The pavilion was built for the Tbilisi Art Fair, which took place in May on the territory of the Ghvinis Ubani Wine Quarter, an art and gastronomic cluster located around the first in the city, but now the former brandy factory No. 1 Sarajishvili, whose pseudo-Romanesque building was built in 1894-1896 by the architect Alexander Ozerov. A place for the pavilion was found at the end of the path leading from the entrance to the territory to the hotel.
The start of the project, as the authors explain, was given by a stack of glass blocks found in one of the warehouses in Tbilisi, with glass of white, bluish and greenish colors. Six rows of glass blocks form an opaque wall, which transmits light both from there and there, with a thickness of about 22 cm. The wall is laid in an even circle, under the floor there are metal structures of the Metall.works company Alexei Khrapov, whom the authors insistently ask to be mentioned as the builder of the installation. Another metal hoop is in the upper part of the wall, from which the wooden structures of the roof cone begin, crowned at the top with another metal hoop around the fireplace chimney. The cone is covered with two layers of roofing material, inside and outside. The height of the wall made of glass blocks is 1.5 m, the height of the roof cone is 6.2 m. The fireplace is located exactly in the center, it is also made of glass blocks and glows from the inside; Above it is a vent and a pipe, all of uneven rusted but not corten metal, it seems. The shatrik, covering the top of the pipe opening from rain, from rust, is completely orange and from a distance it seems like a decorative top of the phial type, a blotch of a decorative carnation crowning the cone of the roof - but meanwhile it has a completely practical purpose. Around the fireplace are plastic beer boxes that serve as stools. At the base of the walls there is a low tape of a concrete foundation, which serves as a leveling base for laying glass blocks; a lot of round holes have been made in the concrete strip, which serve for through ventilation of the pavilion by the method of natural draft from bottom to top, since its high cone provides a fairly intense air flow.
The pavilion fits perfectly into the context of Alexander Brodsky's work, making one even suspect that it deliberately brings together and accentuates his most noticeable and characteristic features and archetypes - as if in search of “Brodsky's archetype”. The walls are made of found secondary material belonging to the circle of Soviet post-war modernism, once obsolete and boring, and now being rediscovered in all the beauty of nuances and shades, which the authors carefully list in their descriptions (may the authors forgive me, once I was with all my heart I hated the walls of glass blocks, even in the 1st humanitarian building of the Faculty of History; maybe in vain). The same walls from the secondary housing, one of the important methods of contemporary art, appealing to ecological preservation, but, more importantly, to nostalgic memories, we see: in the pavilion
Vodka ceremonies from Pirogov, to which the name of the current installation goes back - from smeared window frames; in the Rotunda from Archstoyanie - old doors; in the new villa PO-2 there is also a concrete fence. Roofing material is simply one of Brodsky's favorite materials now: we recall the sloping house at the Venice Biennale or the pavilion of the project "101st kilometer - Further everywhere" for the Pushkin House in London. The fireplace is just one of the archetypes, it is often found in exhibition objects of the 2000s and earlier etchings, Brodsky cannot imagine housing without a hearth, which, we admit, is quite fair. The center of the Rotunda and the concrete slab villas is the hearth. It is exactly in the center, not in the corner, as in the current cottage construction.
Meanwhile, of course, despite the recognizability, probably intentional, of the constituent parts, which seem to be clung to us according to the principle of "repetition-mother-learning", the pavilion, of course, is different. First, Brodsky is usually very context sensitive. In "dacha" Pirogov, the prototype of the name of the current installation, the pavilion looked like a greenhouse or a veranda, a traditional place for libations near Moscow before the nineties. The much larger, but squeaky wooden Rotunda gravitates towards the Palladian manor idea. Houses abroad, in Venice, in London, are a kind of shelter for an emigrant-almost-homeless person, a makeshift; by the way that in Pirogovo, that in these shelters there are no stoves.
In Georgia, the pavilion is solid and even monumental. There is a tree in the structure of the dome, but it is not visible, and being covered with roofing material, it sharply resembles concrete. I must say that here one of Brodsky's favorite themes has completely disappeared - the fragility of temporary structures, ascending, it seems, to the pier-restaurant 95 degrees. Perhaps because in the south, among the mountains, even a shepherd's hearth will most likely be built of stone. In contrast to the Moscow region and foreign "huts", the Georgian pavilion looks like a stone chapel, a kind of temple of strong grape wine (chacha is an analogue of grappa), or in general - a temple of hospitality. This also has a great solidity and even a contrast with the pavilion of Vodka ceremonies and its basin. Here everything is somehow different.
It is quite obvious that the volume is similar to the domes of Georgian temples - both in outline, and in laconic stereometry, and even in the glow of the body - "drum". However, the same silhouette here can be found at the turret on the wall, but there is also another prototype, completely non-Georgian, but functionally close: the so-called "Romanesque cuisine" in the Abbey of Fontainevraud, so similar to our hipped-roofed churches. Here, surprisingly enough, a different, not all-Georgian, but more private context comes into force - the buildings of the cognac factory, which are partly similar to Georgian, but no longer Romanesque churches. Together with the pavilion - the perfect Fontevraud. However, it is difficult to deny the possibility of similar Georgian cuisines, and so on. The main thing is that the hearth is burning, warming, waiting for guests.
