Hasta La Ideas

Venice Architecture Biennale 2010: the Russian pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale presents possibilities for the re-use of vacant factories in former industrial towns across Russia.

The project focusses on the town of Vyshny Volochok, situated halfway between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

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Architects were invited to design conceptual redevelopment schemes for each of the town’s four disused industrial zones.

Visitors to the pavilion watch a movie examining life in the Vyshny Volochok area, before progressing to a cylindrical room where a panoramic painting depicts the proposed redevelopments.

A third room displays detailed information about each of the four sites and projects.

The curators argue that the re-instatement of these spaces as centres for the town’s development through use as cultural educational and social destinations could be rolled out to revitalise similar post-industrial towns across Russia.

Entitled The Russia factory, the pavilion was curated by Sergei Tchoban, Pavel Khoroshilov and Grigory Revzin.

See all our stories about Venice Architecture Biennal in our special category.

Photographs are by Patricia Parinejad.

The following information is from the curators:

Pavilion of Russia at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

The Russia Factory

In the last 20 years Russian towns and cities have been undergoing a period of de-industrialization: old factories in industrial towns have been closing down while new ones have yet to spring up in their place. This presents serious problems for urban planning: Russia today has many towns and cities in which factories that were formerly the core of a place’s development are now at a standstill and constitute disused and ruined urban space. Industrial zones can occupy up to a third of the territory of a town or city and their current condition has a depressive influence on the environment and inhabitants.

Existing industrial zones have already had resources (energy, materials, labour) invested in them, and their destruction requires further investment – confronting us with the prospect of endless expenditure of resources since each cycle in the development of a site begins from scratch. From the point of view of urban design, factory buildings in small towns are the foundation of the urban fabric. Factories shape the scale of the towns in which they stand. It is they that store the town’s memory and determine its identity.

The idea on which the Russia Factory project is based is to treat industrial zones as historical landscape that is open to universal transformation. Curators propose a strategy of preserving surviving architectural structures, with close attention being paid to opportunities for converting these buildings for use for all kinds of urban functions – housing, education, medicine, trade, public space, management, hotels, etc., etc. The project involves re-conceiving the industrial zone as a mixed-use urban environment which is reincorporated in the town and serves as a focus for the latter’s development.

The Russian pavilion at this biennale is for the first time showing not an ‘exhibition of achievements’ by a single architect or a group of architects, but a conceptual project created specially for the biennale and oriented on the future. As the basis for the project the curators have selected the town of Vyshny Volochok in Tver Province. Vyshny Volochok is situated halfway between Moscow and St. Petersburg and has a system of canals created by Peter the Great. This situation has strong similarities with that of Venice (to give visitors to the biennale a better idea of the town’s position). Were it to be modernized and the surrounding small towns to be revitalized, this could lead to a denser network of centres of culture, science, and tourism lying between the two major cities – which in turn would serve to bring Russia closer to Europe. Vyshny Volochok developed as a centre of the textile industry. It contains four large industrial zones – the Tabolka Factory, the Paris Commune Factory, the Integrated Cotton Factory, and the Aelita Factory. All these factories are within walking distance of the town centre. The town centre, which contains buildings erected in Petersburg architectural styles from the Classical and Empire periods, has degraded and is in a partly ruined state. No new factories or infrastructure serving the railway, main road, or waterways, have been built.

The curators‘ project was executed in two stages. To begin with, we analyzed potential functions for the town’s industrial zones on the basis of the needs and capabilities of the town’s residents, as well as on the basis of possibilities for incorporating ‘external’ functions that might take advantage of the town’s location. We drew up a possible brief for a reconstruction project on the basis of social and economic parameters. Next, Sergei Tchoban supervised the creation of a master plan for reconstruction of the town, and then specific industrial sites, together with potential functions for these sites, were offered as design projects to five architecture firms – two from Moscow (Vladimir Plotkin and Sergey Skuratov), two from St. Petersburg (Evgeny Gerasimov and Nikita Yaveyn), and architectural firm SPEECH Tchoban/Kuznetsov, which designs buildings for both the major cities between which lies the town of Vyshny Volochok.

The Russia Factory is a model project. There are more than 300 towns like Vyshny Volochok in Russia today. It is fundamentally important that architects today should form their own agenda and offer society an idea that can serve as an aspiration.

The Russian Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale in Venice was built in 1913 to a design by Aleksey Shchusev. In 2010 it has been completely restored by architect Clemente di Thiene. The restoration was financed by OAO Alfa Bank.

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Commisioner: Vasily Tsereteli
Curators: Sergei Tchoban, Pavel Khoroshilov, Grigory Revzin
Architects: Evgeny Gerasimov, Vladimir Plotkin, Sergey Skuratov, Sergei
Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov (with Alena Akhmadullina), Nikita Yaveyn
Exhbition design: SPEECH Tchoban / Kuznetsov

Primary sponsor: VTB
Sponsors:
ALUTERRA
ASTEROS
CONCEPT
DORMA
HUNTER DOUGLAS CIS
OKALUX GmbH
TOP GLASS

See also:

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Canadian pavilion by Philip Beesley	Villa Frankenstein by muf architecture/art	Polish pavilion at Venice 2010

Hot on the heels of their recent ‘synchronised artwork‘ experiments, Arcade Fire has released another interactive video online, to accompany the track We Used To Wait. The video is created in association with director Chris Milk and Google Chrome – CR spoke to B-Reel, the digital production company behind it, to find out how it all works…

The site can be viewed best on Google Chrome, although it is also possible to view it on Safari. Be warned though – you need a decent connection to make it work well. But it’s worth finding one. The site opens by asking you to enter the name of the street you grew up on – as Arcade Fire’s album is titled The Suburbs, it probably helps if you grew up on the banal fringes of a city, but really any street will do.

After a few seconds of loading, your individual music video begins. The site features the much maligned pop-up window at its core, opening with a window showing a man in a hoodie running through damp streets. He is quickly joined by other pop-ups, showing flocks of starlings, and then – more shockingly – Google Earth footage of the street you grew up on. This spins in time to the music and to the movements of the hooded figure, offering multiple views of the street.

The interactivity continues later in the song, when another pop-up window invites users to type in advice for the teenage self that grew up in the streets that are appearing on the screen. You can also draw pictures on this screen, before birds fly across it and it becomes incorporated into the unique vid. All these effects combine to fit the nostalgic mood of the song perfectly, creating a intoxicating mix of interactive elements that genuinely empower the song, rather than distract you from it.

It is surprising then to discover that the site began as a project for Google Chrome, rather than Arcade Fire. “The idea came about when [digital artist] Aaron Koblin contacted Chris Milk about creating an interactive film to showcase Google Chrome,” says Ben Tricklebank, creative director at B-Reel. “It was Chris’s connection to Arcade Fire that bought about the collaboration and opportunity to feature the song We Used To Wait. This then shaped the narrative of the treatment put together by Chris.”

Explaining how the site works, Tricklebank says: “One of the major challenges of this project was finding a method to control and sequence the multiple windows needed to display the components of the film in synch to the music. At the early stages we created the framework of a custom application that would allow us total control over the timing, size and position of the windows at any point in the song.

“Simultaneously we worked to develop the interactive and dynamic components as self contained units. This meant that each piece could be created and tested in a standalone environment before being combined into the sequence. We tested various different forms of 2 and 3D flocking interaction for the birds. Google Maps and Street View posed many unique challenges due to the way we needed to control very precise distances and movements while compositing animated elements in real time.

“When we set out on the project there was definitely a sense of stepping into unknown territory. We definitely had some concerns over performance and the experience for viewers. That said, we went through multiple iterations that pushed us way beyond the capabilities of most machines. This way we could really identify how far we could go in the final piece, after all it is a ‘Chrome Experiment’… I think we found the right balance, there’s a great deal of visual information for people to take in.”

Despite this video not being at the initial behest of the band or the record label, the We Used To Wait site is another huge step forward into an interactive future for music videos. It is apt that it is Arcade Fire that has continued these experiments, having already created excellent online works for the tracks Neon Bible and Black Mirror. “It still feels like a relatively untouched medium and one that has so much potential,” says Tricklebank. “In the past six months we’ve been approached a number of times, both for advertising and artists. I’m certainly very excited to see where it goes.”

The Wilderness Downtown website can be found here.

Two follow-ups and reviews for the price of one post (that reminds us: why haven’t you been sending us $2.50 for every post you read? Get on that). First, following all the protest against the new 15 Penn Plaza building, the inevitable happened and the city has okayed the project. If it does get built (remember, we’re still in a recession), it will alter New York’s skyline, blocking out a portion of the Empire State Building from certain angles. Though we can see the anti- crowd’s point, our favorite quote about the debate has come from Mayor Bloomberg, who answered criticism after the plans were approved, in particular from the owner of the Empire State, by saying, “One guy owns a building. He’d like to have it be the only tall building. I’m sorry, that’s not the real world. Nor should it be.” In another response to 15 Penn, New York‘s Justin Davidson filed this piece saying the focus should be less about how the new building will be obstructive than how Pelli Clarke Pelli‘s design for it isn’t much to look at, nor are any of the other big towers going up in Manhattan alongside it. That, he feels, is the larger issue at hand.

On a more positive note, we turn to the ongoing Venice Architecture Biennale. For those of you not traipsing through the streets, using the handy iPhone app the event made available, the Guardian‘s Justin McGuirk has written up this great review and recap. In it, he says this year’s curator, the recent Pritzker-winning architect Kazuyo Sejima, has figured out how to breathe life into a Biennale that has always suffered by not being able to show off the one thing it’s about: real buildings. Instead, she’s tried to make the exhibits more personal and personable, encouraging participants to use what Venice has at their disposal. While McGuirk asks at one point, “Captivating moments, but are they architecture?” the review is uniformly positive and sometimes gushing: “The beauty of this year’s biennale is that it puts the human experience back at the heart of architecture. Inspiring places are full of spatial and sensory drama. And so are inspiring exhibitions.”

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