Sergey Skuratov, President of the company "Sergey Skuratov Architects"
Achieving quality requires total dedication from the architect and maximum control over the process. This is like a footnote to the "law of the sandwich" - if something can be built crookedly or with a mistake - most likely it will. Only the will of the architect and his desire to implement his plans with maximum quality makes this anti-law not work on a single construction site. And the stronger the architect's talent, the stronger his conviction in his decisions, his passionate desire to achieve an unattainable quality, the better he can resist the “sandwich” principles.
Sergey Skuratov has an unbending will. Its service to the quality of the author's vision and the created images, the quality of design solutions, the quality of construction is like a "crusade", which, with its earnestness and adherence to principles, at the same time admires and frightens, like any phenomenon accessible to few: those who consciously embarked on this path and go on it, no matter what. Only a few are capable of this, and it is their labor that creates what will go down in history.
It seems that Skuratov has achieved the greatest possible skill in confronting accidents or "regularities" that can harm the image that he created and seeks to realize. And, as is often the case at the pinnacle of mastery, the understanding comes that in addition to an artificially created, rationally comprehended ideal, something imperfect, wrong is possible and even necessary, capable of breathing life into an “ideal creation” and turning a first-class building into a real work of architecture.
In an interview for the "Standard of Quality" project, Sergey Skuratov talks about the main components of high-quality architecture: the design routine, the architect's love and his battle for his ideals.
Video filming and editing: Sergey Kuzmin.
Sergey Skuratov
President of the company "SERGEY SKURATOV ARCHITECTS":
“It is important that the natural overcomes the artificial, that emotion overcomes the mind. Mind without emotion is death. Rational architecture is the architecture of death. Any rational decisions that do not contain emotion, love, which do not contain an element of some external understandable disharmony, are dead things. Disharmony as opposed to harmony, not disharmony in the sense of complete chaos, but some kind of unbalanced harmony that leaves a sense of belonging and is obligatory. This is an imperfect architecture. Imperfect architecture is complemented by man. Perfect architecture - it pushes a person out.
The point is that quality and imperfection are completely different categories. Because quality is a descriptive category, it describes certain properties of an object, architecture, house, which determine a certain level of expectations, a level of needs or the level of some supposed restrictions, properties, and so on. The category of imperfection is an aesthetic category associated with features, composition, and perception. This is not a value category. When we say that we put elements of imperfection into the composition of a building, this means, in my understanding, that we make this building more alive, more human, more perfect in a sense. Because everything that makes a person beautiful is just his elements of imperfection. In this unique composition of perfection and imperfection - this is the meaning of beauty and uniqueness. Therefore, in my understanding, imperfection is a virtue. But they must be used in a very metered manner. This is a very difficult category, and it is very difficult to teach this conscious imperfection within the framework of quality, within the framework of conditionally high-quality architecture.
Take, for example, my project for the Danilovsky Fort. Walls: in a sense of quality, they seem to be imperfect, they are crooked. When we say "curved wall" it means that a straight wall is good and a curved wall is bad. Why are they crooked, why are they pressed in under the influence of the air that goes along the river - this is a sign of their imperfection, softness, vulnerability. But this, on the contrary, gives them absolute individuality. This makes them unique and, in a sense, perfect. It adds some consumer aesthetic qualities to them. And therefore, from the point of view of high-quality architecture, they are all made of very high quality, and from the point of view of some higher philosophical or aesthetic logic, this is imperfection.
There are several factors that contribute to the quality of an architecture. First of all, this is an acquaintance. You and the customer just have to feel some kind of chemistry with each other, not love - mutual understanding. You must develop some kind of common value system. The customer chooses the best architect to solve his problems, and then chooses the best contractor for this project, chooses the best building materials, chooses the best performers, and so on. And together with the contractor, together with the customer, architect, technologists, engineers, they achieve the best design solution. This is how buildings such as Copper House, Art House, maybe a skyscraper on Mosfilmovskaya at some stage … Then the architect must make a very high-quality project. And what is a quality project? First of all, it is its urban planning quality, adequacy to the place, thoroughness of research, volumetric-spatial composition, choice of materials, functional novelty or adequacy. It must be in demand there with its function and necessary, it must be compositionally very competently set: its dimensions, adjacent spaces, greenery, landscaping, roads.
The second point - it is imperative in the early stages to involve designers, engineers, technologists, firefighters - anyone, so that later there will be no surprises when giant cooling towers come out on a luxurious building, which is almost a beautiful sculpture, stick out from all sides. Therefore, we always say: in addition to a good idea, you need a competent project, competent work. And the professionalism of an architect is precisely in organizing the work of engineers and correctly directing it, uniting all specialists into one whole - then a building is obtained.
Another important point is the quality of planning and functional solutions. And here we need to work together. If an architect does not have enough personal experience, he must work together with realtors, with customers, because this is consumer quality. Here the architect sometimes even has to fight with the customer, because the customer writes the technical specification, and lately there are very few competent technical specifications. As a rule, these TK have to be corrected, because within the same area it is necessary to find solutions that, perhaps, due to the area of the rooms, allow creating many more additional areas and spaces that improve the quality of life in this space.
The next step is to get the result. This is a thorough and serious work with material for facades, roofs, interiors, windows, doors and so on. All this must be selected very carefully and taking into account the visual, of course, parameters of a particular material, taking into account its cost and its design features. And then simple things - such as architectural supervision. Author's supervision is the most important part of design and construction. You need to visit the construction site almost every day, you need to constantly look at all the little things. Especially everything related to such complex things as roofing, funnels, gutters, ebb tides, cornices, balconies, hidden systems … You have to watch how all this is done.
Every time we come up with something new, this is due to the fact that we are not interested in doing the same thing. In addition to the situation when a house falls into a specific place and it has its own history, I also have my professional life, also as a history, also as a genius of this place. I have built 40 red houses, and the genius of the place demands that there be a red house here. And I say: I don’t want to make red, I’m tired, I want to make white. I want to make white here simply because I want to see how a white building in the context of reds will be as interesting or as valuable as this or that house.
This is a long story, it only answers the question - how to achieve quality. In this story, there is not a hint of how I enjoy life, how I do my profession, and why I love it the most, that the whole creative process is a pleasure for me. A combination of ambition, love, passion, and in a sense, some kind of narcotic property of architecture, which is experienced by so many architects. The demiurgic ability to do something from emptiness and then look at it all the time, walk, be aware of it is very addictive. And the very act of doing something out of nothing, only the Lord God could afford such things. This is something fantastic, a powerful stimulus. Love, passion. And I really like it, I enjoy all stages of the process, starting with the first trip to the site. This is the anticipation: "as a lover is waiting for the young moment of the first date." After the first meeting with the customer, I start to draw and invent something. The story of the birth of the object is, of course, the most interesting: the embodiment of the idea, the combination of some of your ideas about what you would like to do with what you are given, what areas, what restrictions, what functionality, what difficulties are in place. It's like a mathematician solves some complex formula or tries to solve it, or create this formula. And for me this is the most powerful thing. If you compare with a person, then this is falling in love that paralyzes you, deprives you of the ability to think, realize, experience, analyze something. You become absolutely guided, all this beckons you. You can work day and night. It's about love. And the battle consists in the fact that I am ready to bite the throat of the one who will interfere with me. Everything has been achieved with such love, with such hard work and endlessly presented and told many times … And suddenly there appear some people, builders who do not know all this, who have a different task. And they don't want to know. But I am struggling with such builders.
In a sense, my situation is unique, more precisely, the unique situation in which we, a few people, about a dozen, found ourselves in the late nineties - early two thousand: in a situation of the most favorable attitude towards architects. Everything we did, everything was built, sold for a lot of money. We got the opportunity to learn how to do well. And then, when the situation began to descend, this experience cannot be taken away from us. We got a taste of the thrill of architecture. We have tasted it, we will not sell it now, we will not give it away, it is impossible to take it away. Why am I, for example, calmly fighting with very influential, very famous customers, developers and so on, why am I not afraid? Because I am ready to give anything, just not what is in my heart, in my head, not some of my important life principles. Reputation, my attitude to architecture is my business, I will not let him be torn apart and scolded."
