Alexander Rappaport: I would start our conversation with a well-known provocation. You write a lot in your book about the development of cities and how they can / should be built up. In my opinion, the main problem of modern urban planning is different - the city, at least in the form in which we know it, is beginning to disappear. And it will disappear soon. It will be destroyed by computer culture, the Internet. After all, the main mission of the city has always been communication, and today for its implementation there is no need to be physically close to other people. We are increasingly working remotely. For example, I live and work here, at my farm in Latvia, I work very intensively, and in the city, in the same Moscow, I appear at best once a year.
Sergey Choban: Honestly, I cannot agree with you. I, like you, grew up in St. Petersburg, in Leningrad. And I've always adored the city. Our city - and the city in general. In essence, I am a very urban person, and, to be honest, I am convinced that there are really a lot of such people, if not the absolute majority. Look at the statistics: the number of urban residents on the planet is constantly growing, and urban tourism continues to confidently gain momentum. Life in cities is in full swing, and it seems to me that the reason for this is very simple: it is not enough for people that they can communicate with each other using a computer and do a huge amount of work. In my opinion, on the contrary, today the phenomenon of Wright's disappearing city has proven its worthlessness. The model, when people spread to small towns and autonomous territories, did not take root.
Another thing is that the level of dissatisfaction with cities, their modern structure, their architectural content is very high today. In my opinion, it has almost reached a critical point. And that was exactly the reason for me to write a book. Cities are growing and enlarging, but how to make the people inhabiting them like them, so that new buildings evoke positive emotions and a desire to preserve them?
AR: I do not deny that at the moment cities continue to develop. And I am convinced that, by inertia, the cities, of course, will exist for a long time. But my inner feeling is that the metropolis is gradually dissolving, and the person now faces a new colossal problem: what will be instead of the city? How to live on this Earth in general and what is the role of architecture in this so changing world? I am convinced that architecture is a mystical, esoteric art. And it is dying in the tech era.
Midrange: That is, it becomes overly pragmatic?
AR: Yes, it loses its attitude towards transcendental values. For longevity, for life, for a miracle. Architecture has actually turned into design. Do you know why she stopped being art? Because all tall buildings have floors inside them. And not a general interior space. A building that is large and empty inside, it is architecture. And if you break it down into such chicken coops …
Midrange: It just turns into a shell, I agree with you. Of course, architecture to a large extent begins with an absolutely irrational space.
AR: From the interior. The interior, which is the prototype of the world. You know, I just remembered one very strong impression of mine: the building of the Kronstadt Cathedral, which was rebuilt into offices. The huge five-story cathedral was split into these little cells.
Midrange: Oh, I am also incredibly interested in this topic. I had an installation in Berlin 15 years ago dedicated to the projects of the 1920s, when both the gigantic dome of the church and the huge hollow head of Lenin were turned into a multi-storey office building. Indeed, in Soviet reality, there were many such examples. For example, in Leningrad, the Painting and Design Art Works was located in the church. This year, by the way, I returned to this image again - for the play “The Bright Path. 1917 , which director Alexander Molochnikov staged at the Moscow Art Theater on the occasion of the centenary of the October Revolution, came up with the idea of decorating the stage space in the form of a giant arch, which then turns into a vertical communal apartment filled with floors.
AR: This kind of desacralization of architecture is happening everywhere today. Together with this emptiness, the soul also disappears. As an architectural theorist, this connects me with the problem of the living and the dead. Of course, from the point of view of biology, there is nothing living in architecture, but in the metaphysical sense, architecture is certainly alive and dead. And the deadness of architecture, unfortunately, has not yet become the subject of any thoughtful analysis, much less criticism. On a city scale, it seems to me, this is manifested in the fact that now the city has ceased to be the place where great projects are being implemented. There was a time when everything was done in cities. A man moved from an Italian village to Rome and became Leonardo … Today, perhaps, only on a global scale can one become a man commensurate with the current situation.
Midrange: It seems to me that back in the 19th century it was possible. But since then, the density of the community, the coexistence of people has changed by several orders of magnitude. Today, a huge number of people live in a relatively small area. Skyscrapers, subways, gigantic hotels - these are just some of the formats of coexistence that have become our reality today. Generally speaking, today only people with great wealth can afford solitude. Basically, I would say, they are sentenced to exist in a rather dense hostel. It can be assumed that there will be no room for great ideas in this hostel. But at the same time, one must probably admit that a huge number of people will still live, well, let's say, next to each other. That is, in any case, there will always be some continuation of the development of the structure of the city as a place of residence for a large number of people. And, in my opinion, it is unlikely that it will be a habitable landscape.
AR: And it seems to me that it will be just a landscape. Although I pronounce "landscape" and myself do not fully understand what is the meaning of this word. But I intuitively feel that the concept of "landscape" hides some kind of amazing, fantastic logic comparable to spatial wonders. Is that what the landscape actually includes? Relief? Trees? Or the sounds of nature, or the rhythm? In architecture, integrity and completeness are technically quite simple to define. In the landscape, however, there is almost no non-integrity. Whereas the city, on the contrary, has almost completely lost its integrity. Take, for example, the disappearance of streets as such. Even where cities grow, streets disappear.
Midrange: Many cities today are trying to reclaim their streets.
AR: How? Are new streets doing? Where? In neighborhoods? Or in such fashionable nowadays quarter buildings?
Midrange: The very feeling of a closed front in front of the street, it is now, of course, very popular. And the feeling of a public ground floor, exposed in relation to the street. Today, it is the first floor that delimits the street space from the yard space. And in my opinion, this is a very correct tendency. But there is another problem: the generation of people who grew up in panel houses, they do not realize the value of the street. And it is these people who are now quite actively come, including to the real estate market, as buyers. And it turns out that they like to travel to cities with beautiful streets full of life, but they themselves do not want to live in a house where they will look, as they call it, “windows to windows”. And a rather interesting and at the same time tragic duality arises. People like some cities, but they prefer to live in others. And when you design neighborhoods - it would seem that they are absolutely commensurate with a person - they look at the model and ask: "What are you doing for us, a yard-well?" And they don't care that this "well yard" is 60 meters wide.
To bridge this gap in consciousness, in my opinion, time is needed. And nevertheless, the urban development strategy of most European cities today is based precisely on the streets, the fronts of houses adjacent to them, behind which there are already semi-closed or closed quarters. In Berlin, this is practically the only way of building - and not only of the city center, but also of a large number of new quarters. This is undoubtedly the prevailing type of development in Moscow and in St. Petersburg. And when we do projects for the development of urban areas, we always offer street spaces, boulevard spaces, areas that are either limited on all sides, or are somehow connected with large recreational spaces. In my opinion, this is, if not the only, then definitely one of the most effective ways of the harmonious development of the city.
AR: By the way, I would dispute the proportion of 30:70 proposed by you. I think in reality it is 2:98.
Midrange: This is if you think in terms of cathedrals and the most outstanding structures … But there are, after all, in the structure of the city and dominants of a slightly lower rank, but no less noticeable from this. Although I myself always emphasize: 30:70 is the maximum proportion. In a real urban environment, the percentage of background building, according to my observations, is 80-85 percent. And that is why the question of its quality and variety of parts is so important. The high rate of technology development, of course, forces us to look for completely new forms of implementing this idea. But in any case, I really would not want to lose the feel of the tactile urban fabric. It's almost gone now. I would really like to return it.
AR: In my opinion, this is almost as utopian as returning the streets to pedestrians or, say, horse-drawn vehicles. After all, you are not going anywhere in the car, right? Or do you think it is possible?
Midrange: I think it’s difficult to do it now. And not only for urban planning considerations or considerations of the speed of movement, but also due to the fact that the attitude towards animals has radically changed. And such exploitation of horses, it seems to me, will now inevitably meet with very serious resistance. For example, in Berlin, an initiative to abolish tourist sledding has now been crowned with success. In my opinion, the attitude towards animals is an important indicator of the general, so to speak, kindness and morality of society. Therefore, I think there will be no support here. And, of course, the situation is similar with the tactility of the surface: it is impossible to return the manual processing of the facing material. But it is necessary to look for new forms of production. It is clear that we will not be able to revive, on the one hand, the very hard work of bricklayers, but, nevertheless, our eye still needs to see a certain complexity of both surfaces and buildings as a whole. And this need must be met if we want to think about bringing back the detailed surfaces of building facades. Reconfigure production, make its results in the processing of facade surfaces more perfect. Think about the desired result and look for ways to get it. In the end, after all, cars will look different over time - sooner or later they will no longer need human drivers.
AR: At the same time, one of my Novosibirsk colleagues, a very young man, took and went to Tarusa for a month - he hired a bricklayer, wanted to understand what it was like to be able to fold vaults.
Midrange: This is also a method and, by the way, very correct. But it will never be widespread, although it is clear that today almost all of us receive education, which gives us an extremely weak idea of how buildings are constructed. In my opinion, architects have not been building anything for a long time. Moreover, they cannot build. We can only establish this process, we can direct this process somewhere, organize, in principle, understand how it functions, but we are not able to implement this process ourselves from start to finish. This is, of course, a big problem. But it is also associated with a certain level of comfort that we expect from our life, from the life around us. And therefore, from my point of view, neither horse-drawn transport, nor the labor of masons or plasterers of the quality that was in St. Petersburg of the past centuries, unfortunately, can not be imagined today. It is precisely combined with the comfort of everyday life.
AR: And here again the landscape comes to the fore. Paving, for example, is becoming one of the main themes of urban space. Moreover, paving can be not only, so to speak, stones of different textures. This is small plastic, some kind of small ramps, staircases, parapets - and this whole scene, in fact, what is at the level of the feet of passers-by, it becomes the theme of a person's fantastic self-determination.
Midrange: I agree with you that the architectural solution of the street is made up not only of the facades of houses. This is all the more important because we perceive the city not so much from a car window as from a pedestrian's view. And more and more modern cities put pedestrians at the forefront, creating various opportunities for them to learn about the landscape. At the same time, it seems to me very important that there is enough space in the cross section of each street to fit both pedestrians and cars. This balance is necessary - all these projects related to the breeding of vehicles and pedestrians at different levels, as is done, for example, in Hong Kong, give me the most unfavorable feeling. If you, for example, are trying to walk along the embankment in such a city on foot, then you find yourself in a space that is absolutely not intended for humans. That is why, both at the scale of an individual building and at the scale of the street as a whole, I find it so important to return to the structure of the surface. This seems to be a fairly simple goal, but frankly, until it is achieved, it seems to me rather difficult to talk about other goals in modern architecture. Because in the end it is this that serves as a guarantee of satisfaction from modern architecture - not only today, at the moment when it is just built and impresses with its novelty, but also in the future, when this feeling will disappear and should give way to the pleasure of perception of dignified aging details of buildings. …
AR: I must say that your theory is close to me not only from an applied point of view, but also ideologically. Having survived three revolutions - communist, scientific, technical and informational (the most recent) - architecture entered the era of individuality. But not in the sense of creating iconic objects (this is just behind), but in the sense of the importance of each person working with small, private details and meanings. From interesting qualities, curious, individual small details today, an infinite number of solutions can be formed. I call this the "architect's kaleidoscope": an architect should not seek a theory that will explain to him how to build good buildings, but refine, combine and put together what surrounds him. The individuality of a person, the individuality of an architect and his theoretical means, gives him the most important tool that will allow him to generate truly individual solutions, lively and interesting. I see this as a very important principle for the functioning of architecture in the future, when the higher mechanics of individuation will replace the already worn-out category of progress.
