On the last day of February, a three-month PRO intensive "Design of Public Spaces" starts at MARCH. The school developed its program together with the Wowhaus architectural bureau, which renovated Gorky Park, created the Crimean embankment, the city farm at VDNKh, the Polytechnic Museum park and other successful projects in Moscow and the regions.
Students of the course will conduct applied research in a real-life public space near the Yauza River, between the Kurskaya and Ploshchad Ilyicha metro stations.
Course curator and head of educational programs at Wowhaus Irina Golovitskaya told what tasks the listeners will solve.
Most of the interviews, lectures, announcements and brief descriptions of the Wowhaus bureau begin from the Krymskaya embankment. This is an alpha project, which they cite as an example and which they want to be equal to: a little tired, but we are doing it. My job in the bureau is to work with aspiring architects and students, and I often see the outlines of Krymskaya in my portfolio and sketches of new projects. Such a quotation is inevitable and even flattering in the sense that the embankment turned out to be a very accurate and very effective solution, from which people are delighted seven years after the implementation. Another issue is that these exact solutions cannot be reproduced elsewhere without losing them in content.
- 1/5 Reconstruction of the Upa river embankment, Tula. 2017-2018 © WOWHAUS
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zooming 2/5 Reconstruction of the Upa river embankment, Tula. 2017-2018 © WOWHAUS, Photo by Oleg Leonov, Moscow Department of Overhaul
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zooming 3/5 Reconstruction of the Upa river embankment, Tula. 2017-2018 © WOWHAUS
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zooming 4/5 Reconstruction of the Upa river embankment, Tula. 2017-2018 © WOWHAUS, Photo © Oleg Leonov, Moscow Department of Overhaul © WOWHAUS
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zooming 5/5 Reconstruction of the Upa river embankment, Tula. 2017-2018 © WOWHAUS
A couple of years ago, we wrote in the announcements of our courses that little time is devoted to the design of public spaces, both during study at universities and in the slightest degree of public discussions on this matter. Say, everyone is focused on the buildings and what is between them, until recently, few people were interested. Now the language will not turn out to make such statements seriously, on the contrary, one gets the impression that there is only talk on earth, that about public spaces.
At the same time, the options for public discussion of this agenda come down to a limited number of scenarios: how similar they are to what our colleagues from abroad are designing, how much they meet safety requirements, how well they are implemented. The latter is especially common in publications and in private conversations, the lion's share of the time and effort is aimed at comparing the rendering and implementation, assessing where the tile broke, the lantern went out, or the concrete cracked.
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zooming 1/4 Children's area of the Moscow Zoo © WOWHAUS
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zooming 2/4 Children's area of the Moscow Zoo © WOWHAUS
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zooming 3/4 Children's area of the Moscow Zoo © WOWHAUS
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zooming 4/4 Children's area of the Moscow Zoo © WOWHAUS
All this deserves the attention that it receives, but it is easy to get carried away with such conversations and miss the main thing: we call public space that way because people must be there and do something, there must be something with which you can relate yourself, that you can to oppose themselves or what to "stick to", everyone should perfectly understand how to get there and where to go from there. In his lectures, Oleg Shapiro calls this uniqueness, communicativeness, symbolism and urban planning significance, and these qualities cannot be recorded and described using the comparison toolkit, assessing the quality of performance and the degree of similarity with the pictures from Pinterest.
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zooming 1/3 City farm at VDNKh, stage 2 © WOWHAUS
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zooming 2/3 City farm at VDNKh, stage 2 © WOWHAUS
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zooming 3/3 City farm at VDNKh, stage 2 © WOWHAUS
If you are prone to reflection, then walking among fresh, tree-smelling benches and here and there cracked tiles, it is quite easy to reverse the logic of the decisions made in the reverse order. Here a path connects one platform with another, here the entrance group marks the entrance, here contemporary art shocks the venerable public, and here we have a bronze monument to Chekhov, because once Chekhov broke a wheel while driving through these edges, and so on. You will find one or even several absolutely logical explanations for each form, each turn of the cycle path.
How to approach this from the other side - when there is still nothing (or there is, but very badly) and it is necessary for everything to appear - is a very intractable question. What is the territory like? What kind of life is already happening on it and how can it be preserved? Who may be or are already interested in its development? What functional content is needed here? It depends on how the answers to the questions will be received, how they will be analyzed and how they will be embodied in architectural forms, whether people will come there and whether they will return again after a loud opening. That is, in the end, was it not in vain that you and your colleagues tried.
On the course, which we are conducting together with the MARCH School of Architecture for the third time, this is what we are doing: we consider all stages of work on a project, starting from asking a question (this is not always the same as a technical task) to each specific chair so that the architect could always explain and defend his project.
Learn more and sign up for the course here.
