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Russian architecture. The newest era. 1989-2019
ABOUT THE PROJECT
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Project “Russian Architecture. The Newest Era”is one of the first (and hardly the last) attempts to systematize information about what has happened in modern Russian architecture in the short period of time that separates the present day from the rather conditionally defined moment of the professional paradigm change. However, it consisted in fundamental changes both in artistic and stylistic guidelines, and in the principles and in the material and technical base of the work of architects from all over Russia. Therefore, 30 years is a period, although not too long, but in this case it is indicative for a cut.
Keeping pace with the country
Over the past three decades, Russian architecture has gone through a huge evolutionary path. Economic, socio-political and cultural realities in the country changed - and architecture changed along with the country. As an integral part of the Russian cultural landscape, architectural practice absorbed, processed and materialized in the form of buildings and complexes the vicissitudes of the formation of a new economic system and the transformation of public consciousness. How the formation of a different way of life, corresponding to the realities of the modern history of Russia, was reflected in architecture and became the subject of research.
Special cases
One of the consequences of the turn of the eras is the courage of a number of architects to start their own private practice. In a difficult time in all respects, they tested and implemented new methods of working with a customer and running a project business; searched for new expressive means and plastic language - corresponding to current world trends, but at the same time inheriting the traditions of the national architectural school; mastered new typologies and technologies. This process was accompanied by the brightest ups and downs inevitable for such a complex and multifaceted process. As part of the study, several dozen stories were collected about how it was.
Support moments
The past decades have left their milestones in the history of Russian architecture. These are the names of architects who set new standards for professional and artistic quality with their projects and buildings. These are objects and projects that influenced the further development of the national school or that remained unique examples of the coincidence of talent and circumstances. Each of these names and phenomena is a significant page in the chronicle of the modern era of Russian architecture, which allows us to comprehend and evaluate the path traveled, and most importantly, it is an opportunity to look into tomorrow, promising the birth of new names and the emergence of new architectural successes.
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ABOUT RESEARCH
General collection
In front of the team of the research project “Russian Architecture. The Newest Era”there was an unprecedented task to find a methodology for collecting and processing information, as well as a form for presenting the results.
The first part of the project took about six months. During this time, the initial (basic) part of the catalog was collected with data on buildings, projects and events in the architectural world. As a source of information, we used publications in the media, data from the websites of architectural bureaus and from other open sources. A separate list of events on a global scale was formed, since one of the key tasks was to accentuate the influence of certain political, socioeconomic and cultural changes at the level of the state and the whole world for the development of Russian architecture.
Delegation of authority
From the very beginning, it was decided that the initiators of the study would not themselves assess the significance of certain events, projects and buildings. In a situation where an actual phenomenon is subject to research, which is not separated from the researcher by a large time interval, and in fact continues to occur and evolve at the moment, when the participants in the events and the authors of objects are alive and continue to work, it is necessary to take advantage of this opportunity and delegate the right of assessment to the heroes themselves (literally sense of the word).
Community involvement
The authority to collect information - in part - was also delegated to the professional community: the basic lists formed in the form of two survey forms allowed not only to mark in the already collected register the most significant objects or events for the respondent, but also to add new ones. So the project turned into an interactive system for collecting and processing the opinions of the architectural community, bringing the study to a higher level of objectivity.
Survey forms were sent out to over 300 respondents, including architects and experts from related fields who are actively involved in the architectural life. Geographically, the study covered almost all regions of Russia. The collection of results went on for a month, and according to its results, the most significant (in the context of the study) buildings and events were identified, and also significantly - by almost 25% - the project catalog was expanded.
Distribution of positions
The information received formed the basis of a kind of chronicle of modern Russian architecture, where every year it was a selection of events and buildings, which, depending on the results of the study, were assigned one of three conditional statuses: "noticeable", "significant" and "poll leader". The latter was assigned primarily to buildings (but sometimes also to events) marked by the maximum number of respondents. On their occasion, additional comments from participants and eyewitnesses were collected, including in video format. On the one hand, this gave the chronicle a personalized character, and through the memories and assessments of the heroes themselves, it is much easier to understand and feel the specifics of certain phenomena. On the other hand, the polyphony of many opinions and assessments has formed a more objective event picture.
Three decades - three formats
After that, all that remained was to superimpose a 30-year "architectural" timeline of more than 500 events and projects on the list of global events, so that it would be possible to compare them and evaluate probable and actual cause-and-effect relationships. This was the main result of the project, for the formalization of which we chose three methods: a book, an exhibition and an Internet site.
Book: Beginning a Meeting
This method is the most obvious and familiar: when the temporary tape and the main fabric of the narrative are already intertwined, you just need to put them in neat "rings" in the volume of the paper page. But so that the scale of each object is preserved: “significant”, “significant” events and “poll leaders”, accompanied by descriptions, illustrations and comments, occupy cells of different sizes. A separate place in the publication is given to collections of opinions about each decade, the transformation of the profession, the search for Russian identity and the interaction of architecture and society. Before you is not just a book - a fixation of the moment, but a book - the first brick of the future archive of post-Soviet architecture, the first volume of its “complete works” - which, of course, will strive for completeness, but there is hope, it will never reach it.
Exhibition: a word to heroes
As part of the exhibition at the Museum of Architecture. A. V. Shchuseva (Wing "Ruin", May 15 - June 16, 2019), in addition to showing the actual "time tape" and video interviews, another format for presenting the research results was found. The authors of the buildings - “survey leaders” were asked to prepare an art object or installation for the exposition, representing the most striking feature of the architectural solution of the building or the plastic expression of its idea. The use of artistic transformation was intended to emphasize the status of architecture as an art form and part of a general cultural context. In addition, the creative interpretation made the exhibition more entertaining, especially for the general public.
Understatement is the foundation for a new statement
For some architects, several buildings were among the leaders in the study: in this case, their author had the right to independently decide which of them to present as an art object. Thus, a filter of significance for the architect himself was added to the selection based on the significance of certain buildings for the entire professional community. This objective-subjective approach to selection and evaluation, which did not depend in any way on the opinion of the project team, in some cases gave an unexpected and even paradoxical result, when several undisputed leaders of the survey were not included in the exposition of the exhibition. In addition, a number of top objects were not included in the exhibition due to the fact that their authors, for one reason or another, could not take part in it.
Nevertheless, developed within the framework of the project “Russian architecture. The Newest Era”method of collecting information and collective assessment has not only proven its effectiveness, but also allows the project to continue using the Internet platform. On the site www.archnewage.ru it is planned to further accumulate notable and significant events and buildings, including them through regular voting among the expert community in the common chronicle of the "Newest era of Russian architecture".
1989 –1999
TEST OF FREEDOMTh
The most valuable part of the study of 30 years of Russian architecture is not the collected survey forms with lists of objects and events, but the collected thoughts and judgments of our experts. They, being contemporaries, observers and direct participants in the events that we set out to analyze, have already done this many times - albeit for a narrow circle. And now, finally, it can become the property of the widest public. Of course, it would be more correct to scroll through all the interviews we have collected in full - however, this can only be done in the format of a website or at an exhibition. However, in the book devoted to our research, it was important for us to somehow reflect the palette of opinions not only in the form of comments on individual events and objects, but also in the form of formalized discourses about what happened to Russian architecture for these years, who and what influenced it, how the profession itself and the attitude towards it inside and outside have changed.
At first, we wanted to combine the passages according to the main principle of the study - chronological - and tell sequentially about each decade, like in a history textbook. But very quickly it became obvious that, in spite of the horizontal of our narrative, it is simply necessary to put verticals or at least parallels in order to trace the development of individual phenomena within one large process of the formation of Russian architecture. The time of hopes and dreams, the time of opportunities and prospects, the time of revelry and confusion, the time of chaos and confusion (and such were the 1990s for our entire country) became, first of all, the time of finding new landmarks. And the first plot is connected with the search for a new language, a new "Russia that we have lost", a new philosophy and even attempts to form new architectural schools and traditions. When the possibilities are unlimited, it seems that architecture has every chance to turn into pure creativity and fully establish itself as art …
Alexander Asadov, AB ASADOV
During that period, new structures, customers and technologies arose. We saw projects in magazines, and we immediately wanted to do the same, we did not yet understand what was behind this - neither in construction, nor technologically. It seems to me that the first orders and works, which began to reflect the post-Soviet period, began to appear somewhere in 1995. It all started for us, for example, with a number of very interesting reconstructions of old buildings. The principle was this: building something new is hard, but building, adding and rebuilding is much easier. And we tried to do technologically advanced things, but on our knees; it turned out such a home-grown hi-tech. Even at that moment, the term was born to me that we do not design, clearly fix and build, but grow buildings, because improvisation was constantly going on, and even legalized parameters within 10% could be changed. This was undoubtedly the most romantic and lively period when the bureaucratic system had not yet taken shape. But also the most difficult one. For example, before 1995 there were no construction projects and no work in the normal sense; but we already had a school, and many of the generation that followed us simply did not take place and left the profession. So for the next 10 years we were - and there were students, without an intermediate link. Probably, this somehow affected our entire profession as a whole.
At the turn of the millennium, there was also a certain romance for us - just think, one era is leaving, another is coming. The Age of Pisces is replaced by the Age of Aquarius. It seemed that everything would change: climate, gravity, a person would take and fly. And we believed that this moment must be definitely recorded in our projects. They began to hang bridges, large spans, make glass floors, count on a state of semi-weightlessness. And indeed a lot has been realized. There was such a dreamy period. Everything happened quickly, the country was changing rapidly, new customers appeared, they were overgrown with capital and opportunities. Somewhere in the 2000s, City began to grow actively, and we all felt it. Just like the first crisis in 2008, but the inertia from the heyday continued until 2012. We laughed that we shouldn't even be offered less than 100 thousand m2 - now this is hard to imagine. Nevertheless, it was a formative period.
Evgeny Ass, Rector of the Moscow Architectural School MARCH
If you remember the beginning of the 1990s, then some of the first successes then still remain the most significant for me. There was some general tendency to develop an author's philosophy, relying on the best examples of world practice. Even Ostozhenka was not the subject of a developer's attack. There hasn't been a construction boom yet. It was difficult for survival, but gave rise to some kind of concentration and meaningfulness. In part, these were the times when the ideas of independent architecture were being built. On the other hand, the market for building materials and the builders themselves was still too bone, undiscovered for modern technology. And yet the outlook was optimistic. The general cultural program was oriented towards a bright future - and by now, it seems to me, it has approached the point of absolute conjuncture and, for the most part, the complete dependence of architecture on big business and power. The large volume of construction does not mean the flourishing of architecture. Statistically yes, but this does not mean that a masterpiece will inevitably grow out of this quantity, because the market demands are not for masterpieces, but for something else. Not necessarily the opposite, but it's hard to expect developers to ask for a miracle. If this request arises, then it is inevitably associated with extravagance and trickery, which for me are not mandatory signs of a masterpiece. But, unfortunately, I do not see a deep architectural philosophy that would have appeared against the background of this flourishing of the construction market. I see the average architecture, almost none of this is interesting to me. It seems to me that this is such a worldwide problem. I don’t want to call it a crisis, but there are certain difficulties with the generation of new meaningful architectural ideas. Somewhere they exist and arise mainly on the periphery, not on the development front, but somewhere off to the side, in chamber formats. There are only a few commercial architects who manage to implement their philosophy. On the one hand, we have a construction boom, and on the other, I would say that architecture as a professional activity is in some kind of unconscious, not self-conscious, not culturally conscious state.
Sergey Skuratov, "Sergey Skuratov Architects"
The time was really difficult, but very interesting. Everyone was looking for their own path, their own language and their place in the professional space. Sometimes outside of it. Someone who is bolder - and outside the homeland. Almost everyone solved some specific problem, mainly earning their living. I almost stopped combining the work of an artist and an architect, and after winning several serious competitions I finally chose architecture. During these years, I gradually felt a loss of interest in the language of postmodernism, with which we were completely infected in the eighties. This language and its philosophy were outdated and almost exhausted. Traveling a lot and looking at magazines, I compared what was happening in Russia with what was happening in Europe, and I realized that we were in a deep forest, and we had to somehow get out of it. Brodsky and Utkin in the eighties built the cult postmodern restaurant Atrium for that time, Bokov and Budin made a deconstructivist and very fashionable Mayakovsky museum. In 1991, after winning the UNESCO competition, we parted ways with Sasha Larin and began to work separately. I built a lot and actively collaborated as an architect with the Moscow Sberbank. At the same time, he continued to experience the most powerful influence at the same time by Aldo Rossi, and Leon Crie, and James Stirling. It was a period of individual survival and collapse, no one knew in which direction to move and what to do. The state customer disappeared, a private customer appeared, the private customer also did not understand anything and did not know what he wanted. Everyone moved and worked absolutely intuitively, achieving very interesting results, despite the construction market that was almost dead at that time. In the mid-nineties, everything gradually returned to normal, and an understandable perspective of activity took shape. I came to Seryozha Kiselev in 1995 and in seven years built six houses in his workshop. Over the years, my professional language has completely changed, and I finally matured to create my workshop.
Alexey Bavykin, Workshop of Alexey Bavykin
It was the most interesting moment - the feeling of freedom: in many ways, maybe naive, in something necessary, and in something, maybe even false. Everyone rushed to draw some kind of architecture. Although after 20 years, probably, there was an awareness that such a phenomenon as Soviet modernism, which was ending at that time, is a rather interesting and powerful phenomenon, and now they are beginning to appreciate it more and more. But we, as the next generation, said that all this was not the same, someone went to postmodernity, someone to European modernity. The main thing was to smell freedom. A lot of interesting things have been done - breakthrough, curious, imaginative. We were not yet obsessed with the economy, and the customers did not understand anything in this matter, and therefore all sorts of wonderful structures appeared.
I interpret the past thirty years as follows: the era of perestroika, the era of spree, when money suddenly fell on everyone, and the era of sobering up is the logical end of the chain. And we are all waiting: suddenly everything will turn around and start over again. My prediction is this: it may well be that the time of freedom will come again, and young people will appreciate it correctly and, taking into account our mistakes, will go completely different, their own way.
Nikolay Lyzlov, Workshop of Nikolay Lyzlov
I remember how everything was in Soviet times. I was building a brick house on the corner of Shcherbakovskaya and Fortunatovskaya streets, and it was necessary to coordinate the aluminum, for example: there was a special person to whom you came and said that we needed so much aluminum for the fence. Moreover, he had to immediately say the figure is twice as large, because he always cut it in half without looking. The opportunity to build a house of bricks still had to be achieved, because the installation was to do everything from panels. And suddenly, when this pressure subsided with the revolution in 1991, a terrible thing happened to the architects - the old masters: they blossomed into some incredible postmodernism, completely indecent and obscene. Then I had such an association that these are deep-sea fish that swam in the Mariana Trench under wild pressure, and everyone got used to it, and it seemed like good, but then they were raised to the surface - and they burst. And then everything somehow by itself civilized, the insane euphoria stopped. Everyone began to control themselves in terms of taste, and everything became right.
Alexander Kuzmin, President of RAASN
I'll tell you, Luzhkov did not draw these turrets. It was such a moment when, for example, imagine that a hungry person got to the buffet. Or he used to have Soviet cubes, but he was suddenly given a lego. It is not surprising that a whole galaxy of architects fell into historicism, and sometimes it was very funny, because it turned out brilliantly. Belov, Barkhin, Leonov worked very competently in the classics. Or Alexey Vorontsov, a friend of mine who always experimented - how much criticism he received for his "Nautilus". But when it was necessary for MARCHI to display this period, they put it in the book.
Alexander Lozhkin, architect, advisor to the mayor of Novosibirsk for architecture
The 1990s are a strange time, a time when the centralized Soviet customer disappears and a private customer appears with his own views. This customer was looking for his roots, apparently, in the pre-revolutionary merchants, hence there is so much “pre-revolutionary” architecture, there was even an attempt by some scientists to substantiate the emergence of a regional style through this hypothesis. But, of course, such a story as in Nizhny Novgorod never happened anywhere else. We noticed the first manifestations of neo-modernism in Siberia only at the very end of the 1990s, when the same people who associated themselves with pre-revolutionary merchants, having already traveled around the world, began to associate themselves with Western businessmen. But until 2008, the emergence of good and high-quality architecture in Siberia was the exception rather than the rule. Because the main construction in the province is housing construction. Even business centers began to appear in our country only in the second half of the 2000s. And the housing market before the crisis, until 2008, is the seller's market. And only since 2008 the quality of the environment becomes in demand.
Marina Ignatushko, journalist, activist, ideologist and creator of the Rating of Nizhny Novgorod architecture
The Nizhny Novgorod architects themselves have a very complex and ambiguous attitude towards the concept of "Nizhny Novgorod architectural school". It was formulated by Bart Goldhorn and Grigory Revzin in the mid-90s, and it is more of an advance, given on the wave of friendship with Alexander Kharitonov. Indeed, it seemed that a certain victorious procession of Nizhny Novgorod architecture had begun at various competitions; and Kommersant even published an article with complimentary words about Nizhny Novgorod as the capital of Russian architecture of the 1990s. It was pleasant, and all this significantly raised the degree of general enthusiasm. Kharitonov was the chief architect of the city and headed the city council. It was also important that almost everyone with whom the concept of "Nizhegorodskaya architectural school" is associated had either studied at NNGASU or worked together at Nizhegorodgrazhdanproekt. Guild closeness and trust have been nurtured over the years, and this has already influenced relations between private bureaus. The architects dispersed to their workshops, received a greater degree of creative freedom and, it seemed, from all this, in the end, an architectural school would crystallize. The architects were the heroes of the 90s. And Nizhny Novgorod architecture really interested everyone. There were many programs and publications. The names of the architects were well known. Lyubov Saprykina and I managed to make two guides to modern Nizhny Novgorod architecture, the more detailed of which was called “111 projects and buildings”. When
in 2003, a second, more compact collection was released, Lyubov Mikhailovna said that it seemed that everything was over. And indeed, just then the sites in Nizhny Novgorod interested Moscow investors, the competition of construction companies intensified, and the previous feeling into the city, the experience of every place, every corner of it as a unique one, more often began to give way to the ordinary economy. And the Nizhny Novgorod school was distinguished by its special emotionality, verbosity and multi-layeredness, when the architect tried to express his understanding of the place and his love for it. Nizhny Novgorod buildings, in fact, about this. Let us recall the same bank "Guarantee", which at first surprised everyone with its appearance. Such suddenly open feelings after decades of typical construction! Stormy, violent, lively, spontaneous fantasies. But surprise was replaced by an understanding: all this plastic is from the sensual Nizhny Novgorod landscape … Another classic example of the Nizhny Novgorod school is the Pyla residential building, whose contours are smoothly built along the outline of the ravine. Context is more important than content. The Nizhny Novgorod school is about context. Of course, the school presupposes the unity of approaches, techniques, continuity. But the value of the experience of the 90s, first of all, is that Nizhny Novgorod, the Nizhny Novgorod architects in the 90s showed that it is possible to develop architecture on a separate small area and in a separate time period, even if it is not a capital city.
Nikolay Shumakov, Chief Architect of Metrogiprotrans, President of the Union of Architects of Russia and the Union of Architects of Moscow
What happened happened: glasnost, acceleration, perestroika, Gorbachev, Raisa Maksimovna - all at once in one heap. Our head turned sharply to the West. We didn’t know yet that we could look to the East. We began to travel, actively receive literature. I remember that Zhenya Ass, excited, lectured every week in the library of the Union and educated architects. He did a good deed, he knew how to present the material. I remember, a couple of times I even went, despite the eternal shortage of time. In a word, they turned to the West. Since then, I have two hernias in my spine, because everyone's head was turned off. We thought: here it is, really, here it is, there, let's integrate the West into our architectural process and we will live like people!
To some extent, of course, it worked out. The Moscow construction boom came very soon. We drove the products, drove them at a crazy pace, not even having time to realize what we were doing in many situations. But I must say that there were no global failures in Moscow in those years. Perhaps to a large extent due to the fact that at that time quite strong and professional architectural leaders emerged: Skokan, Kiselev, Levyant, Skuratov. Plus, the Moskomarkhitektura was headed by Aleksandr Viktorovich Kuzmin, who did not allow doing stupid things. Therefore, we walked like that, with a curled neck, for two decades. Then a deep enough crisis came, and we had time to think about what we were doing and how we could live on. I even worried that this crisis did not come earlier, because there was practically no time to think. Boom has swept over our profession. But what to do? Russia is an amazing country: it always does first, then thinks. In short, the time has come to think. And this, of course, is a blessing, this pause has played to the benefit of our community and our architecture.
There were, for example, miscalculations. Still, without a strategic line of development of architecture, it was impossible to multiply and multiply in pieces throughout our space. But at last there was a comprehension, and the situation, in my opinion, stabilized. At least now we are trying to understand what is happening and where we are going. The neck was broken, the boom came, the crisis came. Now, I think, there will be no such convulsive outbursts either in construction or in architecture. The lull is now almost catastrophic. Many architects are out of work, not to mention the provinces. Unfortunately, I know what I am talking about, because as the President of the Union, I receive complaints from both veterans and young people. We help as much as we can. We are optimists, the profession of an architect is an optimistic profession. Therefore, I think that tomorrow everything will change, and goodness will descend on us, and we will show everyone Kuzkin's mother how we love, show the whole world that we are the best, the most talented, the smartest, the most professional, the most-most architects. All the prerequisites for this exist.
