The works presented at the exhibition amaze with the plastic talent of the author and the presence of his original ideas, which, in my opinion, does not happen often in modern architecture.
Architect Stepan Lipgart is 33 years old. He announced himself and his ideas 11 years ago, having created the group "Children of Iofan". Many people remember the work of the group at the exhibitions of ArchMoscow and the festival "Cities". And according to the installation “Tank“Flowers for the Fallen”" at Winery (which became the winner of the Archiwood Prize), it is quite piercing, because fresh flowers in the form of wheels on tank tracks are not such a weak memento mori. In general, the themes of the collision of the machine with the traditional, living and man-made, superhuman heroism and the passion of Lipgart seem close and important for our days and the future. Hence his interest in the architects of the Soviet Art Deco (may the exhibition curator Alexander Selivanova forgive me, who insists on the term post-constructivism).
For 10 years, Stepan Lipgart has done a lot. The exhibition presents both paper projects (computer graphics and video) and construction projects that are currently being implemented (the Renaissance house on Dybenko street in St. Petersburg, a house in Opalikha-3 near Moscow, a garment factory for Bosco and etc.). I was most impressed by the series “Near the Reactor”. The combination of anthropomorphism and grid, modified order and glass gives some enchanting images. The architect himself says that this is a personal dedication, the wave-like motifs on the facade embody the image of a nuclear reactor as a force that warms this world, but also threatens to destroy it. This energy has a similarity to human passion. The station is like a temple, and the theme of the deification of the car is also present here.
The combination of order and glass, which seems to me to be promising for future architecture, is also present in the realized house, more precisely in the facade of the house, in the traditional town of Opaliha-3. This project was kindly provided to Stepan Ligart by the architect Maxim Atayants, the author of the Opalikha-3 concept and most of the architecture in it. The large surface of the glass mesh with an elegant pattern and the ordered articulation of the facade are, in my opinion, what you need. (Similar motifs can be found in the artists' house on Maslovka, but Lipgart has his own individual plastic, weighed down with rustic patterns and machine motifs (!) In the cornices). Glass gives a lot of light, and the order is responsible for the presence of a person in the artistic system of architecture - and this is what everyone feels, regardless of education, and what people like. What makes the facade of the house attractive and friendly at the pedestrian's level, at the eye-walking level. It is buildings with such qualities that are capable of creating a city.
Selim Omarovich Khan-Magomedov as a messenger of the prophet1 stated that the future development of architecture is a combination and inter-pollination of two super-styles: classics and modernism. Which took place in the 1930s, but was not finished and may well arise again. And so he prophesied. How many before me, asked Stepana, why the 1930s? He said that it all started with a lecture by Tom Maine of the Morphosis group, which Lipgarth attended as a third year student at the Moscow Architectural Institute. “In his speech, a lot was devoted to technology, but he never sounded anything about the attitude towards a person, and he did not answer the question about this attitude. And I realized that I don't like modernism. Stepan, according to him, is interested in the unresolved contradictions inherent in Russian culture and history, which manifested themselves especially strongly in the 1930s. The collision of the machine with the traditional and man-made. The line of heroic Petersburg architecture, embodied both in the art deco of Levinson and Trotsky, and in the gloomy archaic of Belogrud and Bubyr, and even earlier in the arch of the General Staff and the monument to Peter. A line of burdened impulse, overcoming, associated with the nature of the city, which has been subjected to violent Europeanization several times. Moreover, sometimes Europeanization turned out to be a blessing and gave rise to a culture that enriched the world, and sometimes led to collapse, as in the Russian revolution.
The third work, which drew the attention of many at the exhibition of Stepan Lipgart, is the projects of ardekos' villas. Some visitors have seen a kinship with the aesthetic Parisian villas of Mallet-Stevens, but Stepan claims that he was inspired by the works of Golosov and Rudnev. Rhythm, musicality, striving lines, not classical anthropomorphism - this is what the author tried to express, in his words. And the final formula is: "The customer of this villa must be beautiful."
Finally, some rather unexpected paper projects inspired by Scriabin's music. Pictures of light and color, volume and space that arose from listening to the poem "Prometheus", again heroics and overcoming, are embodied in a fantasy of the same name.
In general, against the background of the lack of ideas in the mainstream of modern Russian architecture (the last ideas - the environmental paradigm and Gutnov's NER - were in the 1980s - and the modernist establishment left them, but did not come to anything new, except for what was tacitly borrowed from Krie, Duany and Zyberk of New Urbanism, which is embodied - unfortunately, half-heartedly and hypocritically - in neighborhoods and mixed use), the emergence of a young architect with a clear worldview is encouraging. Because the humanization of architecture in the era of the onset of technogenic paganism is actually very ripe.
The exhibition included an excursion "Postconstructivism in Moscow" and a lecture-concert "Neoclassicism in the music of the twentieth century". September 22 exhibition “Stepan Lipgart. Search for a Hero”will open in St. Petersburg. [1 returning to the text] Grigory Revzin said that Khan-Magomedov was revered in his homeland as the messenger of the prophet. A certain graduate student once watched as a group of horsemen gathered near the house where Khan-Magomedov was staying, and when he came out on the balcony in the morning, greeted him with shouts: "Hello to you, messenger of the prophet!"
