Date
Author
Сергей ХАЧАТУРОВ; Венеция--Москва
Source
Preserved copy
Translated material
Contrary to architecture
The brand “radical humanism” suits the anniversary Venice Forum of World Architecture
Some architects and architectural critics perceived the main exhibition of the 10th anniversary Venice Archbiennale as a shock. The fact is that architecture itself, in the presentation that has become familiar to us in the form of layouts, models competing in the complexity of forms, a radical break with tradition and adherence to a new impersonal way of designing on a computer, is present at the forum to a minimum. By the will of the curator, Richard Burdett, professor at the London School of Economics and Business, architecture is recognized apophatically, through the study of the environment that it creates and for which it is responsible. Understanding the irritation of colleagues from color design magazines who came to the Biennale for a new portion of beautiful pictures with houses in the shape of exotic insects, I still consider Burdett’s program an outstanding humanistic message.About aesthetics and ethics
In 2000, the Italian modernist architect Massimiliano Fuksas, being the curator of the seventh architecture biennale in Venice, proposed the theme “Less aesthetics - more ethics.” The current biennale, dedicated to the theme “City. Society and Architecture”, communicates with that old one very friendly. It’s not just the motto that brings people together. Even the spatial design of the central exposition of the forum in the Corderi del Arsenale (a former armory 300 meters long) is similar. In 2000, Fuksas covered all the walls on one side of the corridor with giant screens on which videos were projected. Films on the theme of life in big cities. Construction sites were thundering, cars were rushing along the highways, the engines of taking off airplanes were roaring, crowds of people were buzzing on the avenues... In general, here they are, the delights of urbanism. And I remember, in front of this long wall of thundering screens with giant images, I felt pathetic, weak and insignificant. What does a monster city care about some person!
This year’s exhibition is about this connection, full of dramatic collisions, between the metropolis and its inhabitants. At the entrance there is also a panorama with shots of the life of the metropolis. Moreover, its design will cause pleasant nostalgia for Russian (more precisely, Soviet) people. The screens are located along the diameter of the circle, which causes a special stereo effect of perception. Visitors to the “all-round cinema panorama” at the former VDNKh in Moscow liked exactly this kind of attraction. However, the actual exhibition in Corderie is not of an entertaining nature.
Most of it - graphs, tables, diagrams, figures - a statistical report on the social, economic, cultural (including architectural) life of 16 selected cities. These 16 cities are the main characters of the biennale. They are located on different continents. Their populations range from three (Caracas) to thirty-five (Tokyo) million people. Among these cities there are extensively developing (Bogota), rapidly growing (Shanghai, Sao Paulo), and simply prosperous (London, Milan).
And so multi-colored maps, graphs and diagrams become signaling systems that attack the brain with information that is often not at all fun. In Europe, the population is aging, and in Cairo, crime is creeping across the map in bloody streaks. There are seams everywhere with the environment. In Mexico City and Bogota, neighborhoods are stuck next to each other, where for many kilometers you will not meet a family whose well-being is above the poverty line.
This archive, by the way, is perfectly installed. It least of all resembles lecture material from university professors. Maps flicker on super stylish screens. The numbers sparkle. Population density graphs, thanks to the ingenious solution of the designers, turned into three-dimensional foam mountains, like high-rise buildings in the Art Deco style. Aerial photography floats in a moving projection along the dividing bridges between neighboring cities. And crossing the border is scary - the city is alive under your feet, and your head is spinning. In one hall, on sixteen lying monitors, one day in the life of each metropolis is shown in accelerated mode. The camera motionlessly captures one shot. In Los Angeles, the area's skyline sparkles with disco fireworks. Myriad lights. And cars. And people. And in Johannesburg (South Africa), in a poor neighborhood, a rare car will drive along the chipped pavement, and the dim light in the windows will come on at night.
The general energy of this parallel existential space of warning, commentary signs and images is very strong. Has psychedelic effects. If we were to look for analogies in the world of cinema, we would have to turn away from the fun attractions of the Soviet all-round panorama towards the American anchorite philosopher, friend of the composer Philip Glass, and staunch anti-urbanist Godfrey Reggio. His films are always about the fact that civilization initially and inevitably strives for the destruction of itself. Documentary evidence of this in Reggio sometimes precisely rhymes with the images of the exhibition. In particular, Reggio's latest film, Nakoikatsi, opens with shots of eerie abandoned skyscrapers with broken glass and torn surfaces. We see exactly the same plans in the photos of poor high-rise buildings in Johannesburg.
At the exhibition in Corderie, architecture is responsible for many of the hardships of everyday life. Despite the fact that almost all sixteen chapters end with the announcement of new projects to improve urban infrastructure, the leitmotif remains alarmingly minor. And the main character is not the ambitious projects of creative stars (often taking little into account the realities of the environment and the context), but an unknown little resident of the giant city. All films in each of the sixteen sections of the main exhibition are dedicated to him. Getting from New York to Istanbul, from there to Mumbai (Bombay), we see approximately the same plans on the screens: people of all nationalities and ages are rushing about their business. Some are happy, some are annoyed. Some buy food at the market. Others in cars are stuck in traffic jams on the avenues. In every film, dark-skinned boys are sure to wash the windows of someone’s car. And for some reason the overall impression is one of restless fatigue. And not a single architectural program of modernism could cope with it. And the little man remained a stranger to the big city in many ways. And thanks to Mr. Burdett for this honest and uncomplimentary ethical conclusion for the archcommunity.
Nostalgia for the banal
In the pandan to Richard Burdett's program, the “alternatives” were exhibitors from most national pavilions, which, according to tradition, conceptually syncopate the main theme of the biennale. Projects of real architecture are not present in all country houses. And those that are visiting are dedicated to important social programs. The US pavilion, in particular, shows the possibilities of rebuilding housing in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And in the Israeli pavilion, models of monuments were installed in memory of great historical tragedies.
The leitmotif of the pavilion programs was the private, unambitious world of a small person, just a resident, just a city dweller.
The UK Pavilion depicts a unique experience of urban space (the city of Sheffield being the subject of the experiment), sounding as an imaginary echo for residents and unfolding in the perspective of subtle personal associative connections. The French set up a relaxation zone inside the steel scaffolding that sprouted in the pavilion and burst through its roof. On the first tier there is a kitchen and a disco. Up the stairs into the sky there is a swimming pool, a beach and hammocks. This is an extreme option for achieving personal paradise without the help of any abstruse architectural utopias. Conceptually, the design is reminiscent of the architectural objects of the village of Nikola-Lenivets, created by the artel of Nikolai Polissky and the architects Shchetinin in the Kaluga province. The Japanese profess a similar idea of “humble architecture” for the private individual, displaying environmentally friendly huts made of wood and stones in their pavilion.
It is not difficult to guess that the exhibitor of the Russian pavilion, Alexander Brodsky, who affirms the value of a banal living environment for the spiritual comfort of “a private person, and perhaps even an idle one,” fits perfectly into the context of the biennale. Thanks to the support of ROSIZO and private patrons, including gallery owner Marat Gelman and member of the Federation Council Committee on Economic Policy Sergei Gordeev, Alexander Brodsky launched a personal exhibition on all floors of the pavilion. Called it "Settlement". Brodsky decided to enter the Russian pavilion in the form of a wretched housing extension to the main volume of the building, built by the architect Shchusev in the pompous neo-Russian tower style of the early 20th century. An extension with aluminum walls and lanterns in barred bulbs hid the main staircase and connected the two spaces of the pavilion: the lower floor, where a slide film of Brodsky’s completed buildings is shown, and the upper floor, where several installations are collected, including a hospital gurney with an aquarium placed on it. It turns out to be a barrel organ. You turn the knob - the music creaks, and a blizzard swirls over the model of the sleeping area of the “Brezhnev boxes” illuminated inside the aquarium. The image of the space recreated by Brodsky turned out to be very intimate. And to understand it, you have to work hard with your soul.
It is surprising that our pavilion found a like-minded brotherly pavilion - Belgium. Label Bureau designed an environment called “The Beauty of the Ordinary.” Many black doors lead to the same white room, where there is nothing but transparent balls rolling on the floor. The exit from the opposite side of the same doors leads to a corridor with mirrors, which makes there an infinite number of doors. The black corridor actually encircles the white room, and in its end walls there are cinema halls, where the most banal city views are shown with a car wash, high-rise buildings, changing rooms on the beach, and a country road. And these views were filmed so piercingly tenderly and carefully in emotion that you fall in love with them no less strongly than with the view from the window of your own house in Brodsky’s video and the view of the lagoon staged by him in our pavilion. It’s generally wonderful because it catches the sun’s rays with a toy box made in the shape of a camera obscura, which contains a crib and an armchair. And the chair is turned straight towards the shining silver of the Adriatic waters. And silver trembles like a shadow on the dark wall of the pavilion.