The ProMoArchDiz competition ("Projects of Young Architects and Designers") was held this year for the first time by Project Baltia magazine with the support of the French Institute in St. Petersburg. Architects from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan and Tel Aviv participated in it with their portfolios. The French AJAP (Albums des jeunes architectes et paisagistes) became the model and model for the Russian competition. This is also a portfolio competition, an award given to 20 young architects, established by the French Ministry of Culture to promote professionals under 35. The competition had several stages, see the details here, the St. Petersburg events is one of them.
In the discussion at Sevkabel, teachers Sergey Malakhov and Evgenia Repina spoke on the part of the "fathers", who criticized the young for the lack of critical thinking and conformism. On the part of the "children" were the laureates of the "ProMoArchDiz" competition. To summarize, the problems of young architects are always about the same: the difficulty of integrating into adulthood, obtaining serious projects, implementing existing ones, the lack of social lifts, when even after winning the competition nothing happens in their careers. The latter mostly concerns Russia. In France, on the other hand, a competition is a real way to make yourself known and get an order, as the AJAP competition demonstrates. As for the statements of young architects about their credo, they are not very informative. Many of them are inclined towards contextuality and reconstructivism in the spirit of modern tolerance. But their ideas are not limited to this. It's much more interesting to look at the projects themselves.
The projects of ten laureates of the ProMoArchDiz competition, presented in the atmospheric brick loft of Sevkabel, give cause for thought. I will allow myself colorful notes of an architectural critic. In general, the impressions from what he saw and heard are good. Peter is a space of meaning. There is no sense of the fashionable environment here, they do what they want, they do not imitate anyone, the projects of young architects reminded me of wallets, since many of them are multi-layered fantasies, and not real cases, although there are such cases too, and the layering is preserved in them. As the unforgettable professor of art history Mikhail Allenov said, "It's all nice, even with thoughts."
By the way, the names of the young bureaus are witty and self-explanatory. KATARSIS Architects - how do you like it? Or PapaUrban? Or the creative association "Ah! Oh! Uh!", Where, according to the authors, Ah! - the beauty of the world, Oh! - the state of modern architecture, Wow! - perception of the future.
KATARSIS won first place. The very fact that young architects know this word is encouraging. This means that someone else remembers the composition, climax, beauty, which was confirmed in a conversation with me by the partner of the bureau, Peter Sovetnikov. KATARSIS created a pavilion-installation for the festival in Gatchina Park: a poetic starry sky above a red theater curtain and a figure above a pond mirror - this is almost the Silver Age, a reminiscence of Benois. Or a movie theater on the beach in the form of a giant transparent white hat with a train - under the starry sky, of course. And the film is watched not only by those lying on the sand, but also by the stars from above. In general, the word "poetry" was recalled more than once. The rotating triumphal arch made of plywood, with all its irony, remembers the triumph (the "Mobile Obelisk" competition for Sevkabel "), the form contains the memory of its uses. KATARSIS also has a proposal for a competition of St. Petersburg facades with a comprehension - in a somewhat dry manner - of Soviet Leningrad Art Deco with almost Winkelmann's definitions of "compositional clarity and calm dignity" (Winckelmann had "noble simplicity and calm grandeur").
Nastasya Ivanova took second place with a nostalgic project that marked with wooden wings the remains of the huts of an abandoned village from last year's festival
Drevolution at Chukhloma.
Over the disappeared, half-open hut, wooden wings appear, an inversion of the notorious pitched roof, as if the soul of the house is preparing to fly.
(Project name: "House of Poros", team APIL PILA, authors Ksenia Dudina, Nastasya Ivanova, Dmitry Mukhin - St. Petersburg; Yan Posadsky, Voronezh).
Another project of the same team from the same festival, shown by Nastasya, is called "Over": a house in the forest at the top of a tree, where happiness lives. To get there, you need to swing on a swing, push off and fly.
The theme of nature is the main one in the project of the Creative Association "Cities". The Barilla pavilion of the famous Italian brand is surrounded by a wheat field, which becomes a tuning fork and part of the architectural concept. The plot of the demonstration pavilion is the preparation of pasta, the path from field to plate. The wheat in which the architecture is literally immersed is a beautiful, archetypal image. Let's remember how the buckwheat field around the wooden rotunda of Alexander Brodsky in Nikolo-Lenivets looked symbolic, but here the opposition between architecture and nature is completely gone.
The architects of the Megabudka bureau, who took third place, offered an interesting interpretation of the dangerous Russian theme. The "New Russian City" is a series of repeated zakomars. This technique - repetition of a chord or melodic pattern - is used by minimalists in music. It was also developed with students by Peter Eisenman, when the classical portico stretched out into an endless colonnade, and the colonnades multiplied in several tiers and, so to speak, were pumped until the understanding of what it was and where it came from disappeared. Zakomaras, lined up in a long row, with a golden theater box in the background, create an expressive image with shades of Old Russian architecture and Art Deco, reinterpreted in a minimalist key. This, in my opinion, is much better than fantasies about a temple theme in a competition for
Russian cultural and spiritual center in Paris.
In general, the religious theme appears several times in a neutral, non-judgmental presentation. For example, the creative association "PapaUrban" made a project of a super-campus for the long-suffering St. Petersburg island Tuchkov Buyan (RBC competition). Prince Vladimir Cathedral is perfectly combined with the landscape Tuchkov Park of the Zaryadye type with perforated, matrix, "smart" paths and walls. This is an image of harmony in the city (or, perhaps, a response to the acute confrontation between skateboard lovers and temple builders in Yekaterinburg, which happened this spring?). Here the old and the new coexist calmly. Of course, this is an existing temple, monument and dominant, the view of which is specially opened with the help of a visual corridor. But all the same, on the whole, it turns out Old and New, a dialogue of forces: God, man, nature and technology.
It is difficult to say why there is such a tolerance for religion. Gleb Galkin prefers to look not among temporary trends, but to turn to eternal inner values. The "Holy Land" project is dedicated to the ancient Jewish temple, reinterpreted in the modern spirit as a space of freedom of choice. In general, this calm attitude of young people, both to Nazarite monasticism, to artificial intelligence (with which we will definitely cooperate and be friends) pleases.
A work in the style of the Persian miniature "The Big Paris of Niger" by Anna Andronova from the bureau Ah! Oh! Uh!, Depicting camels around the Eiffel Tower and something like Notre Dame with a minaret, is an attempt to slow down migration by building Another Paris for the movement of peoples …But if you do not know that this is a clone of the French capital, it looks like the Islamic future of old Paris, where rainforests have grown due to global warming. An allusion to Houellebecq's scandalous novel "Submission" is possible, but without his cynicism. The contrast between the jewelery beauty and the doubtfulness of the event itself is impressive. By the way, the genre of science fiction is understandable and organic for young architects. They indulge in reflections about the future with interest and without phobias.
Not the blinkeredness of the generation of "children" is noticeable, the absence of dogmatism, narrow partisanship. They draw from different arts, eras and styles, but at the same time they remain within the boundaries of good taste, without postmodernism and gross irony. They are not afraid of tradition, they want meaning. In theory, they should be metamodernists, like the rapper Monetochka, who melancholy calls bloggers to go to the factory (by the way, the current interest of architects in the reconstruction of industrial zones - what is it like not going to the factory?). Is metamodernism suitable as a definition of the activities of young architects? And if this is not metamodernism, then what?
In general, metamodernism was founded in
article by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Acker. Its main features are: a balancing act between modernist enthusiasm and postmodern irony, a neo-romantic twist that the authors see in the architecture of Herzog and de Meuron and in the installations of Bas Jan Ader. The writer Dmitry Bykov, who expresses himself succinctly and figuratively, sees in the metamodernists, first of all, in his colleague David Foster Wallace, an orientation towards the perfection of the romantic hero and his counterposition with the crowd, towards new smart ones, towards a new seriousness. And he insists that this is a continuation of modernism, forcibly interrupted in the 1920s. In this sense, it is absolutely no coincidence that one of the MAYAK bureaus turned to the image of the main modernist Mayakovsky. An attempt to express in architecture the power and vulnerability characteristic of the poet.
As for conversations with a glass at Archibotics, they were sincere. The archibotic left the Sevkabel, rolled along the embankments of the Neva and landed at the Palace Square. Against the backdrop of great architecture, toasts were raised to the health of the Project Baltia magazine, which turned 12 years old - a serious adolescence age. Professor of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts Alexander Stepanov gave a mini-lecture about the art of the ensemble, to which the presented number "Project Baltia" 04/18 - 01/19 is dedicated.
What do we have now?
It seems to me important to respond to the keynote article by Vladimir Frolov in this issue. The editor-in-chief declares that we now have "super-eclecticism" in architecture, which includes all previous styles, including the avant-garde of the 20th and 21st centuries. This kind of contradicts metamodernism with its neo-romanticism. On the other hand, historical eclecticism, in spite of its "flabby bodies", corresponded precisely to romanticism in painting and music. By itself, the word "supereclectic" is a win-win, it can include everything, just as capitalism can accept any phenomena and make them part of the market. This property of capitalist culture is described by Boris Groys, reminds Vladimir Frolov. He explains the onset of super-eclecticism, among other things, by the development of precise technologies capable of creating any shape - both a complex parametric shell and a very complex order detail. There are many subtle considerations in the article, which are of interest, we refer to the text. It seems to me that there is no energy in the word "super-eclecticism", it does not capture the peculiarity of the moment. Romanticism and heroic overcoming are not for everyone, but this tendency exists in the projects of young people. The only strange thing is that among the laureates of the competition there were no
Stepan Lipgart, who pursues the theme of the heroic neo-art deco very consistently - in the St. Petersburg ensemble "Renaissance" on the street. Dybenko, in a block on Vasilievsky Island and other projects.
I like the word "reconstructivism". It flashed in the article of Vermeulen and Acker as a characteristic feature of metamodernism, as the opposite of deconstructivism. Indeed, how much can you decorate and ridicule? Let's create something already! Reconstructivism combines an interest in tradition, which the new generation, unlike the previous one, does not push aside with reverence, but draws from it with calm interest. Reconstructivism also contains constructivism, that is, the conquests of modernism of the twentieth century. Reconstructivism can be understood literally - as a boom in the reconstruction of industrial zones, about which, provided the careful restoration of old buildings, the society has a consensus. Reconstructivism is also a new discovery of a city in an urban boom. Reconstructivism can even be turned to environmental topics, since the reconstruction of nature is, in general, its revival where it was killed by man.
Thus, we have three candidate terms for describing the present situation: metamodernism, super-eclecticism, and reconstructivism. It is up to the reader to decide which is more appropriate.
P. S.: The works of French architects and landscape designers shown at the AJAP (jeunes architects et paisagists) exhibition are related to real orders. They are visually compelling, marked by civic and environmental awareness, contextual and socially responsible. Here are some examples.
