Archi.ru:
First of all, I would like to ask you to describe in simple words what the city of NER and the River Channel should have looked like. I would like to imagine the environment. What is the difference between NER and a standard microdistrict, where there was also a community center (cinema) in the middle, schools and clinics, kindergartens and sports grounds were located in the segments. There was only a high-speed highway, tucked into a tunnel, passing through the center of the microdistrict. Now the whole world consists of streams of information, financial, cultural streams, and global cities just close these streams on themselves. Can we conclude from this that the key element of NER is roads and high-speed travel? What can we take from the ideas of Gutnov-Lezhava today for practical implementation?
Sergey Sitar: In the interview format, it is not possible to present the NER concept in any way completely, therefore I wholeheartedly recommend readers not to be satisfied with secondary information, but to turn directly to the book “NER. On the way to a new city”(Stroyizdat, 1966), as well as to her Italian and American editions, where many points are presented, although more compact, but often more prominent and sharper. In addition, Alexandra Gutnova and Maria Panteleeva, with the support of the AVC Foundation, released (for the opening of the exhibition they prepared at the Museum of Architecture) a large and informative book "NER: the city of the future", which presents a versatile analytics as a historical context in which NER's ideas arose and developed. and these ideas themselves - already from within the current historical stage.
Here I want to focus only on the most key and innovative aspects of the settlement and resettlement model proposed by the NER group. These are its principles that are most important for the project-theoretical seminar "A New History Will Be", prepared by the same curatorial team and myself in cooperation with the Museum of Architecture, the MARCH School and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation (with the participation of HSE). The seminar will be held from January 26 to February 5 at the Museum site. Taking this opportunity, I invite everyone to join it as either free listeners or participants in the work of design studios.
1. The combination of the universal and the concrete is the path to the revival of Architecture as Art. The starting point for the development of the NER concept was the conviction of the group members of the need to establish a reasonable optimal settlement size and thus radically change the historically established urbanization regime, i.e. to get away once and for all from the spontaneously expansive, all-consuming spreading of buildings over the surface of the Earth. This problem has not yet been resolved and is becoming more and more egregious. An eloquent example is the recent massive "breakthrough" of the territory of Moscow outside the Moscow Ring Road, which is frankly forced, and not purposefully meaningful. What is even more remarkable, the group members were prompted to approve the principle of a compact "modular" settlement not only by global environmental considerations, but also - perhaps even more so - by the demands of the socio-ethical and aesthetic plan, the desire to save "architecture as art" from substitution. murder by her technocratic management, the conveyor approach to the creation of habitable space. Aleksey Gutnov saw a direct and logical connection between the decline in the architectural quality of the environment and the uncontrolled, quasi-natural expansion of cities. The only effective way to resist the decline of architecture, from his point of view, is the concentration of everyday attention not only of architects, but also of residents on a compact, carefully articulated territory, a concentration that restores the living body-aesthetic connection of a person with a specific place. The articulated integral form of settlement is also the NER's response to the ever-deepening crisis of the territorial community, to the increasingly hopeless alienation of residents of large cities from each other. This form creates the basis for the formation of a sense of belonging not only to a place, but also to one's own polis neighborhood, for the local community to realize itself as a “multiple-unified” political and historical subject. NER, thus, is a "theorem" of actions, oriented simultaneously in two "opposite" directions-dimensions. Firstly, to develop an updated general definition of the city, a new universally concrete meaning of its existence, which is replacing "the city as the center of feudal-imperial power" and "the city as a place of accumulation of industry and trade" (both of these historical definitions of the meaning of the city have long been exhausted). Secondly - to return - to give the built environment of a person the quality and status of a work of art, which presupposes an immeasurably higher level of thoughtfulness and feeling of all the smallest details, angles, scales of perception, dynamic sequences of everyday experience, etc. The 1966 book is devoted to the disclosure of this artistic side of the NER in the section "Single space of the NER", which is about a quarter of its volume.
2. The city of free creative relations between free people.
No less - and perhaps more - significant is the aspect of the NER concept, which answers the question about the meaning of the city's existence. The current dominant regime of the consumer society reduces a person to the level of a plant (an object of biopolitical cultivation) or a user-character of a computer game, according to the rules of which she or he can only try to get more “bonuses” than from others. The capitalist order has always sought to convince the average citizen that the degree of his / her self-realization objectively corresponds to the size of his / her bank account and the price of accumulated property. This, of course, is a manipulative phantom, whose charms a relatively small category of people succumb to, and their number is decreasing. In modern Russia, this problem is combined with the remnants of a very long past - for example, the fact that the central government lives in the capital's fortress citadel like medieval feudal lords. All these things seemed to the NER participants already practically outdated, and therefore they managed to offer a much more adequate and promising formula for the urban raison d'etre, based on the understanding of the inevitability of the historical transition to the information economy and the "knowledge society" (note in parentheses that the NER concept was formed in the late 50s and early 60s, and these terms themselves came into everyday use only decades later). According to the NER, the main meaning of the city's existence is education, self-improvement, free communication and disinterested creative interaction between people. In this respect, NER can be called a distant echo of one of the most inspiring literary images of the Renaissance - the Abbey of Thelem by François Rabelais. The approximate total population of the NER itself - in the initial version 100 thousand people (60 thousand adults) - was chosen on the basis of a sociological calculation, according to which it is with such a number in the NER that mini-communities of enthusiasts should spontaneously arise, whose individual creative interests constitute a full range of culturally developed directions of creative activity (10 main directions, each of which is divided into 10 more sub-directions). At the same time, the structure of the NER is similar to a condenser of creative and transforming energy: closer to the outer perimeter, in residential areas, children play and gain aesthetic impressions in the bosom of nature; their transition from adjoining children's institutions to a deeply thought-out complex of a boarding school helps them to simultaneously form independent creative interests (education is aimed at sensitively revealing the individual abilities and inclinations of each) and the skills of working together with others; Finally, in the Communication Center, where they are "relocated" by already formed individuals, there is a maximally free regime of mutually enriching cooperation between representatives of all creative directions - the synergy of all types of arts and crafts, applied design, natural, technical and humanitarian sciences, sports, etc. … For its spontaneous generation, a full range of necessary spaces has been developed - from huge auditoriums and lecture halls, to information storage libraries, workshops and secluded classrooms. Sociologist Georgy Dumenton, who has been a member of the NER group since its birth, was most interested in the topic of the productivity of communication and a person's free search for his true creative vocation. So the really key component of the NER is precisely the “infrastructure” of creative development of the individual and creative exchange, which was inscribed in it from the very beginning - and by no means the “channel of resettlement”, about which almost nothing is reported in the 1966 book. The "channels" were added later to make the concept truly spatially universal, to ensure the links of the NERs with each other, as well as with the zones of industrial and agricultural production, which were thought to be gradually transitioning to full automation. With the addition of a network of “channels”, it became possible to include independent large university campuses in the general scheme, which, for principled reasons, “docked” with the NERs, and not with production centers (see NER, 1966, pp. 36-37).
3. Genre peculiarity and significance of NER as an architectural-theoretical statement - “model-ideal”.
Another feature of the NER concept, which is extremely relevant from the point of view of the current state of architectural and urban planning practice, is its genre and format itself, which combines graphics, three-dimensional models and detailed textual calculations. The theory in the conventional view is primarily associated with texts - at best, accompanied by some tables and conditional graphs. But architectural theory, in my deeply grounded conviction, should be understood primarily as conceptual or "model" projects - for example, the exemplary designs of temples cited by Vitruvius and his specific optimized version of the order canon - "Eustil", visionary projects of Filarete and Palladio, not tied to any specific order, the monumental "fantasies" of Ledoux and Bull, abstract compositional studies by Durand, etc. In parallel with NER, other projects of the same “theoretical” plan were created in the West and in Japan - “New Babylon” Constant, the work of metabolists, Archigram, Archizoom and Superstudio groups, projects Exodus and “City of the Captive Globe” Koolhaas-OMA. All these are just theoretical, generalized-abstract definitions of architecture and the city, which are created in the language of spatial projections, and therefore they cannot be exhaustively translated into textual form. At the same time, the latest projects of the listed group are already moving from the category of constructive-critical statements (in the language of architecture) to the genre of purely ironic or rhetorical. They clearly manifest what the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk in 1983 called "cynical reason" - namely, on the one hand, the complete alienation of the authors from reality "as it is", and on the other hand, their hopelessly ironic, nihilistic attitude to their own ideas about what could come to replace this reality. From this point of view, the listed Western projects are close to the movement of “paper architecture” that emerged in the dying years of the USSR, which was no longer so much theoretical as “ideosyncratic”. And after this period - somewhere from the beginning of the 90s - conceptual design on the scale of cities and continents ceases altogether: the neoliberal agenda that has triumphed in the economy, politics and culture makes all attempts to generalize modeling and comprehension of reality to be recognized as useless at best, and at worst - dangerous, totalitarian, etc. Cities are deprived even of the formal right to claim the historical meaningfulness of their existence, which goes beyond the framework of purely economic and economic profitability ("The city is no more. We can leave the hall" - Koolhaas, 1994). In this sense, the NER concept is, perhaps, the last attempt in the foreseeable history of a realistic spatial articulation of what a city should be, born of the energy of inalienable labor and free creative self-determination of people.
Strelka KB, which has developed quite humanistic principles of quarters, tested in the Dom.rf competition, is it continuing or overtaking the NER ideas? How does it compare with NER? How do the ideas of the NER relate to the New Urbanism (NER and the urban village of Krie and Duany-Zyberk)? Until 2025, a housing program has been adopted in Russia, according to which they plan to build 100 million m2 in year. This means, again, the panel - despite the fact that, for example, in West Germany, with a population of 80 million people, there are no panel houses. How will the Russian landscape change in 20 years, what model awaits us (sprawl of cities, agglomerations, revival of small towns, American suburbia, or something else)?
Both the New Urbanism that emerged as a movement in the early 1990s, and the premodernist scheme of quarterly development that has recently become popular - all these are tendencies, firstly, conservative-passistic, and secondly, compromise-opportunistic. It can be said that NER fully anticipated the requirements of the New Urbanism to humanize the environment, while formulating these requirements more radically and consistently - starting with the fundamental requirement to remove private vehicles from the territory of the settlement. In other words, New Urbanism may well be viewed as a faint echo of a more decisive conceptual turn to the problem of the environmental qualities of a settlement, carried out by the NER. At the same time, in essence, New Urbanism remains in line with the "chronic" American trend towards the spread of suburbs built up with single-family houses, which, due to their low density, are rapidly absorbing the open landscape. NER offers a landscape-saving, high-density alternative with improved environmental quality. As for the quarterly development scheme - not invented, of course, by Strelka - it does not try to exclude private vehicles at all, but only gives hope to somewhat ease the problem of traffic jams and high-speed traffic due to a denser, capillary street network. But because of this, the inner courtyard space is inevitably reduced, which, with the closed perimeter of the quarter, becomes practically unsuitable for recreation and free time for children - there is simply not enough space for them there. In this sense, sparse low-rise mega-blocks with an intermittent perimeter, abundant internal landscaping and limited-use driveways are much more efficient - but, alas, from the point of view of the economic schemes of today's development, they are categorically unprofitable.
In general, both of these concepts - New Urbanism and Quarterly - are simply incomparable with NER, since they, like ordinary planning concepts for specific territories, do not raise the question of the general meaning of the city's existence and do not offer a historically new type of settlement. Of course, one can be a supporter of rather smooth evolutionary changes, the doctrine of "small deeds", flexible adaptations, etc. But such activity is meaningless without defining the general direction in which it is necessary to "gradually" move, ie. without extremely remote, long-term goal-setting. It's like going sailing without choosing a destination. It is in the role of such distant "beacons" or "benchmarks" that concepts such as NER act, and that is why I prefer to use the predicate "theory" rather than "utopia" in relation to them.
The question of the "panel" deserves, of course, a separate detailed discussion. A somewhat hasty confusion of concepts is felt in it: the term defining a constructive system is used as a term for a standard typology and a standard repertoire of internal layouts. Our massive panel building is often genetically erected to the Marseilles Corbusier unit, although the latter, in its non-standard layout, was much closer to the House of the People's Commissariat for Finance in Ginzburg, and it used a monolith rather than a panel as a constructive system. And in their - very preliminary - developments on the architecture of the "primary residential block" NER were guided precisely by Ginzburg and Corbusier. Criticism of the monotony and “non-architecture” of industrial development is one of the cross-cutting motives of the 1966 book about the NER. At the same time, it presents very interesting reflections on the possibility of combining standard structural elements and engineering with individual architectural solutions for each building, which are decomposed into three interconnected "registers" - "plastic plan", "plastic cut" and "plastic facade". Much attention is paid to the theme of decor - it is proposed to return to it, but precisely in the zone of close visual contact, i.e. along street level and other travel routes.
In short, the following can be said about the prospects of the Russian landscape at the current historical stage. Recently - at the suggestion of Alexei Kudrin, although the idea has matured and been discussed for at least two decades - it seems that a strategic course has been adopted towards the formation of energetic agglomerations around million-plus cities. Or agglomerations that unite millionaires in more coherent clusters. Like the decision to “flow out” of Moscow beyond the Moscow Ring Road, this course is forced: we are invited to honestly admit the lack of forces and resources in the country necessary to make the entire existing network of large settlements “competitive” in comparison with cities in developed countries. Therefore, one has to rely only on a small number of the most successful and popular. The logic behind the choice of this course, with all its relative advantages, is clearly inertial: it is the logic of global economic competition, the attitude to cities as commercial enterprises, as well as the logic of geopolitical competition for people who, in general, are regarded as the most valuable resource. to generate GDP. On the one hand, movement in this direction will inevitably entail a further increase in the number of dying and dying cities (a problem that I had a deep professional immersion into in the 2000s), on the other hand, these growing agglomerations promise us an environment of increasingly incoherent, chaos, architectural lack of elaboration and meaninglessness, with an increasingly alienating effect on a person - in short, it will be a continuation of the global spread of the “generic city” themed by Koolhaas. It is obvious to almost everyone that such a prospect calls into question the very existence in the future of the profession of an architect (and even more so as an architect-urban planner). Their former area of expertise is being increasingly handed over to statistical machine algorithms in an increasingly rigid and irreversible way - a lecture on this in our seminar will be delivered by the remarkable German composer and architectural documentary filmmaker Christian von Borris. On the other hand, it is against the background of this depressing mechanistic tendency that NER - with its imperative to revive "architecture as art" - looks like an extremely relevant and topical statement.
Please tell us about the objectives of the workshop and the concepts of the invited teams. Siberian coliving seemed provocative: why was it called a concentration camp? Labazov not understandable enough, Levchuk curious, but completely futuristic?
In the most general approximation, the seminar is devoted to the topic of visionary models of coexistence. The specificity of the approach to it lies in the fact that the most complete way of representing such models in this case is recognized not only and not so much a verbal description, but a spatial - more precisely, spatio-temporal - form that requires the use of communication tools traditional for architecture, i.e. drawings, layouts, plans, storyboards, etc. Form is understood here as a unity in a multitude of inherent moments - or (in ancient Aristotelian terminology) as the essence of the existence of this or that thing. In practical terms, this means that the form is seen as that which coordinates with each other many separate aesthetic and ethical experiences, everyday actions, sequences of experience, relationships and acts of communication.
The seminar has two main objectives. First, to begin to restore the long and globally lost connection between architecture and the emancipatory political agenda. Simply put, to return to thinking about architecture political issues and the question of the level of freedom - topics from which professionals have systematically distanced themselves for almost half a century. The second goal is to pull architecture and project reflection on the urban scale into the open space of humanitarian discussion. To this end, the seminar program includes detailed public discussions with a fundamentally interdisciplinary composition of experts and audiences.
In addition to invited lecturers and experts, independent and critical architectural and theoretical groups joined the project, which within themselves - in the order of self-organization - have been developing ideas for a long time that are consonant with the NER concept in terms of genre and scale of generalization.
The first group is actually a whole constellation of groups - it was formed on the basis of the AB Bureau, then two other architectural groups joined it, as well as the geographer and big data specialist Alexei Novikov, philosopher Pyotr Safronov and a number of other interesting people. This team develops a design hypothesis based on the classification of the types of residents of the future by the nature of their relationship to the territory and movement, as well as on the analysis of the historical evolution of the concept of "comfort". The key point here is the method - within the framework of the seminar it is planned to model the social composition of the predicted future "in the body" of the group itself - with the involvement of volunteers from outside - and then go to the spatio-temporal projection of the life of this model composition.
The core of another initiative group from Moscow was the editorial board of the architectural zine Zapiski Tafuri - Yuri and Katerina Plokhovs, Anton Struzhkin, and others. political orientation. The specificity and originality of their approach to modeling the future are associated with the fact that, in conjunction with the seminar, they are developing an architectural analogue of the co-residential philosophy of Yoel Regev, one of the recent branches of the so-called. "Speculative realism" - in which the categories of time and causality are interpreted in a completely new way. Accordingly, design in their case is no longer viewed as a tool for solving previously set practical problems, but as a living diagram of the cognitive relationship between a person and reality. In other words, the forecast of the future turns here into the modeling of a fundamentally different - liberated - type of architectural and artistic thinking.
The ANO team - "Architecture after ZERO OBJECT" - includes the editor-in-chief of the St. Petersburg magazine "Project Baltia" Vladimir Frolov and architect Alexei Levchuk. Since the 2000s, this duo has been consistently developing the idea of a total transformation of the built environment as a transitional phase to a new state of the world. Their hypothesis-concept thematized the most important mission of the city, which belonged to it since the most archaic times, namely the ability to serve as a place of transgression, an articulated border and at the same time a "portal" between fundamentally different states of consciousness and the world (for example, outside and inside church state). This team is most directly addressed to the actively discussed problem of post- or transhumanism in recent years - i.e. the approaching disappearance of a person in our usual understanding or his transition to a radically different stage of his historical development.
Using the metaphors of "communal apartments" and "conscamps", Sibgroup is an association that includes Vyacheslav Mizin, a famous action artist, in the past - the leader of Novosibirsk paper architects, in addition, a historian, urbanist and editor-in-chief of Project Siberia magazine Alexander Lozhkin and, and finally, members of the young Siberian architectural and artistic group "At the bottom". I will not say that I am familiar with their initial project hypothesis in detail, but - judging by their “pre-manifesto” - they, unlike the NER, focus their attention not on the liberation, but, on the contrary, on the forced influence of the city on a person - in the spirit the concept of disciplinary machines by Michel Foucault. This plot twist is innovative, at least in the sense that it deconstructs for centuries the prevailing notion of sociality and predisposition to culture formation as innate or "natural" properties of a person.
Finally, for the fifth group - it includes Andrei Ilyin, Alevtina Borodulina, Gleb Sobolev, Vadim Makarov and Tatyana Prokopets - the starting problem was the well-known paradox of the ecological movement: in order to reduce his destructive impact on nature, a person needs to separate it from himself, but such a separation turns around an ever deeper polarization of nature and civilization, i.e. escalating their conflict. As the only possible alternative to such a scenario, the group considers the process of "dispersion" - ie. dispersion of large human communities, such as cities, and the reintegration of man as a species into local bioscenoses, life cycles of elements of the natural landscape, etc. Such models of human relations with the territory existed and operated in certain geographic zones until recently, and even persist in some places to this day, but the Earth, it seems, is not able to reintegrate the entire expanded human population under the same conditions. Within the framework of the seminar, a group with joined participants will seek a way out of this impasse.
As can be seen from the above, each of the participating teams offers - at least in the first approximation - some kind of generalized abstract definition of what a city or (more broadly) a human community is in its dialectical connection with its environment. Their initial hypotheses will go through a stage of open expert discussion "at the entrance", and, taking into account this criticism, will be turned into programs of five design studios. At the second stage of the seminar, the teams will expand at the expense of students of different directions and joined audience representatives in order to modify / rework / develop their preliminary hypotheses to the state of exhibition exhibits and articulated conceptual projects-manifestos in 6 studio days. These projects will form an additional postscript section of the NER: The Story of the Future exhibition and will be the subject of extensive discussion during the final session on February 5. I really hope that we will have enough free listeners and active participants, and that the final projects will serve, in turn, as material and stimulus for the next cycles of research, conceptual design, professional and interdisciplinary discussions.
