Global sportswear brand Nike, in collaboration with urban planning consultants Strelka KB, has announced the winners of the competition to design a new Nike sports facility in Gorky Park, located at the heart of Moscow. The competition asked five of Russia’s leading young architecture studios – KOSMOS Architects, Rhizome, Novoe, Crosby Studios and Xора – to envision a “unique architectural object” that seamless integrates into the surrounding park environment, creating a landmark hub for sport and physical activity for Russia.
The Moscow government has just launched the biggest demolition program in the city’s history. Its goal is to get rid of 8,000 5-story residential buildings constructed in the Soviet era—it is probably the biggest program of erasure of modernist architectural heritage in world history. The main assumptions of the plan, as well as the press comments following it, show that we have forgotten what modernism was about, and what the real values of this architecture are.
A few years ago I published an essay titled Belyayevo Forever, dedicated to the preservation of generic modernist architecture. I focused on Moscow’s microrayons—vast, state-funded housing estates built in the Soviet era. In the essay, I explained the spatial and cultural values these prefabricated landscapes had. I also speculated about how one would go about preserving architecture that completely lacks uniqueness. The essay ended with a provocative statement: we should put Belyayevo—the most generic of all Soviet estates—on the UNESCO heritage list.
Known as one of the world’s grandest subway systems, the Moscow Metro is filled with materials more commonly associated with palaces or museums – marble and granite walls, bronze columns, and lavish chandeliers are just a few of the opulent textures you’ll find beneath the streets of Russia’s largest city.
Despite their renown, the Moscow government almost never allows professional photographers to capture the beauty of the stations. But in 2014, photographer David Burdney was finally given that opportunity. Visiting the system late at night after the metro had closed, Burdney was able to capture each station in its best light, and completely devoid of people.
Benjamin Bratton, Professor of Visual Arts and Director of the Center for Design at the University of California, San Diego, is the new Programme Director at Moscow's Strelka Institute. The New Normal is based on the premise that "something has shifted. [...] We are making new worlds faster than we can keep track of them, and the pace is unlikely to slow."
Have our technologies have advanced beyond our ability to conceptualize their implications? "One impulse," the course advocates, "is to pull the emergency brake and to try put all the genies back in the bottle." According to Bratton, this is hopeless. "Better instead to invest in emergence, in contingency: to map The New Normal for what it is, and to shape it toward what it should be."
After receiving his education at the Repin Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in St. Petersburg, Sergei Tchoban moved to Germany at the age of 30. He now runs parallel practices in both Berlin and Moscow, after becoming managing partner of nps tchoban voss in 2003 and co-founding SPEECH with Sergey Kuznetsov in 2006. In 2009, the Tchoban Foundation was formed in Berlin to celebrate the lost art of drawing through exhibitions and publications. The Foundation’s Museum for Architectural Drawing was built in Berlin in 2013 to Tchoban’s design. In this latest interview for his “City of Ideas” series, Vladimir Belogolovsky spoke to Tchoban during their recent meeting in Paris about architectural identities, inspirations, the architect’s fanatical passion for drawing, and such intangibles as beauty.
.jpg?1481904709&format=webp&width=640&height=580)
Update: We've amended the post with new images from Asymptote Architecture and new quotes from Asymptote Co-founder and Design Partner Hani Rashid.
Asymptote Architecture has revealed renderings of their design for a new Contemporary branch of the Hermitage Museum, to be located adjacent to a new residential district in the area of the former ZIL automotive plant in Moscow. Presented at the V Saint Petersburg International Cultural Forum by Asymptote Co-founder and Design Partner Hani Rashid, the museum will house a collection of contemporary art from 20th and 21st centuries.
