20 years ago, the author of this book wrote an article about a house near Moscow. It began like this: “The country house of the 'new Russian' is a topic for an anecdote, not for an architectural review. At the same time, other attributes of this character - a Mercedes, a jacuzzi, a cell phone - are, as a rule, of high quality, and one can only laugh about red-brick castles with columns. Private houses in post-perestroika Russia were built rapidly, but until the mid-90s there was almost no architecture in them. It is also characteristic that there was no tree in them.
There were many reasons for this. First, paradoxically, it is the power of tradition. The Soviet government achieved its goal: the tree began to be associated exclusively with history, and therefore with a departing way of life, with something patriarchal and marginal. The New Russian man, for the most part Homo soveticus, was for a long time excluded from the opportunity to be modern and had to be satiated with this opportunity. Urban children in the late Soviet Union (including the author) were terribly embarrassed by round dances, sundresses, ditties and other folklore, invariably attached to the theme of "hut". It was absolutely not recognized as "our own" - not only because of the historical distance. And not only because it smacked of propaganda. You had to be Pushkin in order to give the nanny's fairy tales a modern sound. But even the prose of the "villagers" - honest, vigorous, homely - seemed more ethnography than literature. The tree has become problematic for us. It seems to be native - but not close. Simple but incomprehensible. Nice - but ridiculous. Childhood awkwardness grew into snobbery. Secondly, the 90s were the era of easy money, along with the heady freedom, there was a feeling of fragility and temporality. In this situation, the reliability and strength of the house acquired special significance - and wood in this sense is still inferior to brick. Thirdly, the question of self-identification was extremely important. Of course, Russian people have always been proud of their home, but never, as it seems, the substitution of representativeness for reality has reached such an extent as in the 90s, and even in the 2000s. The image of wealth became dominant, and wood, as the cheapest material, did not fit into this image at all.
In this sense, the Finnish company HONKA, which came to Russia in 1995, made the exact move. She positioned her product not as a house for the middle class, as in Finland, but as a very expensive house, which, of course, dramatically increased the status of the tree in the eyes of the customer. At the same time, the first HONKA houses in Russia were very traditional both in appearance and in material: they were made of logs. And only a couple of years later, a key position was taken by glued beams, from which 90% of its houses are produced today. The problem of materials in general slowed down the development of the plot for a long time. Despite the fact that Russia held the first place in world forest reserves (22%), the bulk of the 80 billion cubic meters of timber produced annually went abroad as raw materials, and only a fifth of it was processed domestically, which gave only 1% of GDP. And another 70% of potentially suitable timber rotted on the vine … Normal glued beams appear only at the beginning of the 2000s, and even then they bring it at first from Germany and Finland, frame technologies come from Canada. And if in America in those years the share of wooden houses was 80%, then in Russia it was only 5%.
In addition, in the 90s they lost everything they could: school, craftsmen, and technology. Once upon a time, each building university had a corresponding specialization, everywhere there was a special course in wood, there was a whole school of Heinrich Carlsen, there were three dozen factories that produced glued timber. But in the 90s, only one remained of them in Volokolamsk, and the only research and production unit was the Central Research Institute of Building Structures, in the "wooden" sector of which, by the way, reinforced wood was invented, which increases the strength of the structure several times. But there were only seven people working there, under the supervision of Stanislav Turkovsky, a student of Carlsen! Architect Igor Pishchukevich, partner of Totan Kuzembaev, said with bitterness in 2000: “National tradition is a myth. Except how to cut, but in large quantities, we do not know how to do anything with a tree. We order glued constructions from the Finns, calibrated timber - in the same place, parquet, doors, windows - from Italians”.
Not that there were no projects of wooden houses in the 1990s at all. Some strings continued to be drawn from past years: for example, the main enthusiast of the Soviet wooden house, Mark Gurari, puts at the Construction Exhibition on Frunzenskaya Embankment a new version of his successful house in 1985, but with Velyuksovsky windows in the roof (1995). And the main conductor of Alvar Aalto's ideas in the USSR, the architect Andrei Gozak, is reconstructing a wooden house in Peredelkino (1996), foreshadowing almost all future moves and techniques. The best projects of the Soviet years (including the winners of the 1982 competition) are collected in the book "Wooden house from small to large" (1999), which is in great demand. But all these are very traditional houses, although back in 1992 the Architectural Gallery of Irina Korobina and Elena Gonzalez organized an exhibition My Dear House, which demonstrated a wide range of modern styles: there was also neo-constructivism (Villa Rosta by Alexander and Marina Asadov, villa "Shibolet" by Mikhail Khazanov), and neo-rutalism (house in Golitsyno by Dmitry Dolgiy, villa in Pitsunda by Dmitry Bykov and Igor Kochanov), and neo-modern (project by Alexey and Sergei Bavykin), and neo-symbolism (house in Nemchinovka by 2R Studio), and romantic a cross between Gothic and Art Nouveau (projects by Dmitry Velichkin and Nikolai Golovanov), and log minimalism (house in Mozzhinka by Evgeny Assa).
Despite the fact that among these projects were wooden, we do not see any special reason for the revival of wooden architecture in the 90s. "Paper architecture", which became the main university of new Russian architects, did not operate with any specific materials at all. And although Yuri Avvakumov makes his famous fantasies on the themes of constructivism out of wood, it is in the choice of material that a certain irony appears towards the life-building claims of the Russian avant-garde. Nevertheless, it is the "wallets" - Mikhail Labazov, Totan Kuzembaev, Alexander Brodsky - who are building the first wooden objects, and from the two legendary objects of the latter - the restaurant "95 degrees" (2000) and the Pavilion for vodka ceremonies (2003), one can probably generally counting the history of the latest Russian architecture. Both of these structures, as well as Labazov's Plavdom 6 (2000), as well as the Cat Dazur restaurant by Kuzembaev (2003) and his own boathouse 12 (2002) and red guest houses 16 (2003), as well as Evgenia's cottage 14 Assa (2004), - all of them are being built on the territory of the Klyazminskoe Reservoir, which will soon be called simply Pirogovo. It is to this place (and its owner, Alexander Yezhkov) that we owe a lot to the emergence of a fashion for modern wooden architecture. This is practically our Abramtsevo, where the neo-Russian style came from. And this is not a loud comparison, given that in these first years, from 2002 to 2005, the Melioration festival (Art-Klyazma) takes place in Pirogovo, which collects all the brightest, funny and progressive, what was in contemporary Russian art. That is, a new architecture is being born under the sign of art.
Another "place of power" is the village of Nikola-Lenivets, which is becoming the center of Russian land art. First, Nikolai Polissky, together with the villagers, sculpt a thousand snowmen, then they sculpt the Tower of Babel from hay, and in 2001 they also build the first object made of wood, more precisely from firewood, a giant woodpile. Then there will be the "Media Tower" woven from a vine (2002), "Lighthouse on the Ugra" from an elm tree (2004), and in 2006 the first festival "Archstoyanie" will be held in the village, which will endow the world with such wooden masterpieces as "Nikolino's ear" by Vladimir Kuzmin and Vlada Savinkina, Sarai from Meganom, Half-Bridge of Hope by Timur Bashkaev.
Another important for wooden architecture festival, but already purely architectural - "Drevolyutsiya", is held for the first time in 2003 in Galich. Nikolay Belousov takes 20 students there and anticipates the transformation of cities, which will begin in 2010 with the reconstruction of Gorky Park. “We, the students of Moscow Architectural Institute, then raved about Hadid, Bilbao and other“progressive crooks,”recalls Daria Paramonova. - And it seemed to us that some conservatives, “lovers of antiquity”, were engaged in wood. And when Belousov invited us to go somewhere 500 km away to build something out of wood, it was completely incomprehensible what, apart from the "hut", we could build. But we went. " And they built: a canopy over the spring, a bus stop and several gazebos. Belousov himself, back in 2001, unexpectedly left the respectable firm of Sergei Kiselev and began to build wooden houses, creating his own production in the same Galich.
In 2005, the first Cities festival takes place in the Sukhanovo estate. Young Moscow architects construct a dozen art objects on the pier in two days. Inspired by the results, the organizers of the festival - Ivan Ovchinnikov and Andrey Asadov - begin to hold the festival twice a year, each time climbing further and further from Moscow: to Baikal, Altai, Crimea, Greece. Young architects from all over the country come to these festivals, spend their time creatively in extreme conditions, learn to work with wood and build the most incredible objects. In 2011, the festival will find a permanent residence in the Tula region - at the "ArchFarm", where objects are being built, whose names reflect the current craving for multifunctionality: "floating office", "flower bed", "light shop" … Here in 2013 Ivan Ovchinnikov will collect his the first DublDom.
The first stage of modern wooden architecture is summed up by the exhibition "New Wooden" at the Museum of Architecture (autumn 2009), which brings together 120 objects built over the previous 10 years. True, this number includes art objects from "Archstoyanie" and "Cities", and "Pirogov" cafes and restaurants, and actually there are not many houses. But the global crisis of 2008 changes not only the economy, paying attention to the most common and not the most expensive material, the mentality is also changing - imbued with modern trends in environmental friendliness, restraint, and simplicity. This turning point marks the emergence of the All-Russian ARCHIWOOD Prize (2010), which receives about 100 first, then 150, and in 2019 - 200 applications (and these are just completed projects). Considering that the first frontier in the development of modern Russian wooden architecture was the economic crisis of 1998, after which it appeared, and the second - the crisis of 2008, after which it acquired the character of a full-fledged phenomenon, it remains to be hoped that the crisis of 2020 will bear its positive results. And it is quite possible that it is the eco-friendly architecture made of wood, located outside the cities, that will turn out to be one of the pillars of humanity in this future.
XXI century: country house
Collecting this book, the author was worried that at some point it would still have to be sent to print and completed the observation of the development of wooden architecture, cutting it off at some random point. But the crisis of 2020 itself put the world on pause, and no matter how it continues, there is a feeling that we can talk about modern Russian wooden architecture as an established phenomenon. What is the hero of the book - a modern Russian wooden house? Is it possible to somehow generalize and characterize this phenomenon? Let's make a reservation once again that we are not talking about a wooden house in general, but only about one that is of architectural interest, but it is precisely such objects - extraordinary, experimental - that form the standard for the future.
The very first characteristic - the area - demonstrates the deafening variety of houses. Their areas vary from 4 sq. m (there are also buildings with an area of 6, 12, 14, 17 sq. m) up to 2731 sq. m (there are also smaller ones: 948, 830, 802 sq. m). You can, of course, say that the former are purely experimental, and the latter belong to a narrow segment of very expensive ones, while the bulk of the area is still from 100 to 300 square meters. m. And this alignment will fully correspond to the spread in the size of the hut, where, along with the huge houses of the Russian North (up to 500 sq. m.), there were very tiny houses (20-30 sq. m.), and a more massive standard of 100-150 sq. The number of storeys is simpler: as a rule, it is one or two floors, less often - three, but often there is a basement, and sometimes some kind of superstructure, that is, a third or fourth floor. Which, however, also does not differ much from the standards of a pre-revolutionary wooden house - one-story (but, as a rule, with an attic) or a northern two-story (also often with a light or attic). Unless the first floor in the northern huts was more often not residential, and today all the accompanying (transport, household, living creatures) are often assigned separate buildings. However, sometimes a garage or a bathhouse becomes part of the volume of a house - inheriting in this respect the huts of the North, where people, cattle, and the economy coexisted under a common roof.
Vertical zoning is usually standard: downstairs - public spaces (kitchen, living room, dining room), upstairs - bedrooms. Despite the fact that the production function of the modern house has gone, such a distribution almost repeats the organization of space in the hut (and even where it was one-story, the level of sleep was the second - half).
The two-level zoning of the main space (as a rule, in small houses) develops the theme of the beds: a mezzanine with a sleeping place or a workman opens into the living room area. Considering that the front of such a house often has solid glazing, we can talk about cell F of Moses Ginzburg. A rarer option is a complex multi-level space that inherits, rather, the villas of Paul Rudolph.
Speaking of the plan, we also see a wide variety of types. There are also such options familiar to the Russian North as the "house-bar", where all the rooms are successively strung on one axis, while the axis often ends with a terrace to its full end. Or “house with a verb”, that is, with the letter “G”, where the place of the utility yard between the two volumes is now logically occupied by the same terrace. The square plan is popular, which can only be conditionally attributed to the theme of the module, although the modern standard of lumber (6 m) is similar to the usual length of a log in a Russian hut (6–7 m). From the manor tradition comes a house with two equal volumes at the edges, but within it a modernist shift also arises. Palladio is calling out the cruciform plans, the "T" shaped plan recalls the town mansion, and the curved plate is, of course, already from the modernism of the 1950s and 60s. The main change is taking place in the functional set of premises. Zones of mental work (office, library, workshop), health zones (gym, sauna, bathhouse), cultural entertainment (cinema, billiards), as well as children's rooms are added to the usual zones-functions (kitchen, dining room, private rooms). And if in the old house the kitchen and the dining room were usually not separated, instead of the living room there was more often a "common room" (which also served as a bedroom), and instead of bedrooms there were just separate rooms, today they are clearly separated. In addition to the fact that the functional set has grown, become more complex and clearly structured, the size of the premises has increased, and first of all, the living room.
The living room serves as the center of the house, connecting (or combining) with the dining room and the kitchen, which also (minus sleep) follows the tradition of the common space of the Russian hut, where they cooked, and ate, and communicated. These three functions can be located on different floor levels, while being in a visual connection, which makes the space more complex and interesting. The main innovation in the solution of the living room (in addition to its necessarily large size) is the second light, which drastically changes its quality in comparison with the interior of the hut. In addition, the living room can be separated into a separate volume, symbolizing its title role.
The heart of the living room is usually the fireplace, which replaced the stove in this place (sometimes it is also present), and the center is a large table. This is the main stage of a modern house, which, like the rows of an amphitheater, is surrounded by floor levels, podiums, balconies and mezzanines. Meals and their preparation are the main content of suburban life, therefore, the cooking table can be turned into a pedestal. If the kitchen is separated into a separate space, then in it (in addition to its large size) it has become mandatory to have a window in front of the cook's eyes. In the role of the "red corner", where the icons were, now usually "plasma" is the second sacred cow of the modern interior, but sometimes the panoramic window argues with her for leadership. Another decoration of the living room is often a spectacular staircase to the second floor, sometimes practically a sculpture in space, which is also a product of modernism.
The modern Russian architect is inclined to avoid corridors in a country house, both for the sake of saving space and as a result of birth trauma (in small-sized Soviet apartments, corridors took up a lot of senseless space). However, if the customer is not constrained by the budget, then a corridor may well appear, and sometimes even a suite. Moreover, in Nikolai Belousov's work, it often turns into a passage - being illuminated from above or at the ends, which in an original way unites two traditions at once - the estate and the passage of the 19th century. From the same manor house tradition, a study came to a modern house - more often, of course, on the second floor (and even better in the tower), in order to provide the owner with due privacy. Bedrooms in attics and even in attics look romantic, especially if there is a sharp gable roof above them.
The most important place in a modern country house is the terrace, which has migrated from estates to summer cottages and has become the main meaning of the latter. The whole point of a summer residence is to be in nature (but not in the garden, which decisively separated the summer resident from the peasant) and at the same time still under the roof: so that you can breathe air, and drive teas, and talk conversations. The terrace today is supposed to be huge, sometimes in a third of the house, and it is even better to have as many terraces in the house as there are permanent inhabitants, which provides everyone with equal rights to fresh air (as well as to smoke). The terrace often climbs to the second floor, turning into a loggia, but this is rarely a balcony. It is characteristic that a veranda (glazed, but not heated, that is, a purely summer room) rarely appears in modern houses, and if it does, it is glazed from top to bottom.
The cult of the terrace is the main thing that distinguishes a modern country house from a hut. The peasant had no time to relax, therefore it appears only when people have free time - in the era of Chekhov's summer residents. But today, the terrace with full success also serves as a working area for workers of mental (and therefore, increasingly remote) work. (Entre nous, where else is it written so beautifully than on the terrace?) But first of all, of course, it is a place for communication, so the larger the terrace, the better. Therefore, today it is often made not fenced off - so that it seems even larger, and the connection with nature is even more obvious. For the same purpose, a tree can be passed through the deck of the terrace - the first to combine both of these techniques was Eugene Ass. Or, on the contrary, it is possible to decorate the terrace with a portico in a pompous manner - emphasizing its primary importance in the life of today's summer resident. But the terrace can not be dispersed, but deployed around the house - such a solution throws a bridge no longer to the hut, but to a completely different genre of wooden architecture - to churches and chapels, where such a gallery (gulbische) played a similar role, serving as a place for informal communication. This is not the only thing that a modern architect borrows from iconic architecture. Sometimes the volume of a house gets a polygonal plan reminiscent of octal shapes - creating a cozy space that embraces a person (quite in the logic of a cathedral action in a church), as well as obtaining additional views. The theme of "view" in general becomes fundamental both for the location of the house in space, and for the solution of its individual parts - in full accordance with the dream of the Filatov tsar: "So that it could be seen on it, / As on the map, the whole country, / Because I / No shit review! " Instead of balconies, however, they often make loggias, and bay windows, which first appeared in summer cottages, become another move to provide views. However, the most extravagant bay window drum of Totan Kuzembaev again brings us back to the hut - to the theme of the porch, which rises high along the wall of the log house. Actually, the porch can be rethought as an anti-porch - not protruding, but pressed into the body of the house.
True, this is not quite an innovation, but also a return to the forgotten: “The entrance through the basement is not as effective as a porch on pillars,” wrote Alexander Opolovnikov, describing a similar reception in the Tretyakov’s house from the village of Gar, “but it does have utilitarian advantages: it is not brought in by snowdrifts and is not flooded with rains”100. Through hole in the house of the "Khvoya" bureau resembles a lift in the northern house, which was made for horses and often with a through passage (so that the cart did not need to be turned around). But the open spiral staircase is, of course, "Makhorka" by Konstantin Melnikov.
Another element of the house - the window - becomes the main springboard for battles with tradition: there was little light in the hut. First, the windows increase in size and quantity, then they take on more and more diverse forms: vertical, round, panoramic ones appear. The latter is considered an invention of Le Corbusier, but the architect Eduard Zabuga disputes this fact: “My grandfather lived in a log house in Altai. Inside was a long scraped-out table, and along it stretched an equally long lying window without a single binding. And so you sit behind him, drink tea from a samovar and see the forest 180 degrees!”101 Window openings appear in the roofs, and Nikolai Belousov acts even more cunningly: he raises the roof on the rafters to glaze the space under it. The windows gradually grow into the entire facade, occupy the entire end of the house and eventually become walls.
The continuous glazing of the end makes the gable roof especially effective, which, in this way, seems to come off and soar. On a small volume, a single-pitched roof also works well, especially if it has a large angle of inclination. Real flat roofs are still rare in the Russian climate, so they often only disguise themselves as "honest modernism", turning out to be pitched, which, however, does not spoil the image at all. And the powerful overhang of almost flat roofs gives rise to the original image of wooden post-constructivism, where rectangular volumes and abundant glazing are responsible for the second part of the word, and the massiveness of the log carriage is responsible for the first part. Rare Art Nouveau half-hip roofs, pyramid-shaped, curved on glued beams, but it is popular to "wrap" the house with one material, when the roof imperceptibly flows into the walls. Of course, the hut was also cut from one material, but here we see rather an allusion to the flowing concrete of modernism. And Alexander Brodsky, on the contrary, tears off the roof from the house completely, while preserving both the traditional gable and the modern parallelepiped of the house itself.
The sharpness of the wooden house is given by the volumetric solution in the form of a modernist parallelepiped, which in some projects acquires the weight of a full-fledged architecton. The structuralist branch can be attributed to the volumes, where fragments were removed from the whole - and this can be both modernist bars and familiar houses under a gable roof. The fashionable theme of the world architecture of the 2000s - "facade as a cut" - has both a glazed version and a version where the cut is sewn up with boards in a wooden house. Houses with sloping skates or whole roofs move even further into sculpture, sometimes reaching an extreme degree of eccentricity. A cylinder or a dome looks more familiar (but therefore no less impressive).
The modernist theme of overcoming gravitation is expressed literally when the house rises on its pile legs, clearly trying to rid itself of the usual weight of the hut. It is significant that such houses are echoed not only by Le Corbusier, but also by barns and storage sheds that were torn off the ground so as not to rot, ventilate, escape from rodents and be accessible in heavy snow. Of course, only small objects can afford to fully hover, but piles are gaining popularity everywhere - as a more environmentally friendly solution. However, sometimes the house soars, relying on two points: in this book there are two houses-bridges. Sometimes the house, on the contrary, sinks into the water and goes sailing, and sometimes even in flight. Another favorite theme of the twentieth century - a rounded corner - is not structurally organic for a wooden house, but decorative solutions can be used to create the illusion of it - for example, a rail forming curved planes. Shutters have a similar status, radically changing the image of the house - up to its complete homogeneity. Or such a purely artistic device, like a facade made of firewood, which is used for kindling. This, of course, is an extreme case, but decorative solutions often have a constructive component: for example, for greater picturesqueness, you can release logs far away or, as it were, inaccurately fold them, imitating the natural aging of a log house. Alexey Rosenberg, on the contrary, develops a plane in depth, creating a "vibration" of two layers of the facade. Sergei Kolchin resorts to carving - albeit in an enlarged and schematized version, while Pyotr Kostelov plays a similar game with platbands - as if passing them through a computer, which, in combination with the modernist parallelepiped of the house, sounds especially poignant. He also uses a dozen different types of wood for decoration, and Boris Bernasconi embarks on the most risky path, introducing mirror pixels into the facade.
Another unexpected plot is the coloring of a wooden house: it can be either gray, imitating aging, or ever fashionable (but not in wooden architecture!) Black, rarely white, or suddenly even red - also, however, having analogs in traditional architecture, although not in a residential one. Or orange, which has no analogues anymore.
The last thing that has fundamentally changed in the wooden house is the main facade. The street of a modern cottage village has lost all the communicative meaning that it still had in Soviet dachas, not to mention the villages. But at the same time, it ceased to be that vanity fair, which was in the post-Soviet years. The archaic desire to wipe a neighbor's nose was supplanted by security paranoia, fences grew three meters (or even higher), due to
whose very nose was barely visible. And for the house it has become the norm to turn to the forest (site) in front, to the street - backwards: an expressionless, and often completely deaf facade (and sometimes merge with the fence). But on the other hand, the house opens up to the courtyard with all its fibers, to the extent that the facade plane seems to disappear, and a terrace appears in its place or a structure disassembled into layers that looks somehow especially defenseless and therefore attractive. This turn of the house to the site seemed to be a temporary phenomenon, "growing pains" - the same as the aforementioned vanity fair of the 90s. But the pandemic, during which we are submitting this book to print, makes us think that the atomization and autonomization of society (and, therefore, dwellings) will only increase. At the same time, the genre of the "wooden house outside the city" will unfold - for the same reasons - with renewed vigor. Fortunately, there is enough space in the country.
