Anton Nadtochy, CEO of ATRIUM Bureau
System and chaos, dynamics and statics, boundaries and freedom - for more than twenty years the ATRIUM bureau under the leadership of Anton Nadtochy and Vera Butko has been exploring the possibility of expressing all these most complex concepts and images in architecture, each time finding some kind of absolute form for a specific function. Once upon a time these were country houses that amaze the imagination of readers of architectural magazines with fantastic plasticity, energy that is hard to contain, designs balancing on the brink of possibility, elegant accuracy of every line and an extraordinary approach to the use of materials. Over time, the scope of projects has increased. But in urban planning concepts, and in projects of public and residential complexes, one can still feel the beating of a recognizable author's thought, forcing glass, concrete, wood and stone to fuse into a single structure, and transforming architectural structures into giant art objects, almost sculptures. In the portfolio of the bureau there are no passing projects and each of them is developed with the participation and under the supervision of the team leaders. Anton Nadtochy tells in more detail about the value of a precisely found form, the creation of a living architecture that interacts with a person, the key tasks facing an architect.
Video filming and editing: Sergey Kuzmin.
Anton Nadtochy
CEO of ATRIUM Bureau:
“For us, quality in architecture is, first of all, probably the quality of space. Architecture is the only art that works with space; abstract art that works with categories such as mass, emptiness, structure, composition. In a sense, it turns out that we can assess the quality of architecture by the degree of spatiality of the architectural object, and, first of all, by what kind of spatial experiences or the possibility of obtaining spatial experiences the object provides. Of course, architecture for us is art and, above all, art, therefore, like any object of art, an architectural object must carry the opportunity to make some kind of discovery, must convey meanings. Carry certain values and emotions. In essence, an architect's job is to find an absolute form. And for us, this form must satisfy the maximum number of criteria that exist in an architectural object. This is a function, first of all, and context, urban environment, relief, orientation to the cardinal points, preferred views. As a result of the analysis of all these restrictions and criteria, we get a form that has a certain degree of internal complexity. We strive to create an ambiguous, non-uniform form that is read differently in the process of movement around the object, in the process of movement inside the object, which creates unexpected angles and creates emotions that are not read at the first glance at the object. In this regard, we strive to create a plastic, sculptural form, adaptive, which responds flexibly to all the criteria we are considering. And in fact, we strive to some extent to overcome the boundaries of the form itself, that is, to integrate this form with the landscape so that it enters into a dialogue with the environment and to some extent dissolves its own boundaries.
If there is only a form, then we are not talking about architecture, but about the design of the form itself, that is, it becomes more of a design. Since architecture is not design, architecture forms a space that accommodates a person, then, in terms of forms, we must always understand that we are creating space. And, accordingly, space for us is the main criterion for evaluating architecture. If we managed to create a high-quality space in terms of forms, then this is good luck, it worked out.
Our form is dynamic, complex, heterogeneous, different at different points. In principle, high information content is also an important quality of an architectural work. That is, a person, moving through an object, even if at a subconscious level or consciously comprehending, must read information that is expressed not only in space: it is embedded in the details, some conjugations, in the way of working with the form, in how some forms interact with others. This degree of information content must be present. If an object does not contain information, then it is not an object of art, it is just a building.
Art, of course, is not mathematics, and there is no single answer to the same question. Each author has his own answer. Moreover, each author tells his own story. And therefore, it makes sense to evaluate any architectural work, first of all, from the point of view of those ideas and meanings that the author himself laid down. It is clear that further these ideas can be abstractly evaluated already in the cultural context, general and temporal. We evaluate and program the result on the basis of subjective sensations and those qualities that we want to achieve in a particular object.
The absolute form is a synthetic form that answers many, many criteria that we simultaneously apply. And the criterion for considering your object in a certain cultural context, and in the context of the ideas that our objects carry - of course, it is the most important. If we managed to express certain ideas in our object, then we can pretend that our object will become an object of architecture and an object of art. And architecture with a capital letter, I mean.
If we talk about quality: how to achieve quality, what is quality … First of all, there should be some kind of artistic and denier. An architect must understand what values are important to him, what values he intends to convey. Everything else is very much a matter of craft, because architecture is an applied art. And then there is a question of just professionalism. A high degree of professionalism is also art in the applied arts. Therefore, the degree of quality of the architectural statement depends on how professional the architect is and is able to implement and translate his own ideas.
We strive for a certain form of a certain quality: dynamic, complex, spatial, perspective, heterogeneous. The form of this quality and the space of this quality reflect the current understanding of the concept of the universe, because the structure of the building is a reflection of the concept of the universe. Today, this is the concept of chaos theory. This is a high degree of organization of complex structures. What we call chaos is in nature a high degree of organization of complex structures. Accordingly, architecture, when it strives for a certain degree of architectural complexity, to some extent also personifies this.
Chaos, by definition, has no form. The architect is forced to seek form. Form is what unites anything. There is no form, there is no object. Therefore, a balance is needed between integrity and fragmentation, the predominance of one dominant statement - and other statements, because if the object contains only one statement, it becomes understandable and uninteresting - there are no internal layers of information in it. Undoubtedly, such concepts as a formal idea, structure are important for us, the mutual subordination of parts to this structure is important. But at the same time, the object should not be too simple, clear and unambiguous. We can say that we are striving for some kind of ambiguity."
