The ArchiWOOD Prize has been awarded for the eighth year, and the main topic of this year was the summing up - Nikolay Malinin presented a freshly published catalog named after the 2009 exhibition "Modern Wooden". The exhibition was called "new", and now it is no longer new, now "modern", in fact, the second volume of the catalog of that exhibition - the curator of the award Nikolai Malinin never tires of explaining. The book contains the winners of the award for 8 years, but not only them: something that did not win was also horrible, such as Aleksandr Kuptsov's "Peripetr", who had never been and even a participant, built as an exhibition stand for the award in the colonnade of the Central House of Artists, dearly loved by the organizers and now disassembled. It is not difficult to find out other non-winners, they are shortlisted. There are no winners either: “the mechanism of“people's voting has its costs,”explains Nikolai Malinin in the introduction. So the book is also to some extent the result of the curator's judging, of the author's arbitrariness in restoring justice. And good. One hundred and thirty objects, selected on the basis of ArchiWOODa, but creatively. The jury and experts, by the way, are both obstinate and subjective. Now the third - the choice of the book - has been added to the two-headed choice of the jury-people.
Even more pleasing is the introductory part of the book, which briefly but succinctly lined up typological series that coincide with the nominations of the award only partially. Here Nikolai Malinin easily and unobtrusively integrates his material into the context of notable wooden buildings of the 1990s and 2000s - before the foundation of the award, and uses (instead of nominations) such watercolor terms as "Olonets brutalism", "Rublev minimalism", and art criticism. exhibitions - for example, "lyrical expressionism", raising them to historical prototypes in a branchy and sometimes arbitrary way: why, for example, does the "wooden temporary" originate from churches? No answer. But it turns out lacy, shady, lively - this is the author's introduction that makes the catalog a book, turning it from a re-election publication into an essay study, but thorough and remembering the roots. The head exhausted by reality stops hurting from such reading. And of course it is clear that the introduction is a squeeze of Nikolai Malinin's introductions to the annual ArchiWOOD awards, remarkable in terms of the combination of the depth of mastering the material and artistic simplicity of presentation. An excellent book, in a word. Due to the fact that it needed to be completed, the award ceremony was postponed from May to June and was held not in the large hall of the Arch of Moscow, but in the restaurant “house 12” in Mansurovsky lane, in the close company of “friends”.
Grand Prix / restoration
This year ArchiWOOD awarded the second Grand Prix in history (
the first in 2015 was received by Alexei Rosenberg for a house in Dukhanino) - and the main award went not to modern architecture, but to the restored Ostashevsky Terem; he also received the prize of the popular vote in the "Restoration" nomination. The Grand Prix was presented by Yulia Zinkevich, director of the PR agency "Rules of Communication" - the inspirer and even "mother", as it sounded, of the awards. We all love the tower, the history of its revival is almost fantastic in our times and it would be nice for it to become an exemplary one while the palaces are still in the provinces - but on the sidelines there was a slight murmur in the sense that they are not calling us to return to Ropet's historicism on a wave of patriotism.
No, I must think, still no. All the same, we are talking about restoration. The jury prize in this nomination went to Chernoglazov's house in Vologda - a rare example of real restoration in a city full of planked concrete dummies.
Vacation home
The main prize after the carved grand prix was awarded to two houses of rather laconic architecture. The jury prize went to the "house by the sea" in the village of Pribylovo, built by the architects of the Khvoya bureau - I must say, Nikolai Malinin immediately, even before the jury's vote, singled him out among the nominees and
compared with the world's first example of postmodernism - the house [1964], which Robert Venturi built for his mother. " In the catalog I compared in some detail, and the similarities and differences - everything is obvious.
The People's Prize was awarded to "a residential building with a bathhouse", during construction, according to the authors, it turned from a bathhouse into a house, from the Tandem bureau - without signs of postmodernism, on the contrary, a typical representative of the new wooden architecture promoted by ArchiWOOD; with a fashionable sloping silhouette, generalized by strip shading on the end cuts.
Public building
The main public building-2017 was named "Duck Venice" by Elena Makarova, and the opinion of the jury and the people coincided. But the expert council, I remember, was not too eager to include it in the shortlist. Venice did not make it into the catalog. The second phase of the “City Farm at VDNKh” by Wowhaus architects, on the contrary, has got to.
Small object
Here, the opinion of the jury and the result of the popular vote also coincided, and the extension house of the Yaroslavl architect Grigory Dainov received a double prize, which looked either like a snake with a glass-faced window, or like a butterfly nailed to the old house with a corridor anchor with a metal gutter nail at the end. Also, I didn’t make it into the catalog. Actually, not so many of the 2017 winners made it into the book.
Urban environment design
The nomination appeared a year later than the award, in 2010, and since then it has remained in tune with everything the most advanced in the sense of the actual, if not terribly fashionable, theme of a comfortable city.
The jury chose the public space of the Zarya factory in Vladivostok, created by the architects of the ConcreteJungle + Skameyka architects. Wooden platforms, slatted facades, benches of the “reclining but not falling asleep” format, rusty metal, concrete and a plywood sewing machine at the entrance - all the signs of a public space in the capital format are evident. There is a good school in Vladivostok - sounded at the award ceremony.
The popular vote awarded the prize to the team that equipped the embankment of the Nurminka River in Kukmor. Bureau "Architectural landing" from Kazan worked under the leadership of Yevgeny Ass - that says a lot; “We brought the embankment closer to the river,” the authors commented on their project at the ceremony.
Art object
One of the highlights among the winners is a village toilet built by Ivan and Dmitry Kozhin at their own dacha: in the form of a cylinder with a window hinting at "Kin dza dzu" (in the authors' view, this is a yacht porthole). The Expert Council moved it from "small objects" to "art", which the authors were noticeably pleased with. In the sense that: oh yes, let our toilet be an art object. The people named the winner in the category of art objects "Giant mushrooms", built by the "Leapfrog" bureau in Kazan. Inside the largest mushroom, there is a rope tunnel with a hammock mesh for relaxation underneath.
Interiors
The jury chose the studio of the architectural student, set up in a converted garage by the architects RueTemple: a space divided into two parts by a shelving for drawings and plaster heads, where the table is not in the middle, but stretched out like a window sill along the windows.
Alexey Rosenberg, having received the popular vote for the interior of the NagatinSky apartment, became the laureate of the award for the seventh time.
Wood in decoration
The jury named the entrance group as the best example of the use of wood in decoration - the architectural and educational space BFFT.space at Kazan University - a glass volume surrounded by wooden slats, the rhythm of which is reminiscent of Sergei Tchoban's pavilion at Expo 2015 in Milan. The people chose the "Clinic at the End of the Earth", built by Mikhail and Elizaveta Shishina not just anywhere, but in Guatemala.
Object design
The most difficult thing, according to the curator, is the Subject Design nomination, created in 2014 - it was not even included in the catalog. This year, only two objects were shortlisted, which shared the awards in a brotherly manner: the jury noted the table-designer "Tabldot" presented by the KONTORA bureau, the people - "Yegor's playroom" by Maria Anisimova-Karasik, Andrey Anisimov and Roman Rauch, participating in ArchiWOOD for the first time. The jury also awarded them a special prize for a wooden dog, inspired by the bronze prototype of the Ploschad Revolyutsii metro station.
The set is not bad. Perhaps Nikolay Belousov and Totan Kuzembaev are not represented, and there are not enough festival objects among the winners. It is not difficult to notice the growing relevance of the design of public spaces - or it will still be, as well as the spread of the “breadth” award: this year there is only one Moscow object among the winners - the apartment of Alexei Rosenberg. It would seem to grow and grow. But at the ceremony every now and then one could hear cautious notes - hasn't the prize been awarded for the last year? The speakers cast significant glances towards the head of ROSSA RAKENNE SPb (HONKA), the main sponsor and author of the idea and organizer of the award, Alexander Lvovsky, but the answer remained unclear. Is it the last one?
The jury of ArchiWOOD 2017:
- Ksenia Kharitonova and Alexander Ryabsky (FAS (t) bureau),
- Olga Aleksakova and Yulia Burdova (BUROMOSCOW),
- Oleg Panitkov, General Director of the Association of Wooden Housing Construction,
- Anton Kochurkin, curator of the ArchStoyanie festival,
- Roman Leonidov, architect.
