Hello, good afternoon.
I'm ...
... feeling so excited about attending such a remarkable event,
which the one percent might find interesting
who have needs beyond food and TV.
That's great!
I am going to tell you about something
about which we all think to some extent,
perhaps, even, without really giving ourselves over to it.
What makes a city beautiful, how do we go about creating one,
and how do we make one ugly?
And on which criteria is it to be decided
that one building is right for one given site, but not another?
Why talk about this, when you're probably not all architects,
just a tiny percentage of you?
Well, today especially, architecture is a subject of public debate.
Since I conduct this discussion with municipalities,
the representatives of the people in various cities,
I can see how great and how keen the interest is
in regard to which kind of architecture we should regard as beautiful.
And when I talk about this, I always start by showing this photograph.
It may seem not to be about architecture,
but if we are talking about the principle of traditional historical harmony,
then these Smolnyanki, young ladies at the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens,
they just bring it to life
with the harmony here, absolutely uniform:
the ladies in evening gowns,
the gentleman playing the piano
in a tailcoat,
this is a picture of a city in tailcoat and evening gown.
It is just like, 100 years ago, our cities looked.
They were cities like this, in tailcoats and evening gowns,
looking, in fact, the same as the city folk did.
When we look at an historical street, many of us still think today
that this historical street is an example of absolute harmony.
If there is a house of the 18th century,
and you want to put up a house next to it,
then it should reflect the style
of those put up two centuries earlier.
But the world today is developing in a different way.
Seeing that, as the esteemed presenter said,
I'm not only an architect but an active graphic artist
who draws architectural works and popularizes this art form,
I always verify my feeling for a beautiful city
by analysing my drawings.
And clearly, all these cities here are traditionally beautiful.
You all know them, or maybe you'll find out more later:
those were Saint Petersburg, Venice, Ghent, and Amsterdam.
And here, at the end of the 19th, the beginning of the 20th century,
there arises the conflict with the modern world,
when a city stops being totally horizontal
and absolutely harmoniously beautiful, undeniably beautiful.
This is late 19th, early 20th century, Chicago.
I was absolutely delighted looking at the photos shown earlier.
Undoubtedly, it was unreal courage.
I was scared to death sitting in a front-row seat:
I imagined how scary it must be doing it yourself.
That he wasn't afraid must have been a superhuman feat.
I had very great respect for that,
but was interested in one more point he made.
When looking at the pictures of nature, we were all totally persuaded:
it is very beautiful,
nature is always beautiful without exception.
But there is so much ugly architecture.
These high-rise complexes may be more beautiful or less beautiful,
and it is becoming more subjective,
and the beginning of this subjectivity was laid out right there in Chicago,
where the first skyscrapers appeared.
This is late 19th, early 20th century,
and, going forward ...
this is modern New York City,
where the principles of modern beauty,
contrasting beauty,
allow the bringing together of the incongruous.
This is the 19th century, the first third of the 20th century,
the then state-of-the-art construction,
the trendy SHoP building in New York.
These are engineered add-ons over brick buildings.
And here we have the architectural form.
It speaks out in order to stand out.
In order to stand out, it needs a background.
If you appear naked or half-naked,
you need to have around you people in strict evening dress.
Otherwise, if everyone came like it, no one would stand out.
And here, in like manner,
contemporary architecture is looking for such a role,
for a city framework
in which it can show itself off without restraint.
This wonderful sculpture everybody probably knows:
it's by Jeff Koontz, an outstanding contemporary artist.
He chose Heracles to say modern culture is this.
We need Heracles, not to admire him,
but to admire the fantastic glass ball,
and to appreciate the contrast.
But at that moment, as the speaker put it so wonderfully,
when everyone wants to be first, problems present themselves,
because when everyone wants to be first,
we descend into chaos.
Everyone cannot be first,
and, unfortunately, modern architecture, today, cannot get along with itself.
When we were coming here, at least when I was,
crowds of people were wandering
between the different separate buildings in this area,
and we were just slaves to this most recent architecture,
where everyone lived for themselves, and there was no ensemble.
Today's architecture is some kind of conjuncture
between the desire to stand out and yet to be befitting.
And this is a very important feature that I bring out in my drawings.
All this ornament of the urban environment,
it's just designed to understand the beauty of this bridge.
This is the skyline of a traditional city, we know these cityscapes,
of London, of Moscow, of Milan, of Paris.
They exist to make us realize that these two buildings stand out.
Or a contemporary structure:
it needs this street in order to make itself undeniable.
And these sources of contrasting harmony,
we can be proud of them because they came from Russia.
Today, the whole world is using them.
They derive from Constructivism,
because no past trends, no past movements,
worked with such contrast to the historical environment
as Constructivism did.
Take, for example, Ivan Leonidov's construction.
We know how it should have stood in Moscow's structure.
If, today, an architect put forward such a design
to the Committee for Architecture and Urban Planning of Moscow,
of which, by the way, I'm a member,
I doubt his work would be met with applause.
This is what it would look like in the historical environment, but ...
we need to realize that although this was only a design,
it remains an indisputable icon of the 20th century.
And we see that such thinking today has a huge impact all around the world.
This is a vista of Paris that you can only see from the Pompidou Centre,
but tomorrow it will be visible everywhere.
This is another example of Constructivism,
designed by Krinsky,
it was intended for a corner of Lubyanka Square.
This is how it should have been seen
from Myasnitskaya Street looking to Lubyanka Square.
And these buildings should have formed a ring around Bely Gorod,
that is, on the intersections of the Boulevard Ring
and the radial streets, Tverskaya Street, for example.
This building should have been opposite the Strastnoy Monastery,
which has now been demolished.
So, here we are talking about contrasting harmony
where the new architecture was not built from scratch,
but was unreservedly boldly, almost negligently rashly,
inserted into the historical context of the city,
a worldwide trend today.
And this is a purely Russian trend.
Neither the Bauhaus, nor other trends in the architecture of the 1920s,
entered the fabric of the city in such a bold manner.
So here we have what that trend looks like today.
This is what's proposed for the rue de Rivoli -
everyone's been to Paris and knows where it is -
this highly refined location by the Tuileries Gardens and the Louvre.
This is how Vincent Callebaut envisages the green city of Paris
in the near future.
And in my drawings and architectural designs,
I always try to talk, to analyse this subject,
to talk about the different strata of a city.
In my architectural works, I try to prove
that, today, contrast is the most important feature
of the modern cityscape.
Contrast is the the key element of the modern cityscape postcard.
This is my building in Berlin,
the Hotel nhow on the banks of the River Spree,
before that we saw an aquarium at the Radisson Blu Hotel also in Berlin:
a huge construction contrasting with its surrounding atrium.
This is a close-up view of the huge, 21-metre cantilever by the Spree.
Here is another cantilever construction
where there is contrast between it
and the walls of the historical brick building it envelops.
We can see that it is far from conventional harmony,
but I think it's interesting, it's beautiful today,
and we must have the courage to allow this in our cities.
This is the Museum for Architectural Drawing,
so named by the speaker.
In the historical part of the city,
it doesn't rise above the surrounding buildings,
but it is strikingly contrasting, it is strikingly sculptural.
And here's what the new apartment block looks like
that I built quite recently by the Berlin Wall.
I am sure you know where the Berlin Wall ran,
on which there are the outstanding paintings of Dmitri Vrubel,
the Honecker-Brezhnev kiss, it's there.
The same harsh contrast
of high and low, different colours, cantilevers.
And this is when the question arises
of just how we can arrive at not having the whole fabric of the city
look too jagged,
of getting the buildings of contrast,
and those of the traditional harmonious environment,
to work together
so that the whole city is not far off
the picture we have that is close to all of us.
This is just the perfectly ordinary square in front of the Bourse du Travail in Nice.
One thing I'll say is that it is only with rigid rules and regulations
imposed on the built environment
surrounding these historically important buildings,
when not only the height is regulated, but all parameters are regulated,
a wall's surface area, the number of windows,
the use of the ground floor, the availability of public space,
that we can create an environmental architecture
that forms the new framework
avoiding the discordance that we saw in the first picture,
when everyone wants to lead and chaos results.
And here an immense role is played by the detail,
so if there are any architects here,
or if most of you aren't architects
you must also bear in mind,
that if we have a Palladian palace,
the Palazzo Thiene, or the Palazzo Rucellai,
it is always about detail.
When contemporary architecture says that you can do without detail,
it's wrong, and it doesn't work.
But, the detail can be very different, as we can see in these pictures.
Here there's the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople,
Istanbul today;
a building by Frank Lloyd Wright in San Francisco;
a wonderful mansion by Palo Portaluppi in Milan;
all kinds of ways to create ornamentation, to create a rich pattern structure.
These are my other objects,
environmental, without a specific complex structure,
no sculpture,
but there are plastic details
that allow the creation of an environment, refined in detail,
not one that screams out,
which later could become a necklace into which you can later insert a diamond:
those 15, 20, 30 percent of unique developments
around which you can graft an environment
rich in detail like this.
This is very, very important,
as it is also to design buildings down to such tiny details as door handles,
because that is exactly what someone will notice:
they don't look up 100-200 metres;
they look at a height of 1.5 metres,
towards what lies directly ahead,
where they see all these details that they admire,
that enrich their eyes,
and it's like that that they embrace architecture.
Here, architecture should not be left bare,
it needs to be saturated with a fine texture,
which is that which we love.
It should penetrate the interior, it must go inside,
to create a refined surface there.
Ideally, with this, a sculptural form,
what we see looking at it from a distance,
and the subtle texture of the detail that we only see when closer to it,
should combine with each other.
And, indeed, this is what gives us the opportunity
to identify interesting architecture from a distance,
and then, getting closer, observe the smallest details,
and based on these tiny details,
to love architecture from any distance.
and to love our modern cities.
I wish you,
the architects present in here anyway,
to be daring in your ideas,
but to also always bear in mind
that the lifespan of a building is longer
than the time you took to come up with the idea.
We should create a fabric for the building that is a fabric that lasts longer,
and, at the same time,
we need to take pains in implementing those details,
to be demanding of one's clients and others involved.
And I'd like that the majority of those involved in the process,
those people who discuss the work of architects,
to pay greater attention
to different trends in modern town planning,
contrasting trends included,
and not demand that we be always pseudo-harmonious,
because to be modern means to have the potential to do more.
Thank you for listening.
(Applause)