The Wowhaus internship is an educational project that allows young architects to immerse themselves in the profession, not routinely, but creatively - honing and sometimes realizing their ideas in collaboration with practicing architects of the bureau, including its leaders Oleg Shapiro and Dmitry Likin. According to the Wowhaus architects, the fourth internship was the most fruitful. In a short period of time, a team of seven girls who came from different parts of the country managed to develop and implement a raft project for the Art-Ovrag festival in Vyksa and take part in many large projects of the bureau.
The interns recall that they began their first assignment less than an hour after they met. In such an intensive mode, I went through the entire course of study: workshops, lectures, brainstorming sessions, sleepless nights, participation in construction and supervision.
Marina Pakhomova
intern of the fourth internship, now a junior architect at Wowhaus:
“I, as they say, jumped on the last carriage, sending the portfolio one hour before the end of the application deadline for training in the internship. Returning to Moscow from Germany, where I completed my master's degree, I dreamed of finding a job that would bring me pleasure. Bureau Wowhaus seemed the most interesting option. But when I applied, I did not expect that the selection would be so tough - seven people per seat. I was lucky and became part of a large team with my own philosophy and my own attitude to the profession. We were also lucky with the team of interns, we were all on the same wavelength, we were able to work together as quickly as possible, come up with and implement interesting projects."
Perhaps due to the special cohesion of the team, the Wowhaus leaders decided to invite all interns to the office staff as junior architects. Below are a few projects that 2017 Wowhaus interns participated in. ***
Raft "Paradox" in Vyksa
The rotation of one element, made up of two flights of stairs, helped to create a dense spatial knot on a small floating patch, having mastered it in its entirety. Although the raft swayed, and its guests often had to bend down, a record number of people could fit and move on it. At the end of the festival, all the rafts, including the "Paradox", were taken on the balance sheet by the city and used to ride on the pond.
Hills for the fireworks festival
The International Fireworks Festival was held in Moscow at the end of August. For him, the interns, who by that time had already received the status of the bureau's architects, under the leadership of Anastasia Izmakova, developed the concepts of seven art objects, personifying the seven hills of the capital - Borovitsky, Tagansky, Strastnoy, Sretensky; Ivanovskaya and Pskov hills, as well as Sparrow Hills. Each was entrusted with one object. The work on the projects began with a deep immersion in history - with a two-hour lecture by Moscow scholar Philip Smirnov, which allowed obtaining the maximum amount of interesting information not only about the hills, but also about Moscow in general. ***
Borovitsky hill
Sofia Zhukova
The installation was presented in the form of a symbolic city square, surrounded by a red wooden fence, in the center of which there is a 12-meter swing. In silhouette they, like the fence, painted red, resembled a high tower. The square, despite the fact that it was laid out on the grass, made visitors think of the Red Square with the Kremlin walls, while the material chosen for the fence - different-sized wooden blocks - served as a reminder of the pine forest once located on this hill. From this arose the name - Borovitsky Hill.
“Red Square is a stable association that I wanted to leave,” explains the author of the project, Sofya Zhukova. - The only thing that is directly associated with her is color. Historically, Red Square has always been the main place for folk festivals, so I chose the idea of national unity as the main one. This is where the image of a swing emerged - a universal unifying element that both adults and children like."
On all days of the festival, swings, on which, according to the old Russian tradition, one could swing only while standing, really enjoyed immense popularity. The interns recall that even the builders who installed the swing in the park, upon completion of the work, could not resist taking a ride on the swing.
Sewing slide. Tagansky Hill
Ekaterina Kovbashina
Shvivaya Gorka is a place for the development of handicrafts and crafts. For centuries, weaving workshops have worked in this part of the city, so Ekaterina Kovbashina, creating her installation, started from the image of an old loom. The loom, which, according to the author's idea, was to be used for its intended purpose during the festival, took the central position in the installation. Something like a tower has grown around it, assembled from its individual elements and details. One could enter the tower and even try to weave a piece of linen.
“I assumed that the structure of the tower would be metal, but in the end it was made of wood,” says Yekaterina Kovbashina. “We also failed to highlight the threads and implement the interactive component. But in general, everything worked out: the object was very popular with children, and adults viewed it from different angles and came up with associations - someone compared it with a butterfly's cocoon, someone with a penguin. For me, this is the first project implemented on such a scale."
Sparrow Hills
Christina Rykova
Kristina Rykova, creating her art object, was inspired by the high-rise of Moscow State University, and took as a basis the star that adorns the spire of the high-rise. Its real scale is impressive - 8 meters in diameter. But it is almost impossible to realize this, since everyone is accustomed to seeing the star only from afar. Christina proposed to lower the star from heaven to earth and came up with a wooden structure, in terms of repeating the contours of the star in its real scale. The hole in the roof of the structure is made in the same shape, but slightly smaller. It was planned to decorate the walls with stars. It was assumed that, entering inside, it would be possible to observe the stars under our feet, and above our heads, and even around ourselves.
“The project has changed a lot during construction,” explained Kristina Rykova. - Initially, I planned to build an object from wood, but due to the high cost of construction, this idea had to be abandoned. The wooden parts were replaced with red fabric ribbons. Nevertheless, the image of the star was easy to read in the modified design.
Ivanovskaya Gorka
Alina Malysheva
Ivanovskaya Gorka is associated with the image of the Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul. But as the basis of her project, Alina Malysheva took the image of not the cathedral itself, but an org and on, the sounds of which have filled its walls since 1837. The installation plays on a vivid artistic image of an organ consisting of many pipes. But here the pipes, wrapped in a white translucent shell with perforations, are arranged quite chaotically and have different scales - from giant ones, which you can enter like a room, to tiny decorative ones. In windy weather with the movement of air through pipes of different diameters, the installation should be enlivened with musical sound.
In addition to the fact that the installation itself is a musical instrument, Alina proposed to additionally place musical instruments invented inside each of the pipes - for example, a xylophone made from scrap materials, a bell or a communication tube. But the idea was not realized and instead a different one arose: an interactive installation that allows you to transform and apply effects to the sound of your own voice. “The visitors really liked this game component,” recalls Alina Malysheva. “People were tapping on the keys, running from one pipe to another like a maze, shouting and stomping, creating a constant echo.”
Sretensky Hill
Alina Rakhmatullina
A large water fountain was once located on Lubyanskaya Square: people came here with barrels and buckets to fetch water from the Mytishchi aqueduct. It was this image that became the basis for the art object of Alina Rakhmatullina. The girl proposed to build a fountain from numerous intertwined water pipes, painted in different bright colors. Water flows cyclically through the pipes, filling the reservoir located at the base of the structure. For water to fill the tank, you must press the button. The interest is that after pressing, water can come from any pipe, it is impossible to guess from which one.
The fountain that was realized during the festival took place in the food court area and inevitably received another functional purpose: Alina Rakhmatullina recalls that people used it to wash their hands before eating. The youngest visitors of the festival liked the game with pressing buttons the most.
Passion Hill
Nina Stepina
Passion Hill and the Tverskaya Street located on it are inextricably linked with traffic. The street has always been the main transport artery of the city, it was along it that the first horse-drawn car, stagecoaches and the first tram passed. But the most unusual story associated with this place is the expansion of the street in the 1930s. Then the buildings began to move, which were transported to the new red line on the rails.
In the installation by Nina Stepina, rails along which the trolleys are moving also appeared. A kind of 25-meter railroad is designed by a light structure of numerous square arches. In perspective, they resemble a portal. It looks especially impressive in the dark, thanks to the backlight. The portal ends with a large screen on which historical films about Tverskaya Street and Moscow are continuously broadcast.
Pskov Hill
Ekaterina Sporykhina
Pskovskaya Gorka - was located in the northeastern part of Zaryadye and little remained of it - a memory in the buildings of the park and the high location of the red-and-white Church of St. George. The rich history of this district of Moscow gave a lot of images for creating an installation: at different times there were shopping and residential quarters, a Jewish ghetto, an English courtyard. Then all the buildings were demolished in order to build the eighth Stalinist skyscraper, then the hill also disappeared - the relief was leveled.
Ekaterina Sporykhina, the architect of the Wowhaus bureau, who replaced one of the interns in this work, in her installation decided to recreate the Rossiya hotel on a 1:10 scale in order to remind of an undoubtedly significant stage in the development of not only Pskov Gorka, but the entire city. A light wooden structure made of thin strips exactly repeats the dimensions and structure of the demolished hotel with a large courtyard and a tower in the middle. The architect tried to preserve even the function of the hotel by organizing something like hotel rooms with hammocks and soft poufs.
Wowhaus recruits interns several times a year, stay tuned.
