At Arch Moscow, Kleinewelt Architekten presented the Ideal City exhibition, announcing the launch of a research project of the same name. During the first phase of the project, the team collects and analyzes data on cities that rank high in authoritative rankings for quality of life. We met with the curators of the project - the partner of the bureau Sergey Pereslegin and the teacher of the MARSH school Alexander Ostrogorsky to discuss with them the format and goals of the project.
Archi.ru:
- Your project is not a one-time action for creating a spectacular exposition at an architectural exhibition. You announced your intention to conduct research and deduce the basic principles of an ideal city in which residents will be happy. This is a bold, if not to say ambitious, intention that most of the professional community can be rather skeptical about. Let's try to predict the most obvious questions of skeptics and give answers to them in advance. And let's start with, say, this question: how did you come up with the idea of coming up with an ideal city?
Sergey Pereslegin:
- In fact, such studies are a common format for starting the architectural life of any professional. When a person learns and develops, he only makes idealistic concepts. Until he gains experience for the development and implementation of a landmark project. In the European tradition, many serious bureaus, people of world renown, spend half their lives on research projects, present their ideas, and discuss various opinions. The process of accumulating knowledge is in progress. In our case, it all started with our own ideas about the ideal city, more precisely about the place in which we ourselves would like to live, work, study … We tried to fix the parameters and features of the cities that we like the most, based on our own experience, impressions accumulated knowledge. On the other hand, it would be wrong to close the research process only in our office. We came to the conclusion that specialists from different directions should join the work. Alexander Ostrogorsky was one of the first to respond to our invitation.
Alexander Ostrogorsky:
- I would say that, first of all, this study was launched as a self-education project, as a way of developing knowledge about modern urban planning. On the other hand, as an MARSH instructor and architecture journalist, I was invited to help document the process and its results. And I agreed with pleasure.
That is, it is important for you to go beyond the subjective idea of the model of an ideal city? Create a universal formula that you can use in practice?
Sergey Pereslegin:
- We like the process by which we gain new knowledge. The publicity of the project, public discussion of the data and conclusions obtained at each stage, in turn, enrich the project itself and ourselves. We have experience in designing objects as part of the urban environment, but there is even more work of this kind ahead. Each such project is tens and hundreds of decisions that have to be made, moreover, discussing them with numerous participants - clients, consultants, the city. If you do not have your own firm convictions, do not see the whole system as a whole, you can make a lot of mistakes.
Alexander Ostrogorsky:
- Work develops in a natural way: from an intuitive understanding and definition of their values to a project filled with broader meanings and data. One of the tasks of our project is to develop our own perception of the laws of existence of modern cities and the perception of other specialists who will take part in it either as our co-authors or as our audience.
Interesting. It seems to me that humanity left the search for an ideal city largely because it became convinced of the unpredictability of the development of the city and the impossibility of enclosing this development in some kind of formula. Moving away from despotism to democracy, humanity has deprived itself of the opportunity to seriously think about creating an ideal city. You see something different in this idea. As I understand it - a way to understand a modern city
Sergey Pereslegin:
- We project into the project our idea of how the city should be arranged correctly.
Alexander Ostrogorsky:
“And in our project the word“ideal”is a tool for raising rates, we will look for the best possible. On the other hand, the purpose of such experimental projects is provocation, creating a reason for discussion.
Do you think that the professional community is ready for such discussions and is capable of constructively reflecting on them?
Alexander Ostrogorsky:
- And who are we? We are part of the professional community. And I am sure that in the Russian professional and information field we will very soon see many similar research and discussion projects. An example is what is happening at MARSH or the Shukhov-Lab project at the Higher School of Economics. Some bureaus initiate their own educational projects. The internship programs at Wowhaus have been running for a couple of years now. This year Meganom launched a project called Audience. It seems to me that a new generation is coming, striving for changes and new formats for mastering the profession.
Sergey Pereslegin:
- In general, there is a feeling of the formation of an architectural, urban planning noosphere, which is gradually being filled with ideas and theories.
It is impossible not to pay attention to the fact that the beginning of your project "Ideal City", aimed at studying the specifics of the urban environment, searching for an urban structure that affects the quality of life, coincided with a sharp increase in interest in this topic on the part of the authorities. Recently, the advantages and disadvantages of quarterly development were discussed, now there is a talk about the principles of construction on the site of the demolished five-story buildings. Is this a coincidence? Or, indeed, today it is the most acute problem due to the lack of understanding of how the urban environment should be arranged? Previous standards and approaches have been discredited, new recipes have not yet been found. That is why this uncultivated field attracts so many researchers
Sergey Pereslegin:
- The project appeared long before the renovation. In addition, the nature of our Ideal City project is not so pragmatic. The results that we will receive can be extrapolated to some real area, but this is a matter of further work on the project.
Alexander Ostrogorsky:
- On the other hand, this coincidence is really not accidental, because it can be argued that such an urban agenda for Russian architecture and urban planning is extremely relevant now and will be relevant for a very long time.
How will the Ideal City project be built? How will you conduct your research?
Sergey Pereslegin:
- We have broken the project into stages. The first stage is a purely architectural and urban planning immersion, an analysis of cities that are among the leaders in authoritative ratings for the quality of life.
We made a selection of cities that differ in size, geographic location, time of existence, and so on. We will analyze these cities in different aspects: from the point of view of urban planning, architecture, medicine, sociology, ecology, the presence of a certain infrastructure … We have identified three main areas of research. The first is the general structure, boundaries, size, silhouette of the entire city. The second is the fabric of urban development, its constituent elements at the level of the district, quarter and individual buildings, streets, squares, boulevards and public spaces. And the third direction is man. For the research part of the project, we attracted students from the best architectural universities in Moscow, who were selected on a competitive basis. They are divided into three groups, each dealing with its own direction. Of course, there is a constant exchange of information between the groups.
Alexander Ostrogorsky:
“We want to understand, using the example of these cities, to what extent geography and climate affect the quality of life in the city. What features of cities are associated with a reaction to objective factors, and what can be used in other places.
Sergey Pereslegin:
- For example, in Vancouver or Zurich, the weather does not affect the feeling of the city. Everything has been done there to be comfortable, regardless of whether it is raining, snowing or shining in the sun. And our task is to understand why it is good there, with the help of what urban planning and architectural techniques this was achieved. We are trying to identify universal working methods.
Sergey Pereslegin:
- The next stage of our project will be the presentation of the results of our research and discussion with the professional community. We are planning to make an exhibition and hold a series of discussions.
Alexander Ostrogorsky:
- We will try to make sure that the maximum number of interested people in the professional community could enter into some kind of constructive relationship with this project.
In conclusion, I would like to ask a somewhat provocative question. One of the goals of your project is to create a space where everyone is happy. And you intend to use architectural and urban methods to achieve this goal. Wouldn't it be easier to use pharmaceuticals or psychotherapy?
Alexander Ostrogorsky:
“There are many different things that can make a person happy - friends, family, nice streets, pills. Doctors and pharmacists deal with pills, and we deal with the streets. There is a statement by Peter Eisenman that psychotherapists, not architects, are engaged in human happiness. But this does not relieve the architect of the responsibility to do as well as he can imagine. The goal of this project is to move from an intuitive approach to understanding which system is behind it, which things matter and which do not. And then it will be possible to set real tasks and solve them.
Sergey Pereslegin:
- Architecture is one of the most public professions. Every day, leaving the house, we see buildings that shape our mood, attitude. “First we build houses, and then they build us,” Winston Churchill once wrote. And the task of the architect is to get as close as possible to the best result of his work, to form the most comfortable urban environment.
