The results of the ARCHIWOOD-2018 popular vote will be announced on May 18: on this day, in the building of the Central House of Artists (New Tretyakov Gallery), the award ceremony will take place - already the ninth in a row.
This year, the prize again collected a record number of applications - 180. Moreover, exactly one third (60 objects) were given in the aggregate the nominations "Country House" and "Small Object" - that is, exactly those where we are talking about a wooden house. In the first of them, 10 objects were shortlisted at once (this has never happened before, so this is also a record) - which indicates a serious qualitative growth of projects. The main battle threatens to unfold between the houses of last year's winners of the award - the St. Petersburg bureau HVOYA and the team from Vladivostok "Concrete Jungle". Built at different ends of the country, these two houses are similar: low boxes, dark outside, light inside.
The house of Evgeny Silin and Felix Mashkov is made with high quality, as they say in such cases - "furniture", it can even be mistaken for a locker. At the same time, the facade of this "cabinet" is designed in the monumental style of Soviet palaces: the internal surfaces smoothly rounded, passing to the sides and roof, and a whole "square" appears in front of the building - a huge open terrace. The KhVOI house is more comfortable and rational: under the spectacular roof slope there is a mezzanine with bedrooms, and a through passage divides the house into a residential part and a workshop (which is illuminated by the correct overhead light from the north).
The theme of the walk-through and contrasting color scheme is continued by the ILL house in Latvia (INT2Architecture bureau): only here all these modern techniques are set off by the usual two-slope roofing, and the ends are finished with an old barn board (the back ones are flush, and the front ones are indented). The complex includes a garage building, repeating in miniature all the main solutions, staged as if accidentally and picturesquely, but creating a kind of patio with the main house.
The "barn" aesthetics is also being developed by its main ideologist Alexander Ermolaev: the TAF-condominium in Balashikha was built as a workshop for students and associates, combining public areas and corners for creative privacy. The appearance is, as it were, artless, but in fact it is precisely defined by the layout and is very original. Alexei Rosenberg and Petr Kostelov adjoin this flank, who built a group of eco-houses in Konakovo: again the corporate gray color, a symphony of narrow windows (both vertical and horizontal), unusual roof slopes (in Art Nouveau they were called "hip"), which in the aggregate gives the houses a completely non-Russian image. Inside, everything, as always, is not only carefully thought out, but also fascinating. Konakovo remains the main polygon of modern wooden architecture.
But it also has a competitor in this area - the Yasno-Pole eco-park. They also love modern architecture, as well as horses and cattle. And last year, these two loves united: Vladimir Kuzmin brought a whole “herd” to the Tula expanses. House-bull and two cows - guest houses, firmly standing on numerous legs, also having glazed "muzzles", spotted "skins", porthole windows and a lot of other funny signs.
Much more severe are the houses of the newcomers to the award - the Moscow Buro511. There are four of them, all of them are black, but they also stand on their feet and twist their "muzzles" in different directions. And although they do not have that prowess as in the Kuzmin animals, they are more restrained and elegant, but all together these objects designate a separate direction within the nomination - let's conditionally call it “expressionistic”. The most modest in this row is a summer house near Novosibirsk (Galina Budnikova, Grigory Kuzhelev, Alexey Morzhakov). However, it is not devoid of expression: an unusual image was achieved not only due to the multilevel internal space, but also due to the cladding, the boards of which run parallel not to the ground, but to the main volume. This simple trick creates a vivid image: as if the house is carrying a rocket that is about to launch into the sky.
In the Small Object nomination (as well as in the Urban Environment Design nomination), the main focus of the architects' attention was water. This is a super-quality reconstruction of the Krasnogvardeisky ponds (Wowhaus bureau), and the arrangement of the Yenisei embankment in Divnogorsk (Alexey Myakota): spectacular objects resembling either birds or flowers against the background of epic mountains (and this is another new place on the award map and a new name in the list of our heroes).
Immediately there are two objects on the Volga embankment in Samara: "Volzhsky Stork" (lim_architects) - hammocks made of sheets tied to the bars, and Anton Kochurkin's observation swing: a kind of modernist children's designer, which, moreover, moves. The pavilions "Dir" by Yegor Solovyov also live on the water: they are deceptively familiar, they are much more cunning than they seem. The houses are folded in dir, that is, with large gaps between the logs (in the old days, belfries and other economic structures were chopped down, which did not involve a permanent stay of a person), and the gaps are filled with tinted glass (the reason for this was the strong winds blowing on Drakino Island, what will be the name of this entire grandiose complex). Less pragmatic, but no less effective is the "Raft-Paradox" in Vyksa by Anastasia Izmakova and Bella Filatova: he not only referred to the optical games of Maurits Escher, but also added strangeness to them, sending an already bizarre design to sail. Finally, the most powerful "water" thing in design is the "House with a chandelier" from the St. Petersburg HVOI, a house-raft that plowed the expanses of the "ArchStation" last summer. The wooden box with two beds has no windows, but a flashlight is embedded in the roof, in which a chandelier is fixed. During the day, the interior is illuminated through a flashlight, at night - by a chandelier, while the house itself shines on everyone around. An amazingly magical, warm and witty building, which is hard not to predict victory.
One more thing on the water - "Linden tea" in Sukhanovo: two berths on two opposite shores of the lake; symbolize the dialogue between Ranevskaya and Lopakhin; at the same time, both of them smoothly go under the water: Russia did not need either one or the other.
This is already the nomination “Art Object”, the long list of which was more than ever full of animals: hare, bear, elk, horse (red) … The main supplier of this fauna was Tyumen, who took part in the award for the first time (and sculptor Oleg Epifanov). True, the animals did not make it to the shortlist: excessive illustrativeness prevented. Although it would be dishonest to say that conceptuality became the key to reaching the final. All objects that have been shortlisted are good not only in design, but also in execution - like, for example, the obelisk in Sukhanovo. This is a subtle deconstruction of the familiar stone archetype: it has become light, transparent, ghostly, and this is no coincidence: because it arose here in memory of the former greatness of the estate. It is no coincidence that the point is the only one from where both the main house and the pond are visible (the alley connecting them has long been overgrown). A much more evil object on the same topic (all of them were made within the framework of the Drevolyutsiya festival) is a rocking toilet “Pro [srali] Sukhanovo”. Here it is no longer elegiac sadness, as in the obelisk, but an evil satire on the infantilism of adult uncles and aunts, which, in fact, brought the estate to its present state. And again, the archetype is being rethought, or rather, two at once: a children's rocking chair and a country toilet. But at the same time they are cleverly combined into one paradoxical object, which, moreover, is firmly and well made (as, by the way, is the obelisk).
No less sarcastic is Vlad Kisel's "Zern": the slanting cupola of an Orthodox church, and even stripped down, where instead of a spire there is a shanyrak (a round hole for light in the ceiling of the yurt). The guests of the EXPO exhibition and the object of Totan Kuzembaev's workshop in Astana were accepted as the yurt. But it was "Shoshala" - the traditional closet of nomads, designed, however, on a gigantic scale, but at the same time assembled from Euro pallets. The ideology of Reduce Reuse Recycle (cut, reuse, recycle), which symbolized the pavilion, looked especially sharp on the esplanade of the Kazakh capital, built up with glass skyscrapers and palaces with national ruffles. On the same esplanade, the same illegal wooden comet, flashed "Mobile coworking" from "Megabudka": a wooden house on wooden wheels, whose walls are riddled with triangular loopholes (already referring to the mashrabiya - this is a patterned wooden lattice that covers windows and balconies in the architecture of the ancient East).
Not that very practical, but completely original in its appearance construction, which can be compared only with a toilet in the form of a ball from the artel “Danila, Makar and Brothers”. The Artel, participating in the award for the first time, looked gloomily at the archive of the award and soberly declared: "Well, with our houses, we probably won't get anything here, but we have something for you." And she was not mistaken.
No less paradoxical (albeit solely due to a change in the usual scale) is the "Library of Plants" from MANIPULAZIONE INTERNAZIONALE: before our eyes the library catalog, which is becoming archaism, is spread out 3 meters high and instead of cards filled with living plants: to hint to us that they can archaism. In the same way - in scale - takes the Sandbox from the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg: isn't it time for it to enter the Book of Records?
"Drevolyutsia" regained its leading positions, slightly surrendered last year, reaching the final with 4 objects, to which we can add the "Znak" object made under its own brand (but not in Sukhanovo): a pointer to the real estate exhibition, a skyscraper in the form stacked one on top of the other frames of one-story houses, the penultimate of which also worked as a lamp. Quite a fitting reference to the famous Vitra Haus of Herzog and de Meuron. Among the public buildings it is worth noting Anton Kochurkin's farmer's market near Tula and Nikolai Lyzlov's Boomerang motel; in the "Interior" nomination - Totan Kuzembaev's witty round bedroom and, as always, a tough but beautiful mixture of wood and concrete in Alexei Rosenberg's apartment.
Finally, the "Restoration" nomination features three very different objects, three different subjects. The Pokrovskaya (Sretenskaya) Church in Zaostrovye (Rikasovo) is a dramatic story stretching back from Soviet times, about how an absolutely unique monument, whose cover imitates the zakomars of a stone church, tried to save, but unsuccessfully: the domes fell, broke, the old ploughshare, which you could still save, you couldn't save, and so on. The St. George Chapel in Sume is, on the contrary, almost a fairy tale, and even with a happy ending. A young restorer Olga Zinina discovered an almost ruin in the Shenkurskiy district, gathered volunteers from the Verenitsa foundation, opened a fundraiser on the Initiation platform, and in three years completely sorted out the monument with a rare wedge-shaped end. Which, however, was not officially listed as a monument - which made it possible to raise it with the help of volunteers.
Finally, the Assumption Chapel on Kizhi is the first precedent of how the object, from which the boardwalk was removed in Soviet times (as part of the course of Alexander Opolovnikov to return the temples to their original appearance), had to be sewn up again: the monument could not stand the test of precipitation and began to rot rapidly … Now, of course, it doesn’t look so appetizing at all, but it didn’t have to be touched up, losing the historic frame: it will live under a new case. The decision is controversial, but methodologically extremely important.
Public voting on the Internet starts today and ends on May 16. Then a professional jury will choose its winners. This year it included Nikita Tokarev (director of the MARSH school), Anna Martovitskaya (editor-in-chief of SPEECH magazine), Alexey Bavykin (head of the Alexey Bavykin & Partners workshop), Stanislav Gorshunov (head of the Gorshunova / GORA bureau, Nizhny Novgorod), multiple ARCHIWOOD prize winners Daria Butakhina and Alexander Kudimov (RueTemple bureau), Vitaly Gorelov (project manager of the Moscow representative office of HONKA).
The solemn ceremony of awarding the winners will take place in the building at 10 Krymsky Val (Central House of Artists / New Tretyakov Gallery) on May 18 at 19.00.
The general sponsor and organizer of the award is Rossa Rakenne SPb (HONKA).
