In a short speech at the presentation of the book at the educational center of the Garage Museum, the author called himself an archivist. This book is the publication of an archive that Yuri Avvakumov has been collecting since 1984, when the term “Paper architecture” appeared (see the chapter “Title” below). According to the author, the idea of the book came about ten years ago, the book has the form of an anthology, that is, a collection of something, such as flowers. “I collected all the flowers that I love, and if someone loves others, let them publish their own book,” said Yuri Avvakumov.
This is a huge volum, it feels like four kilograms. A beautiful white paper with a classic design, well-printed. Its cover is laid out on a sheet of Whatman paper, which, apparently, is a monument to an architect of the last century. Boomarch is such an indisputable contribution of Russia to the world culture of the twentieth century that the works of wallets are kept in the Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery, in MOMA in New York, in the Pompidou Center in Paris, in the Victoria and Albert Museum and in the Tate Gallery.
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zooming 1/8 Photo © Fyodor Kandinsky / Courtesy of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
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zooming 2/8 Photo © Fyodor Kandinsky / Courtesy of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
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zooming 3/8 Photo © Fyodor Kandinsky / Courtesy of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
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zooming 4/8 Photo © Fyodor Kandinsky / Courtesy of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
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zooming 5/8 Photo © Fyodor Kandinsky / Courtesy of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
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zooming 6/8 Photo © Fyodor Kandinsky / Courtesy of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
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zooming 7/8 Photo © Fyodor Kandinsky / Courtesy of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
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zooming 8/8 Photo © Fyodor Kandinsky / Courtesy of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
The book contains works by 84 authors: 250 projects in 570 illustrations. Some of the names may seem unexpected to someone in the series of "wallets", for example, there is a representative of the older generation, Andrey Bokov, and the younger, Aleksey Kononenko. Many have participated in the legendary paper contests and exhibitions, our ideas about paper architecture are still being refined. Importantly, the book also contains reference material on paper competitions and exhibitions, as well as an index of names.
The work is preceded by a collection of quotes from renowned researchers and journalists. They give figurative definitions to paper architecture. Jean Louis Cohen: "the new and last generation of Soviet visionaries". Catherine Cook: "a catalyst for the renewal of the architectural profession." Selim Khan-Magomedov: “the formative impulse of young architects”. Grigory Revzin: "a form of escape from the dull Soviet reality into the beautiful worlds of the imagination." Alexander Rappaport: "The result of the destruction of two censors - external and internal." Alexey Tarkhanov: "Professional architectural anecdote parodying the system of education and values." Unexpectedly, the appearance in this company of the writer Max Fry, for whom the work of wallets is "a shining example of the transformation of weakness into strength, Sun Ji would be pleased."
The text of Yuri Avvakumov himself (see excerpt below) is organized as a series of chapters with bright titles that can be read in any order. This is a first-person testimony and summary. At the end of the book there are interviews and articles by Yuri Avvakumov of different years dedicated to the boomarch.
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It is very valuable that a large corpus of projects can now be viewed simultaneously with the texts. Literary texts played an important role in the work of wallets. Once the poet and writer Dmitry Bykov said that he did not understand the material arts of architecture and design, because they did not deal with the soul and because they had no plot. In paper architecture, the connection with the soul was restored, and touching the great myths / plots gave the works depth. The glass chapel of Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin ("A bridge over an abyss in high mountains", 1987), hanging between the abyss below and the abyss above, is a Heidegger's image: a person's place is not just between left and right, but also between heaven and hell. By the way, it is easy to imagine such an attraction somewhere in the southern mountains. In general, the main feeling from the book: conceptual architecture is not outdated. Many things can be built in the city, and will be no worse than the Heatherwick "basket" - an observation deck recently opened in New York. Its prototype of 1987 is found on page 173.
The texts are read like fairy tales or poems. For example, the same Brodsky and Utkin preface to the Forum of a Thousand Truths project the following poetic passage: “We spend years wandering in search of knowledge, and in the end we realize that we have not learned anything. Nothing we really needed. Real information cannot be bought, it is available to those who can watch, listen, think. It is scattered everywhere - in every spot, crack, stone, puddle. One word of friendly conversation gives more information than all computers in the world."
If I ask which of the wallets today has kept in touch with those dreams that were in the 1980s, then I would name Belov, Brodsky, Kuzembaev, Utkin, Filippov and Avvakumov himself. Mikhail Filippov literally embodied his manifesto, formulated in watercolors in 1984, about the transformation of an industrial city into a traditional one. The themes of the anti-Babylonian tower, Atlantis, Heavenly Jerusalem are implemented in the Moscow quarters he built in reality and the Gorki-Gorod in Sochi. Mikhail Belov at the moment has gone into the silent area of stones and marble and is less intricate than his paper "House-exhibit on the territory of a 20th century museum" (by the way, this can also be built in the city), but "Pompeian", "Imperial" houses and the school in Zhukovka had whole theatrical programs, quite paper-like in spirit. Alexander Brodsky did not go far from installations, from art, he always bordered on them: the restaurant "95 degrees" or the rotunda in Nikola-Lenivets - in fact, conceptual architecture, embodied in reality. Ilya Utkin has always remained a dreamer, while looking at the semantic field of buildings: the Atrium restaurant, the White House villa, the multi-storey Noble Nest in Levshinsky and the scenography of the Paris Flame ballet in the Bolshoi. And quite in a paper spirit, the project of ennobling panel brezhnevka with risalits. Totan Kuzembaev in the wooden vanguard: the House-Telescope, the House-Bridge and other buildings - also retained the dreaminess of wallets, although outwardly his paper visions-cobwebs of mirage cities are completely different. His recent project of wooden five-story buildings - a realized utopia - is associated with the boomarch's humanism: he, in Fry's words, turns weakness into strength, a sleeping area with similar houses into a human-friendly environment, because similar houses made of wood are possible. Yuri Avvakumov, engaged in conceptual exhibition design, also maintained a connection with paper architecture. Most of the other authors presented in the book have achieved recognition and realized themselves in large architecture. Their buildings are significant, but their dreams have remained in paper projects. The aforementioned three traditional architects, two ecologically oriented masters of wooden architecture and one exhibition author have preserved the metaphysical corridor that opened in the 1970s and 1980s, and they still draw from there. Paper architecture is a phenomenon of world culture of the same order as Tarkovsky's films or Pärt's music, supranational, universal, arising from the same source. I wish this source did not dry out.
An excerpt from the book by Yuri Avvakumov “Paper architecture. Anthology"
Name
The name of the exhibition was born almost by accident, when Andrei Savin and I were mock-up the exhibition brochure, cut and pasted the typed texts - this was the collage technique that was used to prepare layouts for the printing house, - mock-up at the last moment, when there was no time to agree with our comrades. We can say that the decision to call the exhibition "paper" appeared due to the printing process "glue - scissors". And although there was still an alternative to call the exhibition "easel architecture", the adjective "paper" suited architecture better - paper, as in the famous game, won over stone. Vigdaria Efraimovna Khazanova, a specialist in avant-garde architecture, supported the idea of calling the exhibition a professional curse. And it immediately sat on an unfit for combatant figure as specially sewn … And Selim Omarovich Khan-Magomedov, a famous researcher of the 1920s, tried to dissuade retroactively: “The name is shocking, but you already have good work. You don't need to rock the boat, you know, we are all sick anyway. " He really appreciated the phenomenon of paper architecture, placing it on a par with the Russian architectural avant-garde of the 1920s and the Stalinist neoclassicism of the 1930s.
Museum
In 1985, a festival of youth and students took place in Moscow. An exhibition of young Soviet architects was organized in the Central House of Artists: buildings and projects, among which there were quite a few competitive, "paper" ones. We were invited with this exhibition to Ljubljana, to the leading gallery SKUC, and thus in 1986 the first foreign exhibition of paper architecture took place. Well, "further - everywhere" - exhibitions in the Architectural Association in London, in La Villette in Paris, in the German Museum of Architecture in Frankfurt, in the Architectural Fund in Brussels, in Zurich, a tour of four universities in America … After America in 1992 the exhibition returned to Moscow, I staged the last, as it seemed to me, show at the Moscow Architectural Institute, called “Paper Architecture: Alma Mater” and got ready to disband the exhibition, but then the Capital Savings Bank appeared, which at that moment was actively creating its own collection. Marina Loshak was its curator. Thus, the best, selected piece of paper architecture was privately owned. Ten years later, when the owner of the bank, for well-known political reasons, began to get rid of various assets, the collection, at my suggestion, moved to the Russian Museum, where Alexander Borovsky and his department of the latest trends gladly accepted it.
Fin de siecle
The last exhibition at the Moscow Architectural Institute was not the last in the history of paper architecture, but it was already really history - the history of art. Until the end of the 1980s, the traveling exhibition was supplemented with new works, but later - no longer. The decline of the movement happened for various reasons: and because all good things come to an end; and because in the 1990s, architects in Russia were mostly busy with material survival - there is no time for creative experiments; and because the age of paper as a material for architects is over - the drawing board, paper, tracing paper, ink, pencil, ruling pen, ink liner, and eraser have been replaced by computer mice, monitors and images. So paper architecture turned out to be the place where it is best preserved, that is, not on a construction site, but in a museum. And it is symbolic that its decline occurred at the end of the century and the millennium.
About us
When we entered the architectural institute in the 1970s, we did not think that we would become the last generation of Soviet architects - as you know, in 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. When we learned to depict new architecture with pencil, ink, pen, paints, we had no idea that we would be the last to whom this handicraft skill was transferred - now architecture is depicted using computer programs. When we started participating in competitions for architectural ideas and receiving international awards in the 1980s, we did not expect that these works would end up in the collections of the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery or the Pompidou Center … All this suggests that architects are unimportant visionaries. But the future is in the projects presented here. The future we live in or could live in. The future imagined by the graphic means of the past. A private utopia in total dystopia.
Fairy tales
Interestingly, unlike, say, the architecture of real buildings, the conceptual designs of the 1980s are not very outdated. The main reason may be that, being free from the customer and the specific circumstances of the place, the architect in his "project project" simultaneously invented both the architectural object and the environment in which it appeared as Deus ex machina. The appearance of an architect as a creator is rare these days, remember how in Russia today's customers are pushed around by an architect, even if he is a Pritzker Prize winner. And here, almost every project has a wonderful Christmas mood - here is some depressing, poverty-stricken, miserable, joyless, boring, forgotten settlement, but the appearance of a hero-architect with his creation - everyone freezes in amazement: a crystal rises on the edge of a gloomy city. palace; a merry touring theater floats into the bay; in the monotonous chaos of modern buildings, a gazebo for meditation is discovered; residential courtyards are filled with flat acres of unspoiled nature … Fairy tales never grow old. Dystopia in them is combined with utopia - and everyone believes in a miracle, the viewer-reader of the paper project begins to believe that not everything around is so dark that there is still hope that an architect will come, shine a searchlight and find an emergency exit to a better future.
An excerpt from the book by Yuri Avvakumov “Paper architecture. Anthology"
