We have already talked about the exhibitions of the Architecture of St. Petersburg 2019 Biennale. One of them, the Manifest exhibition, included in the parallel program, was organized by two bureaus Futura architects and Yusupov architects and opened in the creative space Golitsyn Loft. It resembles a personal one: graphics, large layouts, installations, projections. But at the same time, its name refers to the well-known "pain" of our time: in comparison with the rebellious 1920s, manifestos have become regrettably few. So architects, trying to fill this gap, added ideas and tried to turn the exhibition into a framing of programmatic text. Yu. T.
We publish the text of the manifest:
“The theme of this year's biennale is the interaction of architecture and society. Today there is a huge problem in that society and architecture are on different planes and their interests practically do not intersect. This is primarily because architecture is perceived as a business and is judged only in terms of cost and efficiency.
We forget that architecture is an art that influences people throughout their lives. If we want to draw public attention to architecture, we need to add one more criterion for assessment, which would concern not only the developer and architect, but also each resident of the city personally. This criterion is emotions.
People will forget what we said and what we did, but people will never forget the emotions they experienced themselves!
The paradox is that in any project, the emotional part of it is thought only at the very beginning, and recently, due to economic difficulties, this period of time has become less and less every year, and today it takes no more than a month or two. After this stage, for several years, architects, builders and developers solve a whole range of complex problems, but the emotional part of the project remains unchanged.
After the construction of the buildings, they influence people for fifty, one hundred years or more, until they are demolished. The emotional part comes to the fore. It turns out that the probability of error is very high, the time for making a decision is getting smaller, and decisions, as a rule, are made very similar. You and I receive a very large number of objects that are similar to each other, certainly effective and economically justified, but with very little public interest.
What we see on the Internet, at exhibitions, is only 2-3% of what is being built. Our main goal is to make complex, inspiring, emotional architecture publicly available!"
authors of the manifesto Futura architects and Yusupov architects
