The exhibition, opened in the suite of the General Staff Building, has three main features. Firstly, this is a large-scale jubilee exposition of one of the largest and most famous architectural workshops of the latest thirty years. Secondly, it is located in the exhibit, since the suite is a space that appeared as a result of the reconstruction carried out by the architects of Studio 44 in 2002-2014. Previously, it was not there, but there were half-built technical courtyards of a state institution. That is why the exhibition is called “Studio 44. Enfilade”.
Thirdly, the exhibition does not just use the enfilade space for the presentation of the bureau that created it, but makes an attempt to intensify its museum use - in particular, it shows all the functions that were incorporated in the project and were either underrealized or not used sufficiently. There are many such functions and they are spectacular enough to say "ah". For the first time in several years of use, the cyclopean doors between the atriums are opened and closed every day - one of the main features of the Enfilade. One of the halls is transformed, changing the exposition every few hours, and in one of the atriums next to it trees are planted - part of the conceived, technically implemented, but not yet waiting for its seedlings "winter garden", saluting the Catherine's, Hermitage garden in the building on the other side of the Palace Square.
You should come here if only to see and feel how a modern mechanized museum can operate - it is shown the way Gonzago once showed pictures of his theater of scenery - and you get a theater of architectural mechanism. The opportunity to make sure that this exists in our country is also worth a lot. It is important that this is not “just an attraction”, but rather a working architecture, although, of course, for a modern exhibition the element of play is very important - and it is completely unclear why the Hermitage has not yet made full use of such opportunities.
It is important that the architects used the exhibition as an opportunity to make their work work, to make it work on the "never give up" principle. This perseverance, one must think, is aerobatics.
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zooming 1/3 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Courtesy of Studio 44
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zooming 2/3 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 3/3 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Photo: Archi.ru
No wonder Nikita Yavein said some time ago that with his exhibition he wants to demonstrate "how to show architecture." An ambitious task, a large-scale solution.
“The idea of the exhibition arose, if not 10, then certainly 5 years ago. There was a desire to show architecture through it itself, without hiding from the profession. How do we show architecture? Or tablets, which annoy everyone, stuck in their teeth and require a special effort to understand what they are about. Or installations, which, on the contrary, are spectacular, but usually leave the architecture itself and become a kind of means of professional escapism. And many people can build mountains of models, as at Foster's exhibition, and this is not interesting. Or turn everything into a video stream, like at the Renzo Piano exhibition, which, by the way, I really liked. But all this is only part of the myth, and I wanted to show the whole myth. Show architecture from itself, show that architecture is beautiful. Why are we so shy about showing architecture? We think it's terribly boring. And this is not boring, it is interesting! We decided to make the show in layers, gradually immerse the viewer, explain and tell, go, on the one hand, from installations, but not neglect the show of the architecture itself."
Studio 44 has existed for 25 years, and if you count from PTAM, founded by Nikita Yavein in 1991, then 30, so the anniversary is double. As stated in the very first explication, in the portfolio of "Studio 44" there are more than 200 works, 45 of them have been realized, and not only in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Russia in general, but also in the capital of Kazakhstan, Astana, which, in general, allows us to consider the activities of the workshop international. It also says about more than a hundred awards; Studio 44 was the first Russian architect to become the finalist-winner of the WAF in 2015, with two projects at once: the first stage of the Boris Eifman Dance Academy and a project for the reconstruction of the center of Kaliningrad. Then in 2018 their project for the Museum of the Blockade won the WAF in the category “Culture. Project".
The exhibition shows 70 layouts for 44 projects in the hall of layouts and 38 projects in the Archive hall, that is, a little more than half, not everything, but only the most important thing, however, as we can see, there were more than a hundred works of the most important.
So we must admit that Nikita Yavein is right in his double approach to the exposition: when the conversation is about tens of years and hundreds of works, it is necessary to capture the viewer and explain to him.
Each of the large halls has its own set design and internal storyline.
The first hall is a large amphitheater of the entrance, it shows itself rather, here at the bottom of the arcade rolls of cripples are fixed, on which you can write reviews, here begins the story of the Anfilade: with many sketches of the amphitheater, showing us that it could get almost any shape.
The niches of the embedded windows in the wall to the right of the stairs are marked in red: “this is a wound of the building, although healed,” the architects explain. The wall of the building near the Moika was weakened, first by a fire 100 years ago, then, relatively recently, by the construction of a parking lot for a residential building nearby. To strengthen the wall, it was decided to lay 18 openings - they are marked with color, as a reminder of the history of the building. The story is told on one of the tablets, and yet the question is stuck in my brain why the windows are red, which is why all the way you pay attention to the red elements, which allows the latter to unambiguously fold into a leitmotif or “red thread”.
The thread is found here under the feet - along the axis that was found by the architects during the design and marked with a strip of translucent green glass, attractive and durable, withstanding up to 500 kg per 1 m2, so you can safely jump on it (just not all together!) - a red strip of phrases extracted from the main interviews of Nikita Yavein, in Russian and English, about creativity and practice, is now glued along this axis built into the suite. I was not too lazy to read the first two phrases, they sound like this: “I have always been interested in what is associated with the construction of a house as a kind of complex mechanism, which is based not on mechanical, but cultural principles. Sometimes there is only one prototype, sometimes there are several of them at once. Some are "fleeting", others claim to be the initial basis for building things, prototypes are not necessarily historical or even architectural, they can be taken from the natural world, shipbuilding, children's toys and whatever."
“It is difficult to call them a manifesto; rather, they are notes,” says Nikita Yavein. But it’s not easy to read them, except perhaps to set such a goal and go from the beginning to the end, and so - the words rather catch glimpse: “customer”, “prototypes” - some teletype or telegraph tape accompanies us all the way, but not focused attention pretends.
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zooming 1/4 The circles in front of the base of the large staircase are decidedly avant-garde, and at the same time linear Studio 44. Enfilade. 02.2020 Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 2/4 Studio 44. Enfilade. 02.2020 Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 3/4 Studio 44. Enfilade. 02.2020 Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 4/4 Sketches of the main staircase. Bottom line. Studio 44. Enfilade. 02.2020 Photo: Archi.ru
In the second hall we are greeted by a kind of propylaea: a brown wooden trailer on the right does not belong to the exhibition, it is part of the permanent exhibition of the Hermitage, an installation by Ilya and Emily Kabakov. Reacting to such a neighborhood, the architects placed a metal container on the left, battered with life, with rust, as if straight from the construction site: “you only knew what it cost to agree on it, and then lift it up,” Nikita Yavein comments on the decision.
The container is installed on red steps, which seems to signal: do not pass by, there is something important in it. According to the author of the exposition design Sergei Padalko, it was from here that the unifying red color came - this was the fireproof paint for the steps under the container, and then it went.
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zooming 1/4 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Courtesy of Studio 44
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zooming 2/4 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 3/4 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 4/4 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Photo: Archi.ru
In front of the container there is an installation, still life of an architect: rolls of drawings, small models, keyboards, samples of building materials, bricks and bricks.
Inside the container, they show a movie about buildings, but not a dry report-re-election, but an artistic one: fragments of the shooting alternate against the background of rhythmic music and form from roofs, streets, arches, streams of people and other rhymed patterns similar to pictures of a kaleidoscope. Forcing to see small in big, or big in small: a kind of patterns of the life of buildings - which, meanwhile, if you know at least a little the portfolio of "Studio 44", are easily recognizable. The buildings were chosen, according to Nikita Yavein, "lived", and then the shooting was cut frame by frame under the direction of director Ivan Snezhkin, with the participation of architects. Video - one of the main tools for our contemporaries' interaction with reality - is designed to immerse us in the world of buildings, it also emphasizes their reality and habitable habitability, which is important: there are many realizations.
The third hall is occupied by an exhibition of models installed in the construction of scaffolding - this is
exhibition of the Architect of the Year, shown by Nikita Yavein in 2017 at Arch Moscow, but "substantially revised and expanded." Wall stands will allow you to explore all 44 projects. You can climb the scaffolding: the walkways are all lined up along the same axis and give one more point of view of the Enfilade, not to mention the fact that they figuratively immerse us in the labyrinth of the profession, allowing us to succumb to the charm of architectural models made in different materials, with varying degrees of detail, some wooden, some illuminated …
“They don’t believe in pictures, they also stopped believing in films, they say, you never know what you will draw there. And people still believe in layouts, they are handicraft and material,”says Nikita Yavein, calling the installation on the woods“the city of layouts”.
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zooming 1/5 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Courtesy of Studio 44
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zooming 2/5 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Courtesy of Studio 44
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zooming 3/5 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 4/5 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 5/5 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Photo: Archi.ru
Indeed, the layout is one of the best ways to show architecture, it allows you to look at the building at once and from above, and from all sides, it creates a sense of understanding and involvement in the beholder, it, in addition, has the effect of a "dollhouse" that allows you to feel himself as a kind of Gulliver, a supreme being, looking out the window to the Lilliputian figures and, as if, understanding everything. A wonderful thing is this opportunity to look down on something big, on a house, a museum, a theater. Usually they are bigger than us, but here on the contrary. So, one must think, Nikita Yavein is right, layouts as a genre will never die out.
At the same time, both the real container, so sharply contradicting by definition the palace space of the Hermitage, and the scaffolding are elements of the construction, which are also used as a leitmotif throughout the exhibition in order to show different sides of the profession. Construction is one of these sides. In the fourth, largest hall, a thin metal lattice resembling a formwork - a masonry mesh - reminds of her. It is graphic, transparent, regular and at the same time, due to its incompleteness, it is intangible or conditionally material, like a drawing. This is where the drawings are shown - first of all.
The idea belongs to Sergei Padalko, who, in addition to working with the actual design of the exhibition, also contributed a lot to ensure that it occupies the entire Afilada as a whole, and not several halls, as originally intended. The architect, head of the Vitruvius and Sons bureau, has long known Nikita Yavein: they have been teaching in the same studio of the Academy of Arts for more than 10 years. Therefore: "we worked in a communication mode." Nikita Yavein invited Sergei Padalko for an "external point of view" and admits that he agreed with most of the proposals.
“I considered my main task to be working with space and I think I succeeded. I liked working with the General Staff, perhaps because I was immediately convinced that there was no need to fight with it. He needs to play along. Everything is already there.
I think that the suite is a good exhibition background for showing the work of Studio 44, since it is very diverse, and the alternation of halls allows us to consistently develop different plots.
And the idea with grids came with lightning speed. As soon as I entered this courtyard, it became clear that it was impossible to just leave him, because he is very strong. On the other hand, it is also impossible to "win", to overcome it. Therefore, there must be something large and transparent. For some time we thought whether to take a 5 mm or 6 mm grid, drew a computer model, and the 6 mm grid seemed to us rough and expensive, frankly speaking. The fact that now, in my opinion, is just right. The mesh is suspended and weighted with concrete blocks, so that visually the gratings grow from them as from the foundations. The construction continues the theme of building materials, honest, open, such as we love - this theme is one of the leitmotifs of the exhibition."
The stands were made of the grid, carrying tracing paper with drawings printed on it and sheets with renders and photographs, hung at eye level. Above the pictures, the grids go into the space of the largest hall of the suite almost to the ceiling, so that it is filled with flickering lines that look like construction lines or unfilled formwork at a construction site, like something unfinished, but very daring, suggesting almost endless growth in different directions. and - regular, non-chaotic.
The spatial, as if tulle, pattern, leaving in height, begins to live some kind of life of its own: you might think that, here, visitors to the exhibition are talking in front of the pictures, and the lines above, where there are no people, are talking about something different. Maybe some kind of intelligence of "big data" inaccessible to our reason is being born there? They do not explain to us why, in a practical sense, the grids have grown so high, what are the benefits of such use of building materials - and in itself this unmotivatedness is good as a technique that generates meaning, since it makes us think about the nature of our perspective perception, which is basically harmonious and predictable., for which Paolo Uchello loved him so much; but as soon as spatial constructions grow and multiply, they easily turn, as here, into a metal cloud.
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zooming 1/5 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Courtesy of Studio 44
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zooming 2/5 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 3/5 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 4/5 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 5/5 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Photo: Archi.ru
In addition, the grid seems to be a paraphrase of those scaffoldings that we saw in Hall 3, and looks great from these scaffoldings.
Buildings on the right, projects on the left. At first, the renders and photographs, the "beautiful" representative part, were hung facing the entrance, then, the day before the opening, - says Nikita Yavein, - they outweighed the opposite, placing the drawings, mainly from the category of RD, "working", forward. The decision must be recognized as correct: the lines of the drawings entered into resonance with the lines of the grid, the translucent tracing paper rhymed with the constructions of the grids against the background of gray walls. So when we enter, we plunge into the silvery-shimmering haze of drawings, become a part of it, join the mystery of creating - and reading - an architectural project. Which meets one of the goals of the exhibition - "to tell about the kitchen." But, apparently, not only to tell, but also to show its beauty, the beauty of the drawing: “It always seemed to me that the worker is more interesting than anything,” emphasizes Nikita Yavein.
But in the fourth hall there is also an interesting roll call of scales: the transition from the cyclopean to the small, human. Although the grids grow up like a forest, below we find projects and buildings - like mushrooms, there is a lot of information, and you can wander and study for a long time.
“It turned out to be an ideal chamber, in a good way. Surprisingly, although I participated in the editing, during the process and, apparently, in the hustle and bustle it was not felt - and when I entered here, when everything is ready, I look - what a home exhibition it turned out, how human it is. I was expecting something overwhelming, large, pompous, but I see the ideal scale, as if the courtyards of the Hermitage had become the rooms of Studio-44.
I must say that far from everything that Studio-44 has been doing for 25 years, and even for 10 years, while I have been working here, is on display here. It's amazing how much has been done during this time. In a working environment, this is not very felt, we are all the time immersed in the process, and the exhibition creates detachment and you can appreciate how much human labor is invested in this work."
The fifth room is dedicated to the "origin of the form". It also serves as the main mechanical attraction, an example of a transformable exposition, although we emphasize that the possibility of transformation is laid in all three halls that were formed in Rossi's bulkheads. Now one of them is working as an example, but all can transform.
The red thread - the axis of statements - grows in the center of the hall with a pedestal of red glass; it supports a 3D printer that prints layouts of iconic projects, which are gradually placed here on the walls. On the pedestal there are fragments of texts designed to reveal the essence of the issue. The hall was occupied by the architect Ivan Kozhin.
“Finally, the Enfilade is being used as it was intended. Actually, the main idea of the exhibition is to show how its space can function. Perhaps more information could have been given, or more could have been said about the actual process of work, but the exposition turned out to be integral, it has its own script and it looks impressive.
Hall The Origin of Form is devoted to answering a question, or maybe even a reproach: many colleagues say that Studio 44 has no style. Indeed, the works are very different. But they always have a certain conceptual basis, which to one degree or another turns out to be more important than an external impression. We show from what things form is born: in the case of the train station in Sochi, these are, on the one hand, streams of people, and on the other, some natural associations with a bird spreading its wings, in the project of the Museum of the Blockade - collective memory, more emotional things that we show in the form of paintings, large light boxes. For each of the educational projects shown, we also show the sources of reflection.
I must say that this desire to explain, to tell why is one of the features of working with Nikita Igorevich [Yavein]: it is not enough for him to show something beautiful, it is important to explain why it is necessary. A purely visual thing without motivation will not be perceived. There are many different objects, completely different, but all of them are held by some kind of ideological structure. It helps. In addition, a lot of people work in the bureau, this approach helps them not to lose themselves, to show themselves more actively than if they had to act in the prescribed manner of the master. There are more grounds for partnership and independence of the participants in the process”.
Indeed, as historian and critic Hans Ibelings defines, relying on the "theory of the linguist Noam Chomsky about the existence of deep and superficial structures in language", the architecture of Studio 44 is built on a "solid and consistent" deep structure ", despite the fact that its" superficial the structure can have many different manifestations”- his article from the workshop portfolio book is quoted on a pedestal in the center of the hall.
Architectural solutions are multi-layered, they can combine several different ideas and meanings of different generations, - emphasize other comments here. With the complex composition of ideas unexpectedly rhyme layers-strings, superimposed on each other by a 3D printer, and the "layering" of the transformable hall, in which two versions of the exposition are packed.
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zooming 1/4 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Courtesy of Studio 44
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zooming 2/4 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Courtesy of Studio 44
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zooming 3/4 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Courtesy of Studio 44
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zooming 4/4 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Courtesy of Studio 44
The Hall of the Origin of Form is a kind of point, further the story of the Anfilade unfolds. The next atrium, with sculptures, which, like the Kabakovs' trailer, are part of the permanent exhibition of the State Hermitage Museum, is planted with linden trees. They should bloom in March and turn green in April. Trees are planted in tubs provided in all the atriums of the Enfilade - all of it could be an alternation of transformable halls and conservatories; let's think that now the gardens have a chance to appear, and the mechanisms are more often used.
In addition to trees in the background, banners with plans and sketches of the General Staff wing appear here, which echo the equally large graphics at the very end and make it clear that now we are talking about the building in which we are located.
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zooming 1/3 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Courtesy of Studio 44
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zooming 2/3 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 3/3 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Photo: Archi.ru
The next, penultimate hall, Nikita Yavein calls “the iconostasis: the local rank and so on …”, comparing his methodology with the Hall of Form: there is external, here is internal. “Here we completely exposed, showed everything from the first, a few naive sketches. That is why the students like the hall so much,”explains the head of Studio 44, admitting at the same time that he does not plan to do this anymore.
The hall is completely filled with photographs and sketches hung on the walls, which, in my Moscow opinion, more resemble not an iconostasis, but a palace tapestry, popular in the 18th century. But let there be an iconostasis. All contours are red, echoing the "red line". Here the leitmotif is again scattered with a multitude of pictures, some of which are so high that it is impossible to make out. Closer to the eyes, stands-tables, which, on the contrary, are easy and simple to look at. On these tables are original drawings by one of the co-authors of Enfilada, now the late architect of Studio 44, Vladimir Lemekhov. The hall is partly transformed into a monument, a monument to all the efforts invested in 12 years of design and construction.
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zooming 1/6 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Courtesy of Studio 44
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zooming 2/6 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Courtesy of Studio 44
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zooming 3/6 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Courtesy of Studio 44
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zooming 4/6 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Courtesy of Studio 44
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zooming 5/6 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Courtesy of Studio 44
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zooming 6/6 Studio 44. Enfilade. Exhibition opening, 02.2020 Courtesy of Studio 44
The logical conclusion is the sharp birdlike nose of the Singing Ladder, similar to the outline of origami in plan. Its configuration echoes the large staircase-amphitheater of the entrance, but there is a ledge, and here there is a ledge, as if they were part of one wave passing through the General Headquarters or even a wave lifted by the space of the Enfilade directed to the northeast.
Here, however, there is a discrepancy in design: the sharp nose, along which we all studied the features of the Empire architecture, is turned to the right, towards the bridge, and the axis connecting the rooms of Enfilada and found by the architects of Studio 44 in the chain of courtyards of the General Staff building looks directly at Petropavlovka, on her spire. The commentary honestly says: Karl Ivanovich Rossi hardly had this axis in mind. But the architects found it, "put on" huge doors on it, turned it into a new plot, partly read by them in the structure of the building, partly imputed to it - but with what power and passion this mental structure was embodied in real forms.
Now the New Grand Enfilade is directed to the spire by a glass line drawn in the floor, underlined in the exhibition by a red line of words, and in the last hall it is held by a metal grid with candy angels - a treat for those who have reached the end, also designed to remove pathos. Nevertheless, the exhibition is large, affects many feelings, and the angel on a stick turns the viewer's involvement in the works of 25 or 30 years into something light and unobtrusive, into something that is easy to carry.
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Petersburg, as you know, consists of axes, around which the houses of the avenues were then built. And his sky consists of golden spiers and angels on them, more precisely, only their presence above the "heavenly line" drawn by the words of Academician Dmitry Likhachev is recognized by everyone as legitimate. In this sense, the Studio 44 Enfilade is perceived as a reflection on the theme of the city in general and self-reflection in particular. The found axis takes on the features of a revelation whispered from above in the course of a long search; in itself, the background of the project, "strung" on the line, explained and conditioned by it, turns out to be an idea from the category described in the Hall of Form. And the entire exhibition in general, directed to where, invisible from the hall, but soaring, we know, the golden angel on the spire, is read in the end as an appeal not only to real spectators and colleagues, but also to a higher power - that heavenly, which, from the depths of reverse perspective, is capable of weighing both the contribution and the effort. We are not accountable to people. There, from above, the angels look at us as if they were figurines in a model, they easily read all the inscriptions, and in general they know everything, everything, everything.
