Bernaskoni

Periods in architecture are largely characterised by the typology of buildings. The 19th century, for example, was the century of railway stations and bridges. But what about the construction typology of today?

As I see it, the time has come for a typology of hybrids. This might be compared with a hybrid car, where two types of engine – electric and petrol – sit side by side. It’s the same with buildings. Today’s buildings are multifunctional; this meets the challenge of time – enabling you to respond more quickly to changing demands: time is flowing faster, and businesses open and close much faster than they did ten years ago. Business plans a decade ago were made for five to seven years in advance, while today they look no further ahead than two or three years. In other words: the content is the software that fills the hardware carcase; both change depending on changing needs.

So in other words, it’s taken into account right at the start of construction that the function of an object will not remain constant, but will change several times during the lifetime of the building?

This, In any case, is the immediate prospect. Take for example a museum. Today you have a completely different institution than you did back in the 19thcentury. Today’s museum functions like the Internet, reacting quickly by means of its programmes and its exposition concepts, as well as the additional “utilities” that visitors can use – from cafés to film screenings. The internal architectonics of the modern museum is therefore mobile, and the halls are often undergoing refurbishment.

You get the impression that the museum gives the modern architect the best opportunity to realise his fantasies.

I can explain why this is the case. Here we move directly to a conversation about typology. The fact is that the museum has no rigid typology of its own. Everything is rigidly structured in offices or residential buildings: it’s clear how big the corridors should be, and what the apartments should like. And, due to the fact that it develops dynamically, the information environment in the museum, i.e. its typology, is not specified. The typologies of each newly designed museum are related to two things: what is exhibited there, and how it is exhibited. The architect gets the opportunity to tackle the form in his own way – the main thing is that it should respond to both these factors. Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, invented an exposition system for the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where visitors would first take the elevator to the top, and then make their way down a ramp on foot while viewing the entire exposition. This principle determined the form of the museum, which then became a model of reference.

Yes, but now museums of the same type are being built – such as Frank Gehry’s Contemporary Art Museum in Bilbao or SANAA’s New Museum in New York: they look like museums-objects, whose appearance tells us nothing about the “content” as you say. Buildings have become icons, independent objects.

This merits a conversation in its own right. Today architecture has become a kind of toy for society, and this started with architecture as a kind of show. It’s about the individuality of the architect. There are those exhibitionist authors out there for whom the appearance, the envelope is important and they build a house like a sculpture. And there are other authors who want to penetrate and understand thing, to build in such a way that the form still follows the function. I am a supporter of the second approach, where the museum itself is not an object of exposition but, on the contrary, its programme is an object of design. Take Frank Gehry’s museum in Bilbao as an example of the opposite. It is impossible to exhibit anything there because everything is crooked and oblique, and the objects themselves are so transformed by this complex space that you can’t perceive them directly. By the way, the New Museum in New York has truly high-quality exposition conditions. There are four or five rooms, each on a separate floor, with these floors being slightly offset from one another. That is, there is no exhibitionism here; this is a real museum space, and quite a pleasant one. However, it should be kept in mind that museums have to attract the attention of visitors and have to become an event for the city, which is why they always have some special distinctive feature of form and represent a kind of spatial attraction. Their attendance statistics depend on this, which is no small matter at all.

Buildings can be divided into “object-buildings” and “place-buildings” that master space. Russia is a vast country, but we have almost no place-buildings. Why is that?

This is primarily an issue of mentality, connect with the desire to take possession of space rather than extend it. The most striking example is Moscow. Unlike Saint Petersburg, Moscow is an object-based city, a set of various object playthings, while Saint Petersburg has the character of a designed environment and a designed atmosphere.

Moving on to the topic of the taking possession of places: our huge country has a certain point on the map – Uryupinsk – where nobody has ever been. And yet you have a project related to Uryupinsk.

You refer to a seminar organised by the Centre for Contemporary Architecture. A group of architects set out for Uryupinsk to help revive this ancient town. During the Soviet era, Uryupinsk was rebuilt on the basis of standard design methods – with a central square, a main street named after Lenin, with the usual infrastructure facilities. There’s a main street, and left and right are the village houses. On the scene, we found that the town had become absolutely faceless, but that people had found a way to express themselves by means of inscriptions, of which there are very many different examples there. And we decided to draw up a city plan in terms of a grid of words, a system of utterances. We played with this theme in a master class in the form of text. In essence, this was a project devoted to the identity problem of our towns. We have a lot of places like Uryupinsk, and each one of them wants something to be proud of. We chose the word as the lynchpin to hold this all together.

That is, rather than develop the cities of Russia architecturally, it’s easier to leave them as mere inscriptions on a map. This Uryupinsk is an empty place, nothing but a name.

Text could become a distinguishing symbol of this town. Design and architecture could use this approach to ensure that get the place obtains its own identity. It already has one, to all intents and purposes, but just in a not very pronounced way – in the form of inscriptions scattered across its fences. And the locals actually are immensely proud of Uryupinsk, which is something evident in the posters and banners found there. So the town is an interesting one.

The same principle is seen in your project for the Russian pavilion at the Expo-Shanghai: Russia is six enormous letters and nothing more, just a big beefy inscription on the map.

Well, we thought that if this was to be a demonstration of Russia abroad, then the pavilion should first and foremost be mediatic. We should assert ourselves through architecture, and, in order to have it immediately readable, it should be in gold and not say “Russia”, but Россия(“Rossiya”), spelled out in six- Cyrillic letters. Even if foreigners don’t understand what’s written here, we thought the name should be made into a recognisable brand in a purely visual way. Apart from that, we tried to combine this with Chinese tradition. The pavilion consists of six blocks which, in plan, make a Chinese hexagram from the “Book of Changes” that means “creativity”. Each of the six blocks has its own exposition, created by the curators. Why gold? Because a gold reserve represents value, and this is the knowledge that is on display inside each block. We represent Russia in the form of a gold reserve while simultaneously speaking the language of Chinese symbols. In short, it was a complex hybrid message.

Complex, yes, but at the same time reminiscent of the literal symbolism of Soviet projects, such as theatres with a star shape plan or a school in the form of a hammer and sickle.

Of course. Because it’s all about information. In all the projects we work on at our bureau, I try to shift the vector from the material zone to that of the immaterial. Even though everything is made of tangible materials. Taken altogether, however, it works like a sign, as a media message.

Could this be considered a tendency? Because everything that we’re talking about here is not so much reminiscent of architecture as of , but media or fake art, which might not even be realised, but which people will still find out about.

As the minimalist Eugene Ass says, architects don’t joke. What I do is communication; it’s a conversation that I enter into with the world. Only in this way should architecture communicate with people, and people with architecture – through dialogue. After all, art automatically requires demonstration, exhibitionism and exhibition, so the public can see it.

Is your “approach art” backed by any kind of global trend?

There are simply a few people, not many, who work like this.

So there are no trends as such, just the creativity of disparate individuals?

I think there are no trends, but there are people who are doing something. If we were to talk about specific techniques, though, in what I do, then it’s a kind of spatial rap. I read space. Architecture is a long story, and it will only be clear after some time has passed if my poems or those of anyone else are read or not. For those who use this language, this isn’t a matter of fashion, but of a fundamental choice. When you read architectural rap, you have to read it in the language spoken by the space for which the design was made.

Are there any criteria for relevance in society, in your opinion? Or are perhaps guided by your own?

A difficult question. Stepping outside the context of aesthetics, which is a matter of taste, I believe that architecture should position itself in the field of socially significant activity. If a house gives something to the city and society, if the functions built into this house help the city become more interactive and activate human flows by drawing them through it, this is a good house. Such is the postmodern idea. If it doesn’t work out like that, the building might well be very beautiful but it does’nt work very well – and this is the modernist idea. It’s another matter when we consider the environment, and as beauty is important, though difficult to define, this, I repeat, is a matter of taste. By gathering the expert community together to discuss the matter, you can find out which house is better. This is connected with the use of criteria of a different scale: how does this house work from the point of view of the city as a whole, how from the street point of view, and how from the human being’s point of view. Ergonomics, practicality, energy efficiency. It’s not so difficult to do. How can you evaluate whether music is good or bad, though? There’s only one answer: either you like it – or you don’t. But if you have a group of musicians, they can easily tell if you’re playing out of tune.

I thought that modernism specifically required unconditional functionality. And that postmodernism was the opposite. Like Zumthor, for example, the Swiss architect who recently received the Pritzer Prize, with his strange moss-covered houses. His architecture is completely dysfunctional.

This is a vestige of modernism, a question of high aesthetics, of proportions, and of order – it doesn’t matter. You have a tastefully made thing – but how to evaluate it? Is it really tasteful or not? Something quite out of the ordinary can be made completely without taste. Ninety of a hundred architects will say that Zumthor is monstrous, and ten will say that he’s great. So it’s a matter of taste.

In Russia, the main sources for architectural ideas are the avant-garde and the neoclassical. Roughly speaking, we are either oriented to Le Corbusier or to Zholtovsky. Why is this the case so, and is this something only seen here?

In general, the avant-garde is an internal state. You either think in terms of the new or with things that have already been produced. Neoclassicism, like the avant-garde, is everywhere. If you look at the architecture as a whole, the buildings that attract your attention make up no more than one percent. The rest are just construction jobs.

I was thinking of the historical avant-garde, of constructivism.

The avant-garde is something outside of time. I would draw a dividing line between neoclassicism and modern architecture. Constructivism is something known only to specialists. The customer doesn’t know what it is. He either asks you to build a modern house or one in the classical style. When I am asked to make a modern home, I take that as meaning the person wants to experiment. But the customer usually shows some stupid pictures of what he has seen elsewhere. And I have to work with him for a long time to explain that contemporary architecture is architecture that we do together, and that’s what makes it contemporary. And together we come to explicit decisions.

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And how does the unconscious customer fit into experimentation? After all, they say that Russian customers tend to want what might be termed dark or chthonic.

The customer in the West differs from the Russian in that he has already been nurtured and civilised to some extent. Though it’s an illusion that everything is so classy over there, unlike here among ourselves. The grass is always greener on the other side. Our customer has no experience, he is young, he emerged ten years ago, right at the moment I graduated from MARCHI (the Moscow Institute of Architecture). He has no experience of construction. The Russian customer differs from the European in that he believes that he knows everything himself, and that the architect merely helps him to realise his own ideas. But I wouldn’t go out of my way to exalt our architect either, because he also has limited experience, likewise beginning ten years ago. Before that, people were trained. The Soviet Union collapsed, and private architectural bureaus appeared, differing from the old state organisations. There are other rules over there – for management, teamwork, working with the private customer. So we are only at the beginning of the road to the European type of construction.

In Moscow, they are still destroying architectural monuments and erecting forgeries in their place. It’s painful to look at it, but we are powerless to fix things. Maybe it’s time to accept this as our only reality?

We have no other option. The Hotel Moskva is built, and fifty years later the same will happen. I try not to look at it all. But it’s a matter of habit, and everyone’s already got used to it.

You can’t get used to it – you just get used to how something new happens.

We chose this “style”, we elected Luzhkov. Everyone agreed with this, and if everyone agreed, the rules of the game are accepted.

Kandinsky believed that Moscow is a mystical city, which grows by itself. Sometimes you do get the feeling that new buildings sprout up like mushrooms, to replace the old ones.

The spirit of Moscow cannot change. Objectivity can’t disappear; new things are appearing all the time, replacing the old, and after some time these are replaced all over again... Unlike Saint Petersburg, Moscow is a living organism. This is painful for everyone – our environment strongly affects us on the unconscious level. The impact takes place on all levels – on the level of traffic jams and overcrowding in the Metro, and on the level of a lack of environment that might otherwise make up for the lack of sunlight. The fact that we don’t have snow, for example, is very bad. This isn’t just down to nature. When it snowed in Moscow, it made the winter seem lighter. Most of the day is dark, and the streetlamps are on, and the snow reflects the light, giving some kind of positive at least. But the chemicals that dissolve all the snow leaves only the dark asphalt. And it’s hard to stay in such darkness for any long period of time. I would fight for Luzhkov to leave us our snow, never mind make the sun shine. Here in Finland, gravel is used instead of chemicals, so the vehicles don’t skid. Now nightingales sing in Moscow – it seems a trifle, but how important it is for the inhabitants! After all, such trifles create an atmosphere. The atmosphere in Moscow is not thought out. This is an information field, and it’s not being processed anywhere or in any way. I’d introduce a lecture course on “Information Design” at the MARCHI. About the human condition, and how to manage it in the city.

So a city is a digital interface, then?

Why does everyone love New York, why are they so crazy about it? Ask a local taxi driver, and he’ll say “I love New York, it’s the coolest city in the world.” But if you ask a taxi driver in Moscow, he’ll answer “Everything is so infuriating, it sucks. I want to leave.” And the fact is that in New York there is something that was set in place there from the start – a certain mood, there’s a network of moods, a certain patriotism, but it’s not the artificial kind like we’ve been trying to establish, but real. People grow up with it. While for us patriotism comes to an end at the age of thirty when you start to think about things. You have two options: either you become a dissident, or you replace your patriotism with humility and loyalty to what is happening. And both are monstrous because they destroy your inner harmony. You either have to deceive yourself, replacing everything with personal motivations like money or social status, or become a dissident. Both of these destroy you. Moscow will never become New York, because it doesn’t have the right software. Our software is obsolete, but we have to keep on using it anyway.

Can’t we update the software?

Everyone would have to do this at once, so that people would participate in the process. Who will do this? Medvedev? First of all, he won’t. Secondly, we need an idea. There is no idea. Architects are trying, but everything is very hard, as architecture is a sealed off world of its own, and the ideas don’t spread beyond the architectural community. It would be great if we could educate society and have the architect be the agent of the idea. Unfortunately, there are no examples to show of this. Everyone agrees that instead of the old Hotel Moskva we have a new Hotel Moskva, poorly finished with monotonous Chinese porcelain stoneware. Instead of the Hotel Rossiya – there’s now just a hole. If people don’t speak out when ninety people are blown up in a mine, and everyone has forgotten about it the next day, then we will have what we have. So it’s not a matter of architecture, but of “the architecture of heads”.

Maybe this is a problem of optics? That is, everyone agrees just because they don’t see the differences? This is an issue of finishing, of texture. A sense of surface is lacking, an understanding of the importance of the texture of a wall, as they have in Italy, for example. And so they put this porcelain stonework everywhere.

We don’t foster the ability to see. For a Russian aesthetics takes last place, unlike with Western Europeans. It’s like with the [folkloric character] “Chicken Ryaba” – we have a golden egg, but we don’t understand what it is, and don’t appreciate it. Those who give us the egg say: “Okay, guys, here’s an ordinary egg - a fifteen-storey panel-built house – in exchange for your golden one, which we’ll put away over in Switzerland somewhere.” We’ve all been cut short, having all kinds of shit peddled to use for the last hundred years as though it were something wonderful. Everybody is used to it. We do not have Russian people – we still have Soviet people. All those who make decisions, who discuss things in the press or on television, they’re all Soviet people.

Well, the Central House of Artists is a Soviet building, but it’s a pity all the same what they did to it.

We’re talking about software now, not about hardware. About brains, that is. People think in terms of Soviet categories, they can’t think in perspective.

In recent decades, design has come to be carried out “in digital”. How does this affect the creation of architectural forms?

It has an effect. But it all depends on the specific hands involved. If something falls into the hands of a responsible person, he uses it as a tool. But if he is just a run of the mill builder, he takes the semi-finished digital product and then realises it as-is. The city faces a great deal of tasks that don’t have any aesthetic aspect. A factory, for example – what aesthetics do we have there?! An architect’s services are expensive – comprising 15 percent of the construction budget. No one will pay money for nothing. But there are certain important points in the city that need to be resolved in a more subtle fashion. And an architect is needed to take care of these delicate tasks. Many use the “digital” as a means. In my opinion, it should be used as a tool. Architecture isn’t flexible enough yet to be a kind of music that wakes you up; it’s still frozen music. But after some time, it really can come to life. There are many interactive materials and facade systems, which can change mechanically.

In other words, you see the future like that shown in the Minority Report– with moving holographic panels and suchlike?

This will definitely happen, and it’s already here. In passive houses, for example – houses that produce and absorb the same amount of energy, and have a zero balance. There are solar panels that provide energy for side lighting – for emergency evacuation signs, or illumination of facades at night. These panels can already rotate slightly, making the lighting of the facade change too.

It’s the Internet again?

What of it? The industrial era is over, the information age has already begun.

I heard that the post-information has already started.

Well, I don’t know about that.

What position does architecture now have in relation to design and art?

Design is a handicraft genre. Something necessary, unlike art. Architecture and design are different parts of the same field. Architecture can exist simultaneously with design and art. Everything that is made is designed. Look from a distance and you see the house, look close up, and you see the door handle. When Philippe Starck makes a house in the form of some designer piece, it ceases to be a design given the difference in scale; it’s become an architectural structure. It’s another question as to whether what he does is of the right scale for a human being. But this is a matter of aesthetics.

Do you think contemporary architecture can liberate the human being?

How so?

Well, like with the Gothic, when people surrounded by terrible forests gathered up all their technically imperfect strength to erect such structures, into which they would then enter and immediately found themselves in the world of lofty mountains.

I can tell you a story. Douglas Colter, a family friend and a professor at Harvard, once gave me a skateboard and that was the moment at which I was liberated. I was at school at the time and receiving professionally tennis training. But I fell off the skateboard and broke my arm. So I ended up leaving sport and signed up for the preparatory courses at the MARCHI. I’ve been doing architecture ever since and I consider myself a free man.