The book about the twenty-year period of creativity of the Moscow bureau of TPO "Reserve" was published by TATLIN in May this year in Russian and English. The event is expected and natural, although it cannot be said that there have never been any review milestones about the company's work before. It should be remembered two mono-issues of TATLIN magazine, published in 2007 and 2011, a two-volume gift catalog prepared by the TPO "Reserve" team as an accompaniment to the exposition "Vladimir Plotkin - Architect of the Year 2010" at Arch Moscow-2011, as well as thematic number 4 (157) 2017 of the magazine "Architectural Bulletin", dedicated to the thirtieth anniversary of the bureau.
Undoubtedly, the time passed by the "Reserve" team obliges today to generalize the experience. But not only the time line was the impetus for the creation of the book - and the author-compiler of the publication, the architect of the TPO "Reserve" and the author of this message spoke about this in her speech at the presentation. The idea of publishing "from within" the company has already been tested in the jubilee "AV": the statements of the bureau chiefs and their creative associates, who have been heading the Reserv workshops for many years, sound open, sincere and reflect the essence of joint work and collegial community. In the new publication, the "insider's gaze" is directed not at the internal corporate culture, but at the heritage of the bureau, and this heritage appears already as a segment of history that has suddenly moved away from us, separated by a thin, barely perceptible curtain of time …
It is obvious that from the period of perestroika to the present day, all domestic architects have created a colossal amount of work. The restructuring of the professional media during this time is no less obvious, as is the powerful information field that they have created by covering these works. But there is one more obvious fact: in parallel with the creation of this historical layer of architecture, scientific work was carried out to study it: the academic community gave a multilateral assessment, including in the context of the world architectural process, the ways of architecture of post-Soviet Russia. And one of the points of this assessment - or rather, its tasks - is a substantive scientific examination of the contribution of individual bureaus to Russian architecture and to world architecture. Which, of course, requires a critical examination of the bureau's activities from the standpoint of architectural theory and architectural practice. This was the impetus for choosing the form of the introductory article, which, in fact, is a classical architectural analysis in relation to the no less classical theoretical concepts of postmodernism. This is only the most initial, formal approach that can be used in the study of the creativity of an architectural studio, but, nevertheless, this approach solves its tasks of the primary definition of the architectural vocabulary of the office. It is especially interesting to do this while inside the workflow, because, on the one hand, as a co-author, you carry the reality of projects in yourself, and on the other hand, there is an opportunity for professional reflection, a more accurate and objective view, which should ultimately merge into a general scientific picture of the architecture of the post-Soviet era and, possibly, influence the development of the workshop's creativity in the future. That is why we are talking here about the "Reserve" in the perspective of new possibilities of historical assessment, which is determined by the very course of time, and at the same time, about a new, so far unknown to us, stage of creativity.
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zooming 1/7 TPO Reserve: 2000-2020. Vladimir Plotkin = TPO Reserve: 2000-2020. Vladimir Plotkin. Yekaterinburg, Tatlin, 2020 Photo © Maria Ilyevskaya
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zooming 2/7 TPO Reserve: 2000-2020. Vladimir Plotkin = TPO Reserve: 2000-2020. Vladimir Plotkin. Yekaterinburg, Tatlin, 2020 Photo © Maria Ilyevskaya
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zooming 3/7 TPO Reserve: 2000-2020. Vladimir Plotkin = TPO Reserve: 2000-2020. Vladimir Plotkin. Yekaterinburg, Tatlin, 2020 Photo © Maria Ilyevskaya
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zooming 4/7 TPO Reserve: 2000-2020. Vladimir Plotkin = TPO Reserve: 2000-2020. Vladimir Plotkin. Yekaterinburg, Tatlin, 2020 Photo © Maria Ilyevskaya
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zooming 5/7 TPO Reserve: 2000-2020. Vladimir Plotkin = TPO Reserve: 2000-2020. Vladimir Plotkin. Yekaterinburg, Tatlin, 2020 Photo © Maria Ilyevskaya
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zooming 6/7 TPO Reserve: 2000-2020. Vladimir Plotkin = TPO Reserve: 2000-2020. Vladimir Plotkin. Yekaterinburg, Tatlin, 2020 Photo © Maria Ilyevskaya
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zooming 7/7 TPO Reserve: 2000-2020. Vladimir Plotkin = TPO Reserve: 2000-2020. Vladimir Plotkin. Yekaterinburg, Tatlin, 2020 Photo © Maria Ilyevskaya
Now about the retrospective look. The book includes 47 of the most striking works of TPO "Reserve" for the period 2000-2020, the most characteristic from the point of view of the manifestation of the author's language in them and at the same time clearly reflecting the structure of the order for the specified period. With this selection of objects in mind, the chief architect of the bureau, Vladimir Plotkin, prepared for the presentation a blitz-review of the most important, from his point of view, architectural events in the life of Reserv over 20 years. Without repeating exactly the points of the report, which naturally broke into 20 statements, it is worth highlighting several major topics in this speech.
First of all, the theme of modern residential architecture in Russia was identified. According to the architect, this topic is becoming more problematic every year, and that is why it increasingly requires an emotional outlet and analysis. It was about a typological deficit, the result of which is a unified approach to the figurative solution of objects. If we talk about the transformation of assessments directly within the framework of the "Reserve", the criticism of what could be called "facade architecture", namely, the decorative solution of the facades of residential buildings using graphic patterns, which has acquired the character of a mass phenomenon in domestic architectural practice, was very interesting. … Considering that the graphic comprehension of the façade plane is one of the proprietary subjects of "Rezerv", then such an assessment from Vladimir Plotkin's lips confirms the reality of the acuteness of the problem. In its light, the house in Zagorskiy Passage (2000) - the object that opens the gallery of projects in the book - once again appears as an “exhibit” of some new form of urban housing in Russian realities and a sign of hope for positive changes in this area.
Another block covers the problems of urban planning, and at the same time, here it was a question of the period of active cooperation of "Reserva" with foreign architectural firms (from 2011 to 2014). Vladimir Plotkin presented a number of projects that embodied the idea of a diverse urban environment, which, from his point of view, is a condition for the full existence of a city. Competition projects of the International Financial
Center in Rublevo-Arkhangelskoye (2013), “The Gray Belt. Transformation”(2016), renovation of quarters of the Tsaritsyno district (2017).
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zooming 1/8 Illustration from a lecture by Vladimir Plotkin, 2020-13-11 Courtesy of TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 2/8 Illustration from a lecture by Vladimir Plotkin, 2020-13-11 Courtesy of TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 3/8 Illustration from a lecture by Vladimir Plotkin, 2020-13-11 Courtesy of TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 4/8 Illustration from a lecture by Vladimir Plotkin, 2020-13-11 Courtesy of TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 5/8 Illustration from a lecture by Vladimir Plotkin, 2020-13-11 Courtesy of TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 6/8 Illustration from a lecture by Vladimir Plotkin, 2020-13-11 Courtesy of TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 7/8 Illustration from a lecture by Vladimir Plotkin, 2020-13-11 Courtesy of TPO "Reserve"
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zooming 8/8 Illustration from a lecture by Vladimir Plotkin, 2020-13-11 Courtesy of TPO "Reserve"
Office and administrative facilities, which have become the bureau's trademark due to their vivid imagery, also found their place in the report. The newest competition project of the office complex of the Roscosmos company (2019) closed their series. In contrast to the poetic predecessors, abstract manufacturability, rigidity of spatial composition came to the fore in it. In a sense, here, too, "Reserve" did not abandon the desire to reflect the customer's profile, responding to the images of space stations and laboratories.
Finally, the Zaryadye Concert Hall (2018) is an epoch facility that demanded from the “reservists” all their accumulated professional and collegial qualities, endurance, perseverance in the implementation of the necessary, knowledge of modern trends in the construction of such facilities, which are demonstrated by the world “musical construction boom.
Publication of the book TPO RESERVE: 2000-2020. VLADIMIR PLOTKIN = TPO RESERVE: 2000-2020. VLADIMIR PLOTKIN would not have been possible without the initiative and patient work of the TATLIN publishing team. We are grateful to Eduard Kubensky, editor-in-chief of the publishing house and curator of the Zodchestvo-2020 festival for the kind words about the period of our joint work, uttered at the opening of the presentation, and for the opportunity to speak at the festival. In addition, we address words of gratitude to our sponsors, who not only financially supported the project, but also gave their comments on the technological features of individual projects of the "Reserve" on the pages of the book: SCHÜCO, U-KON Engineering, ARTCOR.
You can buy the book and find out more on the website of the TATLIN publishing house.
