The exhibition is housed in the ruin wing of the Museum of Architecture. The exhibition is inscribed in a square hall with a ring of white fences, and the hall is divided in half by stubs of the wall - two semicircles are obtained. At the moment when I managed to get there, the overhead light in the first semicircle was off, and everyone, including the director of the museum, lamented. The breakdown, I suppose, had already been fixed, but at that moment it turned out quite nicely: the background, context and diploma - the beginning of the movement, found themselves on the darkened side and only sparkled with "relics" of books and films from a number of small niches, and the second half was the apotheosis, with With the intricate design of the Channel for the Milan Triennale, the triangular grid of settlement patterns and the ear spiral, the cities of the future 1970 turned out to be brightly lit and beckoning from the twilight. We could have left it that way, slightly highlighting the tables and tablets for clarity.
Generally speaking, the reliquary effect in this exhibition probably makes the most sense. Photos, which Ilya Lezhava speaks about from the screen in the film shot for the exhibition in 2018: “here we are young”; drafts and sketches read like a book, and vice versa, closed books, suggesting someday find yourself in the library. Letters - 'Dear NER! Hello! From Archigram. Do mail us anything that might be interesting that you are working on. Best wishes, Peter Cook + Dennis Crompton ’(" Dear NER! Hello! From Arkigram. Send us anything you might find interesting about what you are working on. Best wishes, Peter Cook and Dennis Crompton "); next to the 1968 AD magazine with an article by Peter Cook "The NER Group". All these are values brought together, a subject of memories and nostalgia. They are surrounded by a timeline of major events.
In 1960, the NER group defended a diploma in which a new urban planning concept was proposed, developed on the example of the city of Krytovo in the Krasnoyarsk Territory - hence the name of the first stage of NER – Krytovo, which for some reason was not explained at the exhibition. (I must say that this exhibition is not the first in the XXI century, ten years ago in 2008 the VKHUTEMAS gallery showed a smaller exhibition"
NER. Graduation project 1960”and held a conference). The first version of the NER is visually not very bright, it is present in the form of a layout, layouts and a 1960 film, in which the most clear from the features of the settlement element is: production is taken out separately from housing; inside we walk along “spacious courtyards and cozy streets, along wide pedestrian paths of green rays; clubs, exhibitions, sports facilities, scientific laboratories, entertainment bands”. The authors show the architecture of the new element on the example of fragments of the House of Tsentrosoyuz Corbusier; a sea of people - in waves that beat against the stone embankment. The curators contrast the human-centered, culture-rich and natural environment proposed by the NER with the microdistricts that were built around enterprises in the 1960s.
After defending the diploma, the Nerovites were offered to make an exhibition in the White Hall of the Moscow Architectural Institute. “All the leading architects have come … - says Ilya Lezhava in the film. - Gradov came, who scolded us very strongly, said that all this was nonsense … We were told - you can't even imagine that there is a theory of microdistricts. What have you done? Then Osterman got up and said: a little bit of a dog, the guys did a brilliant thing."
Further in chronology: in 1968 the NER group participates in the Milan Triennial at the invitation of the curator Giancarlo de Carlo, along with Arcigram and Arata Isozaki. Here the Riverbed appears - the trunk of the roads that unite the elements for life and work, planted on its "branches"; here bright, intricate and attractive forms appear - both in the graphics of plans and in plasticine models.
In 1970, the group shows in the main pavilion of the world exhibition in Osaka a model of the City of the Future, which, unlike the linear Channel shown at the Triennial, now looks more like a network, and the element of settlement itself folds into a Spiral. The forms, according to the curators, are getting more complicated; and the epigraph of the theme - "The architectural form is replaceable, the idea is not" - indicates development. The layout becomes lightweight, paper-based. Ilya Lezhava talks about the work on the third stage: “… the Deputy Chairman of the State Construction Committee Baranov came to us and began to lead us. But we are not fools. We made the NER that we need and sent it to Japan. And he continued to change, to do something, to put some five-story buildings there … But we have already sent everything."
The circle closes with the book "The Future of the City" in 1977, written by Alexei Gutnov and Ilya Lezhava.
Logically and in its own way, even textbook, the work in a little less than 20 years has been lined up in a neat row. And preceded by context: Festival of Youth 1957; another side of the moon; the endless house of Frederick Kiesler; American exhibition in Sokolniki; Japanese architecture
metabolism; Gagarin's flight; Arcigram; the publication of the Russian translation "Catcher in the Rye"; an exhibition of futuristic projects at NIITAG, where the NER group is already participating; Team 10, the introduction of troops into Czechoslovakia - and so on, the Thaw is woven into global and architectural events, another portrait of the era of dreams. “There was a dark past, there was a glorious revolutionary past, there was practically no present, and there was a bright future. There was no real as a theme,”says Alexander Skokan in the film. The exhibition is monographic, you can come and study the phenomenon.
But we cannot say that everything is immediately clear. The first thing that catches your eye is the beautiful, distinctly futuristic graphics of 1968, like from the sci-fi movie - the graphics of the Rusla for the Triennale. It was painted using the monotype method, a pressed print pattern, in combination with printing ink, this should be a large and rather durable drawing. Here at the exhibition is a copy on tracing paper, but still a large one, "holds" the hall. What do we see? The veins stretching in all directions are cut neatly in many places; these are roads and tunnels. They are joined by figures that most of all resemble insects, ciliates under a microscope or sea inhabitants, such fantastic creatures, and maybe a herbarium. From the second approach, it turns out to consider among them a couple of plans of historical cities planted on branches of roads like the heads of sunflowers. From the third time, we approach the most symmetrical of the drawn beetles and read the explication: in the middle there is a public center, ovals along the contour, which we initially mistook for beetle eggs, are stadiums, its tail is a communal zone, its head is a civic center, and its hind legs are a school. And you can blame me for comparing it to a beetle, but the antennae are clearly drawn over my head. In many other arguments, here and there, there is a comparison of a city with an organism, veins, here architectural bionics bloom with might and main, images of an unusual internal logic of nature.
But above all, these drawings are mesmerizingly bold and beautiful, and it is quite obvious that the authors admire the intrinsic beauty of the resulting graphics, they like to draw like that, in general they like to draw such fantasy, recalling either surrealism or expressionism. No less good are the models, molded from hard sculptural plasticine (with the help of vegetable oil, the curators specify in the comments), dark gray, with inclusions of metal rods. At the recent Venice Biennale, a similar layout among others
showed by Peter Zumthor. Not all models have been restored, some are shown by fragments of photographs taken with love and professionalism, in an oblique light. They were cut with a scalpel, - explains Ilya Lezhava in the film. The models did not reach the Triennial, the group showed their photographs.
What do we see? Attractive complex graphics, fragments of a fantastic, for some reason I want to say lunar landscape. The history of the group's work: diploma, Triennial, Osaka, - international recognition, contacts, articles in foreign journals, involvement in the international context. What does all this look like? - "our everything", paper architecture of the eighties. The same beauty of the drawing, the same involvement in global reflections, the same recognition, only a little differently; only the themes are different, there is no longer the pathos of futurism, there is another, vague, metaphysically profound. Here, in the works of the NER group, the reflections are quite practical.
“We were not in vain engaged in resettlement,” says Ilya Lezhava in the film. “We believed that it was a huge state, 8000 km, and we shouldn't start with houses.” NER was a proposal that was not accepted in a country that was building microdistricts of five-story buildings. The theory of NER, both in the 1960 film and in the sketches-theses of Alexei Gutnov 1968 shown here, begins with a story, with a primitive man and his need for shelter and protection. The city grows, suburbs appear, then factories, then "factories and offices" fill everything, and an inhuman scale of automobile traffic arises. The city cannot grow in breadth, it grows upward, and it should not grow further in breadth and upward, - the authors assert (in the film'2018 at this moment the fields of Moscow microdistricts are in the background), - and they offer a human scale settlement unit.
We look at Gutnov's sketches. The human scale for the home is two human heights and 10 steps in length. The biological scale of the possibility of natural movement is about 5 minutes on foot, the size of an ancient polis and a medieval city. Let's add from ourselves, not everyone and not always, but in this case these amendments do not matter, it is important that Gutnov opposes a modern large city, designed for the scale of high-speed traffic, to a small historical one: “the fact that the city does not grow is its dignity, but not a drawback”, is included in the epigraph of the part devoted to the diploma of the Nerovites.
Then Gutnov introduces the concept of a monostructure - "an organism at the level of a separate structure" and monospace - a "spatial field" that a monostructure creates around itself. They have a human scale and they are designed, serve as the subject of both architecture and urban planning. They are opposed by polyspace - mechanical connection, "non-architectural area of building art." Monostructure is a highly organized system, polystructure is generally (well, that is, simply) a system. "Polyspace is a space not designed by man as a holistic environment." The ideal example of a monostructure is a temple. Cities that have grown to the scale of high-speed traffic are polyspaces that have lost touch with a person; they are "superimposed on a scale of high-speed movement that is alien to humans." And the person is uncomfortable there. All this is the reasoning of 1968, the time of the Triennial.
In a word, NER, a new settlement element, is an example of a monospace, small, designed for a human scale, designed and after a certain limit does not grow - then a new element appears and grows at a distance. In it, a person “is not constrained by the narrow framework of a certain activity” and “contemplates more”, here he “forms and rests” (A. Gutnov), and then goes outside to work in scientific and educational or production centers connected with the NERs by the same channel - a network of roads; or to master a new area of space, that is, to build a network further. Historical centers are strung on this network on a par with NERs, but all the pozdnyatina (sorry) around them is destined for decomposition - polyspace “will fall apart, stick to monospaces”. Let me remind you that in the spirit of the sixties, everything before 1830 was valued as a monument at best, the rest was an indistinct and gloomy industrial zone. Now we look at things differently.
In fact, the network of megalopolises, cities and towns and villages in the structure proposed by the non-Russians turns out to be replaced by a network of residential and working “elements” of a limited scale, located in the country’s space, ideally evenly. Whether the NERs look like the neighborhoods that everyone is so passionate about now - they are similar, the co-authors in the film also talk about this. But they are also dissimilar: neighborhoods are part of a dense building included in a rigid grid, NERs are distributed in space like molecules. One canvas, the other a fishing net. Rather, these are small towns with one center and a ring of a park or square around them. Do they look like the settlements of the Trypillian culture, where houses stand in a circle, and from where people, after resting, go to the outside world to hunt - but they are also similar, right?
Perhaps it is worth emphasizing several features of the NER structures. Firstly, they are invented as a counterbalance to the growth trend of megacities, even as an attempt to decompose them, disassemble them into molecules and combine them anew into a new structure - a kind of chemical dialysis. Now big cities all over the world are growing faster and faster, but in our undeveloped country, growing, in essence, at an insane pace, there is only one city. So the tendency persisted, it was not possible to overcome it in any way.
The removal of production outside the contour of the settlement, one of the key provisions of the NER, on the one hand, happened in a natural way - many industrial zones were taken out of the city, and on the other hand, the plot soon became irrelevant: the methods of cleaning emissions improved, and mixed development, one way or another allowing someone something to work close to home is now appreciated; she is overtaken by a tendency to work from home or in coworking spaces, which does not require moving at all. But during the construction of single-industry towns, with which it is not clear what to do for 30 years now, the separation of housing from production for the sake of full-fledged restoration of a person, and even growth with contemplation, was definitely a humane and revolutionary proposal.
But here's what I want to note - the roads of the Nerovites are beautifully made, these are powerful multi-tiered veins, half-tunnels with highly raised edges, oval cutouts, tubes in which you want to place some kind of Hyperloop. That is, a comfortable scale of housing and walking, commensurate with a person, is combined with a powerful network of roads necessary to get to the university, to production, to the next settlement or historical city. The network is not only molecules, but also molecular bonds. Calling to dismantle newly built concrete interchanges, ay! That way. Here, connections are no less significant than the elements of settlement. In principle, maybe the element of settlement is something in between desurbanism and the idea of a block. They are too dense inside for the Disurbanists, and too sparsely spaced for the quarters.
And yet - each element is designed by an architect according to the idea of the Nerovites. Its essence is that it is designed and thought out. What is significant in our (in Russia) is still a typical time. In this, the ideas of the group are opposite to the winning trend of linking standard projects to sites in institutes, which, as you know, killed our architecture so that it still barely recovered. The global trust in the architect, the leading role reserved for him in Gutnov's theses sounds both as resistance to what is happening, and as a utopia, not without a Masonic shade - the architect here turns out to be akin to the Great Master, it is not without reason that the temple is shown as one of the best examples of monospace. We admit that the architect reached such a value quite rarely, but his position was never worse than in the Soviet 1960s - 1980s.
And, of course, the liveliness of the group's international ties is also striking - and this is against the background of the country's closed nature. The self-criticism of the group members is also striking: Ilya Lezhava in the film says - we knew nothing, but about Corbusier we were told at lectures that it was a jumping flea. These people learned on their own, found goals and ideals themselves, and by 1968, as we see, their work was quite at the level of Arcigram and aroused keen interest in the latter. Our culture develops in bursts: it turns out to be at the level and in the context of the world and European, then suddenly again everything dissolves somewhere for different reasons. So NER is one of such outbursts.
There are many valuable clues to be found at the exhibition if you look closely and read carefully. It must be said that there are quite a lot of people on it, although, to be honest, there are visitors in the sense of “we don't understand anything, let's go from here,” but they seem to be a minority. Ner's puzzles attract, especially since in their interweaving quite real and even practical meanings are encrypted, although I will not say that they are easily realizable, meanings. And here comes into force such a subject as relevance, an inevitable companion of dissertations. It was said more than once, albeit without firm confidence, but in different voices: much that the Nerists talked about in 1960-1977 is now more relevant than ever. Human scale, the importance of public spaces and comfortable walking trails. “The words that were said, but were not heard, then come back to us from somewhere,” Alexander Skokan says in the film’2018, “often from abroad, where these words were brought into some kind of system. They come back to us, but it turns out that we all said this before. We shouted out and forgot, then we said something else, and again we forgot …”.
It turns out like a cycle. But in fact, not quite so. Firstly, the ideas were not forgotten, but were ignored and pushed aside (“Of course, this irritated the official architecture,” says Lezhava in the film). The growth trend of big cities prevailed, as elsewhere. I think that admiring roll calls, you should not deceive yourself: NER is like a block, but not a block; the attention to public spaces and pedestrian zones in the NER is indeed visionary, and the comparison of a settlement unit with a historical city will later pop up many times in various theories, in particular, of new urbanism. This is a pleasant and pleasant part with modern landscaping, but it is not the main one. More important is the attempt to reorganize the entire country, to subordinate it to the regulation of architects and urban planners. Moreover, the attempt was based on the idea of creating an element predisposed in some way to self-development, although tightly tied to regulation. It completely failed, despite the work of the group members at the urban planning institutes (A. Gutnov and Z. Kharitonova at the Research and Development Institute of the General Plan of Moscow. A. Zvezdin is the Deputy Director of the GIPRONII RAS for the future development of computer technologies - see here).
The general plan of Alexei Gutnov in 1989 was not approved by the Moscow government. “The mayor of Moscow Luzhkov said directly to the chief architect of Moscow Vavakin:“We will not allow your laws to guide us. We will run the city collectively and by hand,”says Sergei Telyatnikov in the film. One of the objectives of the General Plan was “to stop the territorial expansion of Moscow. The energy that is bursting with Moscow must, according to Alexei Gutnov, be turned inside it. This is not only a question of economy of territory or convenience of communication, it is also a question of radical improvement of everything that has been done so far”. Did not work out.
Utopia of NER or not? On many grounds, of course, a utopia - first of all, now it is completely impossible to imagine that even in the planned, but poor economy of the USSR it was possible to implement, even with the desire of the "official architecture", such a large-scale reconstruction of life in general - then it was at least to settle communal apartments. It feels like a lot of science fiction of that time, although times are changing, and 1960 is "The Way to Amalthea", 1968 - "The Tale of the Three", and 1977 "A billion years before the end of the world", "… the curves are deaf roundabout paths”. However, let's be fair, the Strugatskys are not mentioned in the exhibition in any way, and Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" - yes. Bradbury's dystopia is right here, see: “Did I tell you that my uncle was arrested again? Yes, for walking. " Published in 1953, in Russian translation in 1956. In a word, NER is a utopia that has absorbed a dystopia, pushing off from a car for living, without ceasing to idolize Corbusier (for this, we admit, you have to be very young people) - and built on this basis its utopia, where people socialize and walk, contemplate, and then still rush along the highways. Utopia is to take the world apart and then put it back together like a mosaic, improving the “good” parts and distancing the “bad” ones. NER for all good and against all bad.
This philanthropic and naive, as before, utopia was projected as a research and proposal for improving life. In principle, the 1960s were precisely the moment of radical restructuring of cities, and if they did not follow the most economical path and not the path of actually refusing the services of architects, something interesting could have happened. Some of the ideas, in particular the search for the future in the past, survived. Some, indeed, came to us anew, from the lips, in particular, of Rem Koolhaas. The history of these ideas is quite entertaining, and it is gratifying that the published book of articles is presented as the first collection, that is, there should be more, and the program around the exhibition is quite extensive. But the most attractive, in this we must agree with the curators, part of the NER for our contemporaries is the idealism and futurism of the group, the confidence in the usefulness of ideas, characteristic of the Thaw and almost completely absent now, which deprives us of a significant share of human happiness.
The exhibition will run until February 10.
From January 5 to February 9, a cycle of lectures “Architectural utopias. XX century on the conceptual design of cities in Russia and abroad.
From January 26 to February 5, a project seminar entitled "New history will be" will be held on the basis of the exhibition. Within the framework of the seminar, young specialists will present their vision of the city of the future.
The educational project "NER: The Story of the Future" is being implemented with the support of the AVC Charity.
