The prize approached its first major anniversary as usual - as always, changing something (date, place, number of nominations), but keeping the main things intact: transparency, democracy, the Expert Council. The organizer and the general sponsor of the award are in their place: Rossa Rakenne SPB (HONKA). And the award ceremony, crowning the project, moved - for the fall and to a new location: the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. In addition to being the most important platform for contemporary art in Moscow (and we still consider architecture to be art, albeit not as “important” as the circus), Garage has built beautiful wooden pavilions more than once. in 2013) - and prize winners. But back in 2012, when Garage was just beginning to explore the Park of Culture, the curators of ARCHIWOOD made a small exposition about contemporary Russian temporary architecture - as part of Garage's large exhibition Temporary Architecture of Gorky Park: from Melnikov to Ban. Three quarters of the exhibitors at that exhibition were in different years and nominees for the award.
The exhibition was housed in the first pavilion of the Garage, built by Shigeru Ban, the great Japanese master of wood (as well as paper and cardboard) architecture. The pavilion itself was not nominated for the award, because it only seemed to be wooden - its columns were only wrapped in cardboard. This adherence to principles is also one of those things that do not change in the award: for the same reason, the estate of Klaug Muizha, which became the main event of Russian architecture this year (Grand Prix of the Golden Section Prize), was not nominated for it. The fact is that the main house of the estate carries (and largely determines the enchanting general appearance) of a concrete base - not hidden in the ground, but flying out of it with consoles and thus allowing the house to soar. Of course, the award has a special nomination "Wood in decoration", but it also does not get there, because all other structures of the house are made of wood.
So formally, this wonder of the world, built by Totan Kuzembaev, can be considered a "hut on an extremely developed basement" - therefore it was included in a book dedicated to a modern Russian wooden house, the main theme of which is the search for connections between old and new wooden architecture (and therefore the buildings in it are only structurally wooden). This book is being prepared by the Garage publishing house (which was another reason for the cooperation of the two institutions), and was supposed to be released for the award ceremony, but the author did not complete the work on time (and will be severely punished). However, this "spoon" is expensive not only for lunch, because unlike the previous book of ARCHIWOOD "Modern Wooden" (2017), this is no longer just a catalog of the best works that were nominated for the award, but a study on their example of the evolution of a wooden residential building over the past 25 years. This evolution is going in different directions (the size of houses is decreasing, the size of window openings, on the contrary, is increasing), but the most curious is the change in the sources of inspiration: at first it was a hut, then it was replaced by a dacha, and today it is mainly modern world architecture.
And the houses that were shortlisted for the 2019 award just confirm this. There are at most two or three usual houses for two slopes, and even those interpret the archetype quite radically. Ivan Ovchinnikov not only hangs his House-Bridge over the pond, but also turns it towards the water with its facade, which makes the slopes spread out and turns the house into almost a solid pediment. And Sergei Kolchin, on the contrary, stretches his gable almost into a Gothic vertical, close to the second volume - dark and with a flatter roof - to set off the radicalism of the first. Which is also in the fact that the side facade is almost a solid carved ornament, but, of course, with an enlarged and modern pattern.
Both authors are multiple winners of ARCHIWOOD, but the newcomers of the award (representing the previous generation): Ivan Shalmin and Sergey Mishin, will compete with them. Both houses have even less “houses”, but rather volumetric-spatial structures “with a turn”. It's amazing how similar they are - and yet how different. And if in Shalmin's "Rough Long" one can read the letter "G", at the two ends of which there are terraces, then Mishin's house in Vyritsa is so intricately twisted that the letter "G" is almost impossible to read (although this is also her, and in it the same through terraces). Both houses are sewn up from head to toe in larch, while Shalmin's house is a horizontal board, and Mishin's is vertical. The first is simple, the second is whimsical; the first is raised on piles and seems weightless, the second is heavy, like a dinosaur, clubfoot crawling on the ground.
Another debutant of the award, Yegor Egorychev, is much more modest in the size of the First House. Only 5 by 6 meters, while everything is there, even the entrance hall and the terrace. But it is even more interesting that in such a tiny house there are two bedrooms: one below, and the second on the mezzanine - under the high edge of the pitched roof, which at the same time takes off not from the back wall to the front (as usual), but from one side to the other. This slope is echoed by the slopes around the stained-glass window and the door - and all this together gives the seemingly simple house a surprisingly uncommon facial expression. Sergei Nikeshkin is playing the same theme, but this time on a space of 200 m2: "the lean-to swiftness of roofs" (as Konstantin Melnikov wrote about his "Makhorka"), black color, an office on the second floor and a fully glazed living room on the first.
This company of "non-Russian" houses is crowned by the Red House of Ivan Kozhin, in which everything is non-standard: the color (which the annals of our award do not know), and the elongated narrow volume, and the full diversity of square windows. And even the house of Anton Litovskiy, for all its "cut-out", is very far from the traditional house - both in the layout of the volumes, and the powerful roof overhang, and narrow strips of glass. The house of the student of Nikolai Belousov is generally similar to the work of a teacher, but there is a lot of original in the details: an unusual cut, filing of roofs, and most importantly - those very stripes of light that give enough light into the house, but at the same time do not destroy the integrity of the wooden structure.
Against the background of this powerful main nomination, the contenders for the title of the best "Small object" look modest, although there is an elegant oval Flexse module (SA lab), a sauna with a window in the steam room (AI-Architects), a black house of a guard hidden in snow-white patterns of local ornament (Evgenia Larkina and Anton Balakhnin) … Only two objects reached the final of the Interior nomination: the cheerful hostel Baraban (ArtCrafts) and the stylish Barracks by Dmitry Kondrashov - while in both cases the tree is not walls, but only arranges the space. But a complete disaster happened in the category "Wood in finishing", where only one project was shortlisted - a pavilion on the beach of Priozersk (Rhizome). Considering that this object is very interesting, the Organizing Committee of the award made an ambiguous decision to transfer it to the nomination "Public building".
Here, however, there is a funny object with a mixed filling: a sports and entertainment center in Khimki, the wooden frame of which serves as "packaging" for modular containers (Alpbau and MAP Architect). The same company Alpbau, with the same KDK (glued timber) and also in a mixed construct, but in partnership with architects from AB Novoye, completed the Vorobyovy Gory cable car station, the design of the facades of which perfectly matches the theme. Two other bright objects of the nomination are from Nizhny Novgorod. This is the family building of the Izumrudnoye recreation center - another success of Stas Gorshunov, who this time threw out the chic knee of the outrigger staircase. Made as an homage to the architecture of brutalism, but not at all made of concrete, and in size comparable to the building itself, it looks like an independent sculpture, but at the same time echoes that color scheme. Another masterpiece is the Pavilion of the Future in Vyksa, built by Sergei Nebotov as part of the Art-Ovrag festival. A multifunctional spiral inside a conventional cylinder is an unusually beautiful, interesting and transparent structure that would do honor to any European festival.
Vyksa and Gorshunov turned out to be neighbors in another category - Urban Environment Design. Vyksa is represented here by Art Courtyards (Mikhail Priemyshev, Svyat Murunov): modern life scenarios are introduced into familiar Soviet courtyards, and a tree logically becomes an intermediary between the old and the new. Gorshunov, on the other hand, decorated the pond of the small town of Kulebaki with wooden terraces - simply, gracefully and noble. And on a completely different scale - the reconstruction of the Kazanskaya embankment in Tula: a giant project by the Wowhaus bureau. The project was immediately criticized: was it necessary, they say, to arrange all this modern improvement right under the walls of the Kremlin. Moreover, the Wowhaus bureau is so full of hand in this matter (starting loudly on the Crimean embankment) that many of its moves begin to seem like truisms. But there were simply no such stories in Tula before, the embankment powerfully shook the city, became a necessary breakthrough in its self-awareness, and the townspeople voted, as they say, with their feet: 180 thousand people came to the opening! And, finally, the most unexpected building - "Brateevskie teleporters" bureau "Praktika". Power transmission towers are the main decoration of the Brateevskaya floodplain, but they are also the main danger. In order to prevent casualties in the event of a possible break in the wires, it was necessary to erect some structures that would secure the passage of residents to the river - as a result, these modular pergolas were obtained.
This object could well appear in the "Art Object" nomination - where the image is more important than function. The function can be invented, or even contrived, or rather, invented. This is what young architects are doing at the Drevolyutsia festival. The fest, invented and permanently directed by Nikolai Belousov, has been taking place for the fifth year in a row, each time changing its location. The penultimate one was held in Astashevo, the last one - in Moscow, but since the prize was shifted to autumn, objects from both festivals converged in it. But the undivided (and even slightly indecent) dominance of "Drevolution" in this nomination (8 objects!) Is explained not only by this circumstance. Of course, the territory of ArtPlay was an interesting challenge, and in terms of quality, the objects of the latest "Drevolution" look solid: that the witty "Belfry" with a bell found on the territory of the "Manometer" as a bell, that the combination of a Trojan horse with a battering ram in the object "Ram", in which Oleg Panitkov, chairman of the Association of Wooden Housing Construction, saw “the logo of a modern wooden one: heavy in openwork”.
But the place where the previous "Drevolution" took place inspired young people to absolutely metaphysical impulses. These are the Chukhloma forests around the famous Astashov tower by Andrey Pavlichenkov - but all objects react not so much to him (there is nothing in the "Russian style" among them), but to the presence of this miracle in the middle of a dense forest. “Obverse / reverse” is a manifestation of the border between dense, drinking, lazy and enlightened, active, healthy Russia: the object does not offer to choose who you are with, but to realize that there is a border, for what to rise above. The next step is the path, the object by the "Forest": it would seem that the theme of the "tree house" has long been hackneyed, but the trick is that a 36-meter staircase leads to the house, winding between the trees (and the house can make a fire at a height of 12 meters. Further - and at all flight: a giant swing in the thicket of the forest (object "Above"). This is already a strong move in itself, but here there is an important addition to them: a small red house on top of a spruce, which turns out to be "under" when you take off on a swing with your legs up. And the most dramatic work of "Drevolyutsiya", which directly responds to the tragedy of a Russian wooden house, a Russian village, is "The House of Poros". Butterfly boards are built into the ruins of the former houses: it was as if the roof had fallen into the house, but it didn’t go all the way down and rotted there (as it should), but as if it sprouted up to the sky. It is a powerful statement that contains both sadness and hope; where you can read both the history of the death of the Russian house and its revival - fortunately, the best example of this is just around the corner.
A total of 199 applications were received for the prize. Of course, a round jubilee is supposed to have a rounder figure, and we were already happily rubbing our hands in anticipation of a record, but the Bell Tower art object from the new Peace River festival was destroyed by local intruders. And Zhenya Kazarnovskaya, the curator of the festival, who specially went to photograph him, returned with nothing. This, of course, exposes some of the shortcomings of "participatory design", but translated into the language of art objects - "the population did not remain indifferent." Nevertheless, "Reka" threatens to become a new strong supplier of objects in this nomination, while in the meantime it is represented by the "Sunflower" of the Indian Subot Kerkar: as a sunflower changes its appearance during the day, so an object changes when you swim past it on the same "River world ", in the quality of which - Nerl.
Kerkar was inspired by the story of how Peter brought a sunflower from Holland and its oil became a national product, and the Moscow artist Alexei Luchko was inspired by the theme of "flocks" - this is how the sheds where cattle and chickens were kept in Satka, Chelyabinsk region. And he made his "Stayka" - more, of course, picturesque than it should be, but with an accurate dosage of old materials (rough boards and plywood) and new (colored plastic). The "flock" can easily be caught in imitation of Alexander Brodsky's "sheds", but it would be more accurate to say that the aesthetics of the "Russian poor" returned to their origins.
The popular vote on the award website (https://premiya.arhiwood.com/prize/vote/) will take place for two weeks and will end on September 16. Then the professional jury will sum up the results.
