Mouse: Let's get dry: let's play some dry-themed tricks - and that's it. Alice: What?
"Alice in Wonderland". V. Vysotsky, O. Gerasimov, N. Demurova, E. Gevorgyan and others, 1976
The present Architecture is the twenty-seventh, the festival is held every year for almost all thirty post-Soviet years; for a long time it took place in the Manege, now in the Gostiny Dvor. This year, many expected that due to the epidemic the festival would not take place, they sighed and planned for six months, but the festival is here, and even on November 13, when all other mass events will be banned, the festival, as the organizers told me, will work … So - welcome, nevertheless Zodchestvo is open for only three days, from Wednesday to Friday.
Tomorrow, Thursday, November 12, a new president of the Russian Union of Architects is scheduled to be elected at a re-election meeting parallel to the festival. The re-election of the AUA has already taken place, Nikolai Shumakov retained his place, and now
two contenders: incumbent president Nikolai Shumakov and Dmitry Narinsky.
So. Today, the curator of Architecture, Eduard Kubensky, head of the all-Russian architectural publishing house Tatlin, based in Yekaterinburg, walked, or rather ran, around Gostiny Dvor wearing a T-shirt with the inscription "Live forever", illustrating the theme of this year - "Eternity" as a living example.
Eduard Kubensky loves concept installations, and this year he definitely set himself the goal of filling the festival with them, inviting many architects to create 40 installations on the theme of "Crazy Ships", led by two of the craziest - at the entrance, made of plastic forks and foam sausages.
Structures that more or less resemble a boat filled almost the entire space along the sides of the central axial corridor.
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zooming 1/10 Zodchestvo 2020, Gostiny Dvor Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 2/10 Zodchestvo 2020, Gostiny Dvor Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 3/10 Zodchestvo 2020, Gostiny Dvor Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 4/10 Zodchestvo 2020, Gostiny Dvor Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 9/10 Zodchestvo 2020, Gostiny Dvor Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 10/10 Zodchestvo 2020, Gostiny Dvor Photo: Archi.ru
On the axis, the traditional basis of Architecture is hung - tablets with projects and buildings of the participants of the competition, candidates for the Crystal Daedalus, the main award for buildings, and Tatlin, the main award for projects. Thus, everyone got their own: the tablets are hung up quite traditionally, as always, and the installations arrange a real dance around.
But if you walk the corridor to the end, to the amphitheater-forum, and turn left, there is a remarkable installation not far from the directorate, where a coffin with the inscription Architecture is shoved into a garbage can with a hashtag # the funeral is canceled.
At first, this statement reads the message of either the festival itself, fortunately not far from the directorate's office, or the curator - there is no doubt that everyone waited in suspense until the last whether the Architecture would take place or not, and the coffin in the garbage seems to be something like a message that “hurry to bury us. But I managed to talk to one of the authors of the stand, Albert Zyabbarov from BAZA school, and it turned out that, firstly, the stand shows the space conceived by the youth branch of the union in the SAR building on Granatnoye, 12, which was reconstructed by Alexander Asadov 10 years ago.
It should be located on the ground floor and serve as a coworking space, as well as a place for communication and exhibitions for young architects. The name of the intended space is Pomegranate, after the name of the alley. And the inscription “communication is more important than money” on the floor also hints that the price of a full-fledged stand at the festival is too expensive for young architects. The place for the installation was provided by the Museum of Architecture, whose director Elizaveta Likhacheva accepted the "explosive" polemical installation, according to its authors, "with a bang."
A broken pomegranate is placed in the stand supporting the layout of the future coworking space - the symbol of its name.
But there are a lot of pomegranates at the exhibition - Eduard Kubensky made these fruits, symbolizing the Christian sacrifice, an element of navigation. The pomegranates lie on the navigation cubes with the exhibition plan and at some stands of the non-commercial program; QR codes are pasted on the pomegranates, opening which, we get the designation of our place on the exhibition plan. [UPD: It turned out that all the other grants were distributed around the exhibition by the authors of the installation # the funeral is canceled, and all QR codes contain a diagram of the passage to their stand. That's a whole box of grenades with codes lying on the stand. Well done. And the pomegranates, a symbol of the sacrifice of Christ, are interpreted by the authors as a symbol of the revival of the youth section of the Union of Architects. - Approx. author, 12.11.2020].
By the way, there are a lot of QR codes at the exhibition. It's time to switch to a hexadecimal communication system, to embed a reading chip in the brain.
If we talk about the applicants for the main award of Architecture, then in some years of work with the maximum chances for an award, they were grouped, uniting five or six closest applicants - but now it seems that this is not the case: the buildings and projects of the participants of the main competition are lined up to the right of the entrance, student projects on the left, and, perhaps, all. Traditionally, there are few Moscow projects, traditionally a lot of St. Petersburg ones. Churches are singled out in a separate group, which, one must think, is correct, a very specific genre, and, already less justified, projects presented, in addition to tablets, with models. But the latter is understandable - the reception ensures the best preservation of the exhibited models, since the central corridor is narrow, and no one will stumble over the exhibits in it. The largest of the layouts is the ITMO campus of Nikita Yavein, recently shown at Arch Moscow right here, in Gostiny Dvor (generally speaking, aberrations occurring between Arch Moscow and Architecture, especially after they began to take place in the same space, and even from for Covid, both in the fall - the subject of a separate study).
The main corridor, which is adjoined by the cells of the stands of the regions, several bureaus and parts of non-commercial expositions, is built, as usual, of plasterboard. By the way, the best stand is perhaps the Samara region, with a large squirrel wheel.
At the stand of the Rostov region, the main character is the updated memorial of the Sambek Heights, but alas, they could not name the architects of this project, and they, of course, are not indicated on the stand, which is a pity.
All installations and stands of special projects accompanying the central axis on both sides are made of expanded polystyrene of the Mosstroy-31 company, which, as a result, received a place for its own stand among the installations there, it shows sculptures from its own material, which looks like polystyrene, as well as paintings by the head of the company.
The installation space - a typical "periphery" - is occupied mainly by "ships". There are many of them, some authors have made two ships each. Some companies also made ships. One ship from a real old boat was made by the Norvex company, a man sits in it, plays the jew's harp and makes other sounds similar to shamanic rituals. All together - the special project "Hell, Heaven and Awe", reminiscent of "the staging of Dante's" Divine Comedy "in September 2020 in the village of Khuzhir on Olkhon Island on Lake Baikal.
Another large ship was made by Riverclack.
The same red (orange), but made of paper boats - Vladimir Kuzmin and students.
The Asadov brothers - one with a metal bowl with a handful of something black: "Humanity", the other with glass flasks, lamps and moss.
Alexey Ginzburg is a colorful “architect's dream”.
Mikhail Beilin - circles, some of which rotate, some do not.
Nikolay Lyzlov - a lattice structure with a Teddy bear inside and a mask of rainbow colors in the form of a flag.
Totan Kuzembaev continues to develop the national nomad theme: carpet and camels.
Alexey Kozyr and Alexander Ponomarev used the ship theme to show their design of the Memorial to the Perished Sailors in Kronstadt: the water there overflows and flows to the sea like tears.
School MARSH - many pictures.
And so on.
Among the special projects is the stand "Permafrost" by Elena Petukhova, Andrey and Nikita Asadov, Olga Kudrina and Alexander Moshkirev, dedicated to the work of Alexander and Elizaveta Shipkov in Norilsk in the 1960s. There they came up with projects for "Polars", self-sufficient multifunctional complexes that allow them to survive the polar winter. Some of these projects have been published in Architecture d'aujourd'hui. The wind howls at the stand, there is a real drawer (a rarity!) And several old stools. The stand is very atmospheric and looks like a stand-alone exhibition that can be shown elsewhere.
The stand of BIF - the interior festival of the Union of Architects, which is mentioned very, very often in the exposition, not to say everywhere, with a secret: it is a frame of a three-dimensional space that will change every three days, demonstrating the power of the illusion of visual effect, or more simply coloring the walls. On the first day, the stand was painted according to the project of MAD architects - here real cubes echo the drawn ones, flaunting the similarities. Shadows from megabudka are promised on Thursday, op-art from CITIZENSTUDIO on Friday.
[UPD: it turned out that two festivals CAP, Zodchestvo and BIF are held in parallel on the same venue, one with the theme "Eternity", the other with the theme "Variability". The variability of the stand is intended to indicate the theme of the interior festival, and the works of its competition are exhibited on purple stands closer to the amphitheater-forum, - approx. author, 12.11.2020].
Further photo report. The non-commercial program of the festival includes: an important stand dedicated to the scientific works of Yuri Volchka, which can be downloaded and read, again, via a QR code; a retrospective stand of Dmitry Mikheikin with the Cathedral of Christ the Savior melting before our eyes; the Kaluga bench by Alexei Komov with an attempt to classify the types of city identity; the project "Identity in the typical", classifying typical recreation centers of the Soviet era (150 models) and the project by Evgenia Repina and Sergei Malakhov, classifying the Samara courtyards through the prism of "order", that is, the original order of the owners who organized the space; "Necropolis" by Yuri Avvakumov; exhibitions of Arhnadzor, School of Business and Design and RE-school Narine Tyutcheva.
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zooming 1/16 Zodchestvo 2020, Gostiny Dvor Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 2/16 Zodchestvo 2020, Gostiny Dvor Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 5/16 Zodchestvo 2020, Gostiny Dvor Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 6/16 Zodchestvo 2020, Gostiny Dvor Photo: Archi.ru
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zooming 9/16 Zodchestvo 2020, Gostiny Dvor Photo: Archi.ru
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There are many different things. Although, like Arch Moscow in 2020, the Architecture looks quite spacious, let's say, unrestrained, cannot be compared with 2007.
What, perhaps, the curator really managed to achieve, since it was not possible to achieve free participation of architects in the competition, which was optimistically declared in the curatorial program, which won in 2019, is, perhaps, a balance between the non-commercial and the basic program of the festival. There are so many "ships" that you can wander between them for a long time, identifying and interpreting. Non-commercial stands are also numerous and extensive. Maybe once they huddled in the corners, but now they threaten to flood the center, and some flaunt with "looseness": now a rainbow flag, now a Belarusian ship, now a coffin - as, incidentally, is what artistic installations are supposed to do. But flying between the completely official stands of the regions and completely free, as well as completely mysterious, open for interpretation, ships, shows the diversity of our world, many borders and border plots, equal in the face of eternity.
A curator would not have been a publisher if he had not already published a catalog "written in the blood of a curator." You can understand it.
