling to abandon ethical energy efficiency, which, according to statements that, however, still need to be verified, allows you to save the planet, just for the sake of beauty?
- In my lecture, I said that there are a lot of historical buildings with massive brick walls, in which we feel great. And in order for them to provide a person with the comfort of everyday life, they do not need to be completely packed in a heat-insulating layer. Of course, the creation of new energy carriers and new heating concepts can and should lead to the fact that the norms, including energy saving, will gradually come in line with the above or similar wall structures. But do not forget that environmental friendliness is not only about how much a particular building consumes and consumes energy. In my opinion, there is nothing worse than spending a huge amount of energy (including human resources) on the construction of a building, and then simply demolishing it in a short time, which is happening everywhere today, since it is hopelessly ugly aging and becomes worthless to anyone. All this energy could be spent, including on heating buildings, created in a more durable way! You see, in the same Western Europe, energy saving standards are tightened every two years, which leads to a constant increase in the thickness of the thermal insulation layer. Already today it reaches 20 centimeters in energy efficient buildings! Twenty! Is it so sustainable - especially in terms of the long-term use of the building? What will be left of such a building when it starts to age? That is why I believe that this is a temporary phenomenon, to which an alternative must and will be found. Of course, the question is what this alternative would look like. One of the ways out, I think, is the search for more "honest" materials and return to them. At the same time, of course, the search for new sources of energy is under way, and rightly so. But in my opinion, a more reasonable attitude to the standards of one's own comfort could be a step towards the prudent use of resources and, as a result, the creation of more thoughtful and high-quality objects of the urban environment.
