Exhibition about NER - the city of the future at the Museum of Architecture. AV Shchuseva passed, as always happens with significant exhibitions, too quickly. Too fast to examine in every detail the giant graphic sheets to figure out what is what on the layouts, which look fantastic even today, when the viewer, it would seem, has already seen everything. In order to answer at least some of the questions that inexorably arise after the examination - What was NER after all? To what extent is it utopian? How did they come up with this? How, in the end, it was all arranged at every stage - graphics and layouts need a detailed commentary, without it you can't figure it out.
Answers are urgently needed: the exhibition is closing, the members of the NER group are relentlessly leaving us. In the process of preparing the exhibition, we lost the opportunity to ask three NER participants about something important - Stanislav Sadovsky, Valentin Skachkov and Ilya Lezhava, whose invisible presence was almost physically felt in the Ruin by everyone who was familiar with him.
To the delight of the researcher of today and the benefit of the researcher of the future, a book remains. It was published for the exhibition, but it is not a catalog. The book contains texts by architectural historians - Jean-Louis Cohen and Maria Panteleeva, co-curator of the exhibition Alexandra Gutnova and the most important direct participants in the NER, including Alexei Gutnov and Ilya Lezhava, who have gone into a better world.
Of course, this is not the first book about NER. The first - "A New Element of Settlement: On the Way to a New City" - was written by the architects themselves and published back in 1966, when the NER was in its first phase, just as bright as it was not worked out with respect to further development. It was quickly translated into Italian, English and Spanish. NER has become a part of the world history of urban planning thought. The first publication was followed a decade later by the second - in 1977 the book by Lezhava and Gutnov "The Future of the City" was published. In it, the concept of NER matured into a full-fledged urban planning theory.
The edition “NER. City of the Future”is undoubtedly a separate and significant event. The texts collected in it reveal the NER from today, from the time when, on the one hand, the authors already know how it all ended, on the other hand, they can freely view the “big - at a distance”, without the ideological pressure that the NER members themselves were constantly subjected to. and which they managed so successfully to leave outside the perimeter of their creative and intellectual process.
Jean-Louis Cohen's essay "NER - Excerpts from History and Memoirs" is a very personal text, but therefore does not become less scientific. Cohen finally gives an answer to one of the first questions about NER - what did they know, who they relied on, what books lay on their tables, where are their roots? How are they related to their predecessors and contemporaries? Interspersing personal memories of meetings and conversations with NER participants, the first of which took place in 1974, with an analysis of the development of the theory of Western urban planning in the 20th century, Cohen accurately embeds NER in the international context, paying tribute to its uniqueness.
The stage-by-stage history of the NER is set out in the chapter "The New Lexicon of the City" by Maria Panteleeva. The curator of the exhibition pays special attention to topics that are almost not presented in the exposition - the social component of the NER's ideas and the attitude of the group's projects to environmental problems, which was not usually paid attention to in the Soviet Union and which was certainly a topic from the distant future in the 1960s-70s. …
Maria Panteleeva unfolds in detail the entire process of evolution of the NER's ideas. The transformation of theoretical proposals and the parallel work on new visual images throughout the life of the NER have finally been studied in detail and "put on the shelves" for the reader, who had the opportunity to concisely trace all the logic of a vast and time-consuming process.
The essay analyzes in detail the methodological approaches of the NER group - what has not been done before by anyone in any way systematically, and what constitutes the main essence of this phenomenon.
The last three texts in the book belong to the pen of direct participants in the NER - Ilya Lezhava and Alexei Gutnov, who stood at its origins, and Alexander Skokan, who joined the group in the late 1960s. Lezhava explains in detail the idea of a channel - one of the central ones for the NER, which he continued to develop until recent years, and through the idea of a channel - the whole concept of the formation of linear settlement systems, invented by members of the NER group in the late 1960s and applicable, first of all, to countries with vast territories, such as the former USSR or today's Russia.
Written in the mid-1980s and previously unpublished text by Alexei Gutnov, it reads almost like today. It is dedicated to the ecological city - a topic that the NER members raised and comprehended almost the first in the USSR in the late 1950s. And they were the first in the Soviet Union who began to view the city and, more broadly, the world, as a single system, and even the flap of a butterfly's wings can affect all its components. Here one involuntarily recalls the graphic image of the "butterfly" - the plan for the development of NER in 1968, one of the central exhibits of the exhibition. It was this drawing, according to the recollection of the exhibition curator Alexandra Gutnova, that became the starting point for all the work done to bring the NER back to today's world of topical discussions. The return was successful.
