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Paper architecture as a social phenomenon. Castles in the air: the most famous paper architecture projects

What is paper architecture? This is a very interesting phenomenon, which can not be described in a nutshell. Nevertheless, I would like to introduce you to paper architecture, especially since a lot of geniuses have grown on this soil.

The first paper architects are considered to be the Italian Giovanni Battista Piranesi (who built only one church in his entire life, but became famous for his architectural ideas).

Piranesi

Portrait of Piranesi

There are also quite a few French neoclassicists, such as Etienne-Louis Boulet (who also built little, but created more than 100 projects on paper).


In relation to the Soviet avant-garde, the term began to be used pejoratively: since the late 1920s, utopian paper projects have been condemned, including for "breaking away from reality." This meaning stuck: "paper architecture" was called impossible projects.



This is the work of Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, the main ideologists of the movement.

But not so much time passed, as this phrase acquired a completely different meaning. It happened in the early 80s.


Then the graduates of the Moscow Architectural Institute found a way to send their projects to international competitions of architectural ideas and began to win prizes there (in total they received more than 50 awards).

Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin

An informal group of young architects arose, about 50 people who in any case had no opportunity to translate their ideas into reality, so they began to create projects that were initially utopian and completely free.

Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin

Since then, "Paper Architecture" - projects created for the search for new forms without the purpose of their subsequent materialization. There was a lot of wit, gloomy irony, graceful constructions and implicit longing, all this was far from reality and did not aspire to it in any way.

Information market or sanctuary of 11 oracles.

An apartment for an islander family.

"Atrium, or a space where everyone can be big and small"

Museum of equestrian sculpture without riders. 1983

"Tombstone skyscraper, or city self-erecting columbarium", (together with Yuri Avvakumov) 1983

Theater of the Lonely Red Lady.

Architect: Mikhail Filippov

Resistance shaft. 1985

Tower of Babel. 1989

Atrium. First prize at the international competition 1985

information market. Honorable Mention Prize at the International Competition 1986

Monument in 2001. Honorable Mention Award at the International Competition 1987

Architects: Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin

Ilya Utkin and Alexander Brodsky

doll house

House for Winnie the Pooh.

Museum of the Disappeared Houses (Columbarium) - the first sheet.

Museum of Disappeared Houses (Columbarium) - second sheet.

Mountain-hole.

Villa Nautilus

Bridge over the abyss

city ​​turtle

Crystal Palace of the 20th century.

Museum of Urban Sculpture. Island of stability.

Bridge city.

Dome. 1990

A theater without a stage, or a wandering auditorium. 1986

Nameless river.

Ship of fools.

Opera Bastille.

Museum of Architecture.

Temple city.

Villa claustrophobia.

glass monument.

Untitled.

Forum of a Thousand Truths 1987

Monument 2000

Filippov Mikhail Anatolievich. R was born in 1954 in Leningrad.

Education:

In 1979 he graduated from the Leningrad State Academic Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. I. E. Repina.
In 1983 he joined the Union of Architects of Russia, in 1984 - the Union of Artists of Russia.

Urban planning projects:

  1. . 2009.
  2. (Moscow region).

Separate objects:

  1. Reconstruction of GUTA-Bank (Moscow). Diploma of the festival "Architecture-97" - 1996-1997;
  2. Executive mansion (Moscow, B. Afanasevsky per.) 1998;
  3. State Jewish Musical Theater (Moscow, Taganskaya Square) - 1997. Diploma of the Quadriennale in Prague (1999), diploma of the II degree of the festival "Architecture-97", diploma of the I degree of the festival "Architecture-98", prize of the "Golden Section" MOCA (1997 ), Diploma of the Union of Designers (1998). Nominated for the State Prize;
  4. Representative complex (settlement Gorki Leninskie, Moscow region) - 1998. Diploma of the festival "Architecture-98";
  5. Project for the reconstruction of the area of ​​the sea station and the harbor of the city of Sochi 2000 - 1999;

Contests:

  • Sculpture Museum, Central Glass, Tokyo. Second Prize - 1983;
  • "Style 2001", JA, Tokyo. First Prize - 1984;
  • "Atrium", Central Glass (for atrium space solution), Tokyo. First Prize - 1985;
  • "Roll of Resistance", JA, Tokyo. Honorable Mention - 1985;
  • "Information Market", Central Glass, Tokyo. Honorable Mention - 1986;
  • "Monument 2001", JA, Tokyo. Honorable Mention - 1987;
  • Ostrov, Moscow Committee for Architecture (commissioned by the Academy of Architecture of the Russian Federation). Diploma - 1998.

Main exhibitions:

  • Milan Triennale - 1988;
    State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg (personal) - 1992;
  • Milan Triennale - 1996;
  • State Museum of Architecture. A. V. Shchuseva, Moscow (personal) -1998;
  • VII Venice International Architectural Biennale (personal exhibition "Ruins of Paradise" in the Russian pavilion). 2000;
  • "Marmomak-2000", Verona (personal). 2000;
  • State Museum of Architecture. A. V. Shchuseva, Moscow. 2000;
  • "10 years - 10 architects", Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), London. "10 best architects of Russia". 2002;

Creative creed:

"Canonical order architecture — architecture of post-consumer society»

Paper architecture: utopian fantasies on paper

Ignoring censorship, successfully positioning on the global creative arena, the desire to dilute the monotonous gray reality - this is what the Paper Architecture movement is. Today this phenomenon would be called a project, but then - in the 80s, at the decline of Soviet power - it became a vivid manifestation of postmodernist sentiments, which were based on the rejection and rethinking of the values ​​of modernity.

As the architect and architectural theorist Alexander Rappaport writes, young professionals tired of the “lenten menu” have entered a new era, which he calls the phrase “post-post”: “In part, the properties of paper architecture coincided with the aspirations of many Soviet architects, exhausted by the asceticism of the official architectural ideology, on the banners of which it was written - "savings, savings and again savings," he writes in one of the studies.

"Paper architecture" is an area of ​​fantasy that appears outside the socio-cultural context and temporal concepts. This is a kind of game, pampering, the boundaries of which the architects themselves did not build, and the censors ignored, because they did not see obvious threats.

How did everything start? It was precisely as a trend that "Paper Architecture" appeared in the USSR in the 80s of the last century, although isolated cases were encountered earlier in other countries. During this period, novice masters begin to participate in major international competitions (OISTAT, UNESCO, Architectural Design, Japan Architect magazines), and become winners, striking the jury with the scale of their ideas. Projects made only on paper could never be realized, which partly contributed to the fact that architects could depict even the craziest ideas, turning them into full-fledged works of art.

Architects, limited by ideological and political boundaries, created a new world on paper, in which there were no labels and boundaries - complete freedom and independence, a utopian parallel space.

The founders of the movement are Alexander Brodsky, Ilya Utkin, Mikhail Belov and Maxim Kharitonov. Yuri Avvakumov was the locomotive of the wallets, thanks to whom the movement took on full-fledged forms and came out into the light. It was he who collected archives of works and arranged exhibitions, supervised and directed architects.

Architects always initially present the project of the future object, and only then, in case of approval, the implementation stage begins. Why did the sketches created at that time turn into a whole separate direction? The fact is that the architects initially understood that their ideas would never come to fruition, so they approached designing on paper from the artistic side, giving the works a special graphic and symbolism. Competitions, where the masters were able to express themselves, gave rise to the attention of the world community to Soviet architects. Their work was exhibited in the West as part of projects dedicated to, which aroused interest abroad.

It is impossible to determine the style and manner of the architects who worked within the "paper" framework - everyone experimented for their own pleasure, without abandoning their own aesthetic principles and guidelines. An explanatory note was attached to each project, which turned into a full-fledged literary work - with a hero, a plot and a special mood.

The fact that the drawings were forever drawings allowed the design itself to be perfect. Often, adjustments are made during implementation that change the ideal concept and are related to technical features. Before the "wallets" such a problem did not arise. “The term “paper” was ambiguous and partly inaccurate. It's not just the paper, it's the commitment to pure ideas, pure forms. The point is the futility of the idea,” says Alexander Rappaport.

In an interview in the early 2000s, one of the representatives of Paper Architecture, Ilya Utkin, told how it all ended: “And it ended when it became interesting to also embody all this with my own hands ... No, it didn’t really end. It didn't end because it's a normal job. Right now I am doing projects - after all, at first I have to draw the same paper architecture, architecture-idea, to propose one or another version of the structure. After all, this is the same thing, this is a sketch work, only then turning into stone and with such difficulty. So now, I think, another period has come: the period of architectural practice.”

In 2010, Yuri Avvakumov described an interesting story in his blog: back in 1983, together with Mikhail Belov, they developed a project for a vertical competition in order to send it to the competition in Japan. The drawing was called "Funeral Columbarium". “27 years have passed, and the future has come. A vertical cemetery is being built in Mumbai. Finally, someone besides us realized that it was more reasonable than to build on the bones with a shortage of urban land,” Avvakumov said.

Today, alternative projects of young Soviet architects have become classics, and the very direction of "Paper Architecture" has become the art of utopia.


Despite the short duration of the phenomenon called "Paper Architecture", its cumulative collection is very extensive. Therefore, the curators have a great degree of freedom in combining her works both with each other and with works from other eras. For example, at the next exhibition, which is planned to be held at the Museum of Architecture, the works of the "wallets" can be seen along with the works of their predecessors - Soviet architects of the 1920-1960s. At the current exhibition at the Pushkin Museum, curators Yuri Avvakumov and Anna Chudetskaya placed 54 works of wallets in a “company” with 28 architectural fantasies of masters of the 17th-18th centuries. from the museum collection: Piranesi, Gonzago, Quarenghi and others. To combine in one space two epochs of fantasy and architectural creativity, our contemporaries with their "forefathers", according to Avvakumov, was the conceptual idea of ​​the current exhibition.

Russian paper architecture is a rather specific phenomenon that had historical precedents, but no contemporary foreign counterparts. This phenomenon was generated by the special conditions that developed in domestic architecture in the last decades of Soviet power. Being artistically gifted people, young architects, for well-known reasons, did not have the opportunity to realize themselves in the profession and went into the “parallel dimension” of purely fantasy creativity.

The history of Russian Paper Architecture is inextricably linked with the conceptual competitions held by OISTAT, UNESCO, as well as the magazines Architectural Design, Japan Architect and USSR Architecture. Their organizers sought to search for new ideas, and not to obtain solutions to specific "applied" problems. And the largest number of awards went to participants from the Soviet Union, who were able to draw attention to Russian architecture after a long break.


Unlike their predecessors (primarily the avant-garde artists of the 1920s and 1960s), the conceptualists of the 1980s did not seek to create utopian images of an ideal future. There was no futurological component in the works of the "wallets" - their teachers, the sixties, had already exhaustively expressed themselves on this topic. In addition, the eighties are the era of postmodernism, i.e. reaction to modernism, which for several previous generations was the "future". By the time Paper Architecture flourished, the “future” had already arrived, but instead of general happiness, it brought disappointment and disgust. Therefore, "paper" creativity was a form of escape from the gray, dull Soviet reality into beautiful worlds created by the rich imagination of educated and talented people.

The specificity of paper architecture was the synthesis of expressive means of fine arts, architecture, literature and theatre. With all the variety of styles and creative manners, most of the "paper" projects were united by a special language: an explanatory note took the form of a literary essay, a character was introduced into the project - the "protagonist", the mood and character of the environment were conveyed by drawings or comics. In general, all this was combined into a kind of uvrazh, a work of easel painting or graphics. A special direction of conceptualism arose with a characteristic combination of visual and verbal means. At the same time, paper architecture was associated not so much with parallel forms of conceptual art, but was, in fact, one of the varieties of postmodernism, borrowing both its visual images and irony, "signs", "codes" and other "games" of the mind .

The name "Paper Architecture" arose spontaneously - the participants of the 1984 exhibition, organized by the editors of the magazine "Youth", adopted the phrase from the twenties, which had initially abusive meaning. The name immediately caught on, as it played on two meanings. Firstly, all the work was done on whatman paper. Secondly, these were conceptual architectural projects that did not involve implementation.


A special place in the activities of the wallets belongs to Yuri Avvakumov, who played a key role in the design of an episode (albeit a bright one) of the cultural life of the 1980s. into a complete work of art. It was he who cemented the disparate participants into a single array. Being himself an active creator, he served as an "information center", a link and a chronicler of the movement. Collecting the archive and organizing exhibitions, he brought the activities of the wallets to a fundamentally different level, turning it from a narrowly professional into a general cultural phenomenon. Therefore, it will not be a big exaggeration to say that Paper Architecture is Avvakumov's big curatorial project.


However, there was no movement as such - the wallets were too different. Unlike, say, the Pre-Raphaelites or the World of Art, they did not have common creative goals and attitudes - the “wallets” were a collection of individualists who worked either together or separately. The only theme that united them was architectural fantasy, which makes them related to Piranesi, Hubert Robert or Yakov Chernikhov.

The works of Paper Architecture, alas, are not very accessible to the general public. One of the reasons is the fundamental impossibility of their constant or at least frequent exposure: unlike canvas, paper is very sensitive to light. Until there is a technological revolution in this area, the hypothetical Museum of Paper Architecture will be virtual, which in principle is congenial to its very phenomenon.


It turns out that the rarer exhibitions of Paper Architecture are held, the more valuable they are. In this context, one should also consider the current one in the Museum of Fine Arts, which occupies a cozy hall behind the Greek courtyard. However, despite the chamber character, the exposition is quite capacious. Many works have been collected as "hits" ("House-Exhibit for the Museum of the 20th Century" by Mikhail Belov and Maxim Kharitonov, "Crystal Palace" and "Glass Tower" by Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, "Second Dwelling of a Citizen" by Olga and Nikolai Kaverin), as well as those that have not previously been exhibited ("Hedgehog House" by Andrey Cheltsov) or exhibited infrequently (works by Vyacheslav Petrenko and Vladimir Tyurin). Each exhibit requires careful examination, contemplation, immersion in it; behind each work there is a whole story, if not the whole world. Capriccios of the old masters, including the famous "Prisons" by Piranesi, occupy the central space of the hall, and "wallets" encircle them around the perimeter. Avvakumov's choice is somewhat subjective - some of the "wallets" are not (for example, Alexei Bavykin or Dmitry Velichkin), and someone is presented more modestly than he deserves (I mean, first of all, Mikhail Filippov, who, in my opinion , created his best works in collaboration with Nadezhda Bronzova during this period).


Everything is clear with the first part of the title of the exhibition. But how to understand the second - "The End of History"? After all, the "funeral" of Paper Architecture took place in the early nineties. By uniting representatives of two different eras in one space, the curators wanted to draw a symbolic line under the five-century era of paper (the mass transition from parchment took place about 500 years ago). Ironically, its final chord was the Russian Paper Architecture. In the nineties, a new, computer age came, which subjected to a radical revision not only the design process, but also the entire architectural work. So the future paper architecture will be paper only in an allegorical sense. At least until the lights go out.

The sponsor of the exhibition is AVC Charity.

Fantasy

It may seem strange to some that under many sheets from the collection of paper architecture there are signatures of several authors. But if you remember that paper architecture is, first of all, projects, and the design business is done in teams, then it is clear that wallets imitated private architectural bureaus that were absent in Soviet reality. Secondly, this is kitchen architecture, because most of the competitive projects were created not in workshops (few people had them), not at work (it was not accepted), but at home, where in those years the intelligentsia habit of kitchen conversations operated. And you need company to talk. Hence Brodsky - Utkin, Bush - Khomyakov - Podyapolsky, Kuzembaev - Ivanov ... Where there is only one author - Mizin, Zosimov, Morozov - more often you need to look not for a project, but for a fantasy.

Architectural fantasy, or otherwise capriccio, was invented in the 18th century, naturally, in Italy, where the fashion for ancient ruins was created by great artists, mainly in painting and decoration, being not a design genre, but a pictorial one. Giovanni Piranesi has more of a frightening mood in Fantastic Images of Prisons than torture engineering; in Yakov Chernikhov's "101 architectural fantasies" there is more illustrative of entertaining geometry than technically invented.

Fantasy or, in other words, the activity of the imagination is a forbidden activity in the dystopian novel by Evgeny Zamyatin We. In a totalitarian society, people are deprived of imagination from birth, and those few in whom this atavism awakens are deprived of the ability to imagine forcibly. Fantasy in the novel is a disease, it is treated with radiation. According to Zamyatin, the carriers of fantasy "madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, skeptics" - all need to be isolated from a healthy society.

Photo courtesy of Yuri Avvakumov

Tower

As you know, in reality, all times are present forever, and the past, present and future live like the pages of a book under one cover. People are accustomed to reading a book from the first page to the last, but in reality this is not necessary at all. Some artists are able to open the book anywhere, both on the read page and on the unread one. The Tower of Babel in the painting by Peter Brueghel is presented both as a project of a man - to build a tower to heaven, and as a project of God - to stop blasphemous construction, the builders both assemble and dismantle what was built at the same time. Everyone at this construction site is busy, but whether they bring a stone to the construction site or steal it, as in the Colosseum for private needs, whether the construction should end in a pristine desert or, having overcome the communicative chaos, reach the sky, we, the audience, do not know. In the etching by Brodsky - Utkin's Glass Tower, the tower was completed and crumbled into fragments only later. But by the way it collapsed - not vertically, imprinted on the ground with its plan, but in the direction to the northeast, spreading across the plain with its facade, it can be assumed both that the destructive effect was instantaneous and severe, and that the transparent tower still stands unscathed, and we see in the rays of the setting sun its long shadow. No, this cannot be - look, much more material shadows from the nearby city stretch strictly to the south - two suns cannot stand above the Earth. And the sun, contrary to the laws of nature, cannot shine from the north, which means this city is either a mirage, or heavenly fire has just poured out from outside the graphic frame, and in a second the city and its inhabitants will fly after the shadows. Unless, of course, this is happening in the southern hemisphere. There are other laws.

Photo courtesy of Yuri Avvakumov

Chinese ball

For the December 1987 issue of Decorative Arts, a group of paper architects were asked to write their creative manifestos. In the Bush-Khomyakov-Podyapolsky manifesto, the creative method was described as a Chinese ball - "this is an example of spatial and decorative unity and emotional harmony." And further: “What the study and comprehension of the Ball provokes is endless purification, liberation from superfluous, striving for spatial logic and, most importantly, for simplicity.” Their project “Cube of Infinity”, within which a cruciform structure endlessly multiplied in mirrored stained-glass windows, completely filling the cube, seemed to illustrate this manifesto. How could it be illustrated by Vladimir Tyurin's project "Intellectual Market", which is a Menger sponge, a geometric fractal or "a system of through forms that do not have an area, but with infinite connections, each element of which is replaced by its own kind." Or Sergey and Vera Chuklov's project “The Space of Civilization of the 21st Century” with concentric squares wrapped in a spiral: “Penetrating deeper and deeper into nature, we leave behind a geometric landscape. XXI century: from a stone thrown into the water, there are squares. In all examples, the divine geometry of order opposes the chaos of human fuss and grows out of the surrounding chaos, just as utopia grows out of dystopia.

Photo courtesy of Yuri Avvakumov

Architecture is a Chinese ball. It is like a nesting doll, it consists of a sequence of similar shells; it is like a Kabbalistic sphere, into which the Almighty lowered a thin line of light; and it remains architecture, whether we depict it as a dollhouse or as a universal temple, model or building.

The whole universe is a Chinese ball. Matter, as has now been proven, is homogeneous and isotropic, that is, it has no axes of rotation, no hierarchy, it is distributed evenly in space, does not depend on the place of observation, which means that the architecture of the universe is by and large homogeneous, and the Chinese ball, if you imagine it infinitely large, this situation illustrates. If the architecture of the universe is isotropic, then why shouldn't the architecture of man be isotropic? Even if it in its concrete manifestations exists in hierarchical, symmetrical, non-democratic forms, if it depends on the point of view of the observer and depends on the time of viewing, by and large, somewhere far away, architecture strives for purity and simplicity.

Photo courtesy of Yuri Avvakumov

Less is more

"Less is more" - this commandment phrase has been attributed to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe since 1947. "Less is more" defines the philosophy of minimalism in art and architecture as achieving the greatest effect with the least means. There was a phrase in Buckminster Fuller's definition of his term "ephemeralization" as the ability of technological progress to create "more and more with less and less effort until, in the end, you can not do everything from nothing." In English, the expression "less is more" was first heard in Robert Browning's poem "The Flawless Painter" in 1855. The poetic was ahead of the design by a hundred years. In fairness - even before Browning "less is more" or Und minder ist oft mehr ... was said by the German Rococo poet Christoph Martin Wieland in 1774, so it is not entirely clear from which language Mies van der Rohe borrowed the famous aphorism - from his native German or International English. Mies himself recalled (in English) that he first heard this phrase from Peter Behrens (that is, in German) when he worked in his studio in the late 1900s, but for Behrens it was only among the unnecessary sketches made by young energetic apprentice.

In the diploma workshop on Trubnaya, in the very heyday of postmodernism, I came up with the slogan: “A city is when there is a lot!” Nikolai Nikolaevich Ullas, head of the department of urban planning, looked into the compartment, read the slogan, said as he cut it off: “The city is when it’s not enough!”, thought and summarized: “The city is when it’s just right!”

About Us

When we entered the architectural institute in the 1970s, we did not think that we would become the last generation of Soviet architects - as you know, in 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. When we learned to depict new architecture with a pencil, ink, pen, paints, we did not imagine that we would be the last to whom this handicraft skill was transferred - now architecture is depicted using computer programs. When we started participating in competitions for architectural ideas and receiving international awards in the 1980s, we did not expect that these works would end up in the collections of the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery or the Pompidou Center ... All this suggests that architects are unimportant visionaries. But the future is in the projects that are presented here. The future in which we live or could live. The future imagined by the graphic means of the past. A private utopia in a total dystopia.

Photo courtesy of Yuri Avvakumov

About Me

I did not invent paper architecture - it has existed since architectural designs began to be depicted on paper. This expression was used in France and Italy during the time of Piranesi, Ledoux and Bullet, it also went around in Russia in the 1920s and 1930s, it was used when I studied at the institute. All these, of course, are different "architectures". My merit, perhaps, is that, having appropriated the name, I applied it to a specific phenomenon that appeared then in Soviet architecture. It so happened that for many I was a propagandist and organizer of participation in international competitions of architectural ideas, and then participation in exhibitions, domestic and international. The projects and awards themselves are the merit of a large group, or, as they began to say, “groupings” of young architects of the same generation, to which I belong.

The collection of architectural projects and fantasies in this edition does not claim to be exceptionally complete and methodologically pure - in many respects it characterizes the tastes of its collector, and therefore it is called an anthology, or “a collection of flowers, a flower garden” in Greek, and not an anthology. This is not a study guide.