What to do with a building that was built for a certain technical need and has lost its meaning, and its structure does not lend itself to transformation for ordinary functions?
The studio of Alexander Brodsky and Nadezhda Korbut invited students to take part in the transformation of a Moscow building, a former transformer substation of the 1950s. For him, they were looking for not only new functions, but also meanings, they learned to "evoke feelings in people with the help of building materials", because, as the studio program said, "architecture is the art of real things and non-material experiences."
Alexander Brodsky
head of the studio "Transformer, or Marseille Soup"
“The project is dedicated to the old transformer substation located at Krasny Oktyabr. She ceased to be needed, she was turned off and sentenced to demolition. The house is huge, very beautiful, it will be demolished sometime in late autumn, I think. Our project is a kind of tribute to the memory and respect for such a chic building.
We decided to split it spontaneously into 13 parts, because we have 13 students. We launched them there in winter, in the dark. They climbed everything there, explored all the labyrinths, made a plan, divided it among themselves, and each came up with some function for his part. There is a prison, a casino and a church, a bathhouse, a dairy farm, a parliament - in general, thirteen different things. They turned out to be a small town. We were inspired by buildings like Diocletian's Palace in Split and antique amphitheaters occupied by medieval cities like Arles. Something similar happened with them.
The difficulty was mainly in the fact that the students had to work very closely collectively: fill all the space, define the boundaries of each and create communication routes - a very complex organism emerged."
video made by students of Brodsky's studio:
Entrance
Alexandra Polidovets
«Through comprehending what I felt and saw, I formulated for myself the secret of the transformer, on the basis of which my further work on the project was based. Firstly, the Transformer is a place to live, secondly, it keeps traces of everyday life, and thirdly, it is a place where everything is mixed.
Just as many ingredients are combined in a Marseille soup, so thirteen different functions are placed in one volume of a transformer, and thirteen different apartments - in one entrance. There are different typologies of housing here: from a communal apartment for farmers and homeless people to a tiny master house on the roof."
Milk's farm
Alexander Belozertsev
«The building became unnecessary due to the fact that it failed to fit into the transition from the industrial to the post-industrial paradigm of the territory's development. Since the post-industrial functions turned out to be incompatible with it, its content was defined as pre-industrial.
This was reflected both in the idea of using pre-industrial design solutions and, in general, in the rejection of the industrial horizontal scheme for organizing the space of a dairy farm and in the transition to a more traditional, albeit modified, principle of vertical functioning.
The space for human work intersects with the space for the life of animals, and all levels are connected by a system of ramps. The slopes of the ramps vary according to the location of the different animals: cows on the ground floor, sheep on the middle levels and goats on the upper levels. Thus, it is possible to limit the penetration of animals to adjacent levels: cows are walked outside, and goats - on the roof."
Library
Ekaterina Itsikson
«The intellectual center of the Transformer is a library "filled with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, mysterious (Borges)." Like books, readers sit in wooden cabinets in the reading room. Inspired by the work of Alexander Brodsky, the library is emphatically out of date: in it time has stopped, as it has stopped for the entire building, here is an island of stability and silence in the stormy world of a metropolis."
Home for the homeless
Peter Kornishin
“The first image of the future function arose after sketching a“secret place”- a space that permeates the entire building, but at the same time remains unnoticed. This place is a ventilation shaft with dimensions that allow a person to be in it.
I wanted to create a whole "web" of a secret tunnel system that permeates the entire building. But it was necessary to clearly define why such an architecture should be created, who would be its "inhabitant" and why this place should be hidden.
Such a space - its dimensions and minimum comfort conditions - has designated a special social group. Analyzing people and their needs, I determined that homeless people can become residents of my “city”. The problem of the lack of the required number of places to meet the minimum needs of people without housing, the problem of their integration into society and their perception by society set the vector for the development of my project. Homeless people get their own space inside the "living" infrastructure, go through the path of socialization through the Transformer, and, possibly, change their life principles."
