Architecture, landscape, the individual and the city

Summary of Anton Gorlenko’s lecture

Этот текст опубликован также на русском языке: «Архитектура, пейзаж, человек и город»

A discussion between architects Kirill Asse and Anton Gorlenko on the role of an architect in creating the city landscape took place on February 9, 2019 as part of a public programme of The New Landscape exhibition at Ekaterina Cultural Foundation in Moscow. The conversation was moderated by an architect Yury Grigoryan.

As an introduction to the discussion, Anton Gorlenko and Kirill Asse made short presentations. Here you can read a summary of the first of the two, the introductory presentation made by Anton Gorlenko — an architect, art historian, author and editor of translations of books by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Colin Rowe in Strelka Press publishing, professor at the Moscow Architecture school MARCH.

The summary of the presentation by Kirill Asse (“The individual in the city as the social animal”) and the most notable fragments of the discussion“The role of the architect in creating the city landscape” are published separately.

Eight pictures I have chosen don’t claim to be the answers to the questions “What should we do?” or “How should an architect act?”. They just point out the key points of interaction between architecture, landscape, a man and a city in history and serve as a sort of an index.

1

A dwelling house of P-44T series

It’s a dwelling house of P-44T series, the advanced series P-44, which they began to construct in 1997. I’m particularly interested in one detail ― a rustication made of concrete slabs of the ground and the first floors.

Architecture has two main features: firstly, it is an object, which is situated in the landscape, and secondly, it is a framing of the landscape, when we look from inside-out the building.

Approximately in the middle of the XIV century in Siena in course of several juridical operations a legislation was gradually formed. According to it, each building had to have a main facade situated along one of the streets. Secondly, the owners of the houses were legally required to finish the main facade of the building in a nice way within the height of 9 to 12 Siena feet, which was approximately 2 stories. This has given rise to a detail, which architects used for the whole Modern Times — I mean the rustic basement. It is finished up to such height not because there is any compositional rule or measure, but precisely because in Siena they decided that such height is enough for a person, who is walking along the street, to experience city environment as nice.

2

«Lively streets»; residential development project by Pik Group, Moscow

Later on, in the XV century in miserable chaotic split Italy with humble and reckling sprouts of humanism the governors of several big cities faced with the task of introducing the proper order in politics. Along with it a concept of the ideal city appeared. It seemed that a harmonic administrative system had to be accompanied with a harmonic geometric picture of physical space, which had to be easily comprehended visually. It supposed to be a space for an articulate political life.

Starting with the famous series of three views of the ideal city, attributed to Luciano Laurana, architects seem to have approximately the same attitude to the image of the ideal city.

3

Photo wallpaper in soviet interior

The second important feature was the concept of architecture as a window to the landscape, as a frame. The idea that one can contemplate the landscape behind the window being inside a piece of architecture is quite new.

I’d like to point out one case which struck me at the famous Villa Barbaro by Palladio. All the windows there are covered with thick curtains, so you can’t look out of them, and at the same time everybody contemplates beautiful landscapes by Paolo Veronese which are on the walls next to the curtained windows. Perhaps Palladio himself and his customers didn’t care about the scene from the window. I dare to assume that the view from the window as a matter of concern in the modern sense didn’t emerge until the middle or even the second half of the XIX century. The relations between the landscape as an actual window on the world and a metaphorical one are different. This exhibition [ the New Landscape — ed. note] is a particular case of this situation: we are inside a room and we look out of it to see different landscapes by means of the photographs.

4

View of a South Versailles cottage village

This is a picture taken from the site of a town-planning company from the section “Objects under construction”. The cottage village in the suburbs of St. Petersburg, which is called South Versailles, is illustrated with a view of an empty field, covered with snow. The way people call their projects seems characteristic to me: they often try to fill the lack of some of their qualities.

The concept of the ideal city discredited itself rather quickly, because it was just impossible to overcome all the difficulties of private intentions and relationships which existed in the city.

In the early XVII century they began to found the ideal cities not within the existing cities, but outside of them. Versailles became a well-known model of a big ideal city, where the royal court was transferred. This is a model of the ideal city which expressed the criticism towards the existing city.

5

Scheme of military dispositions of US mechanized infantry division

In relationships between an architect, a customer and a landscape, apart from the act of framing, putting something into the context, there is another very important thing outside of — the act of controlling the land. The word “landscape” as well as the word “paysage” are etymologically connected to the notion of “land”.

In Modern Times architects and their customers were often concerned about the landscape not aesthetically, but politically. Palladio, along with his projects of villas, his own tractate and his illustrations to Vitruvius’s tractate made illustrations to the History by ancient Greek historian Polybius. In particular, he engraved a certain amount of military schemes, battle schemes and attack formations. This is a form of interaction between architecture and landscape through the forms by means of controlling and conquest of the landscape.

6

One of the public samples of meter, Paris, 1795–1796

At the end of the XVIII century a a very important thing happened — all the main European countries accepted the metric system. Europe gradually rejected local, anthropomorphic systems of measurement: feet, ells, palms, etc. — each state used to have its own measurement. For the first time a meter was measured as 1/4000000 part of a Paris meridian. Now the landscape is measured assuming not the sizes of the human body, but the sizes of controlled and comprehensible territory.

7

Magnitogorsk project, Yuri Palmin, 2014–2015

At the beginning of the XX century modernism seeks to dissolve architecture in the landscape. Paradoxically, for the whole XX century architects have been persistently creating objects which stood out of the landscape more and more, all under the slogan of dematerialisation.

8

Palimpsests project, Max Sher, 2013

The surveys of irrationally formed city context (“townscape”) and chaotic environment of historical cities began as early as before the World War II. One of the greatest experts and someone who was fond of difficulties and contradictions of the ordinary city environment was Le Corbusier. Along with Ozenfant he even published a catalogue book of Paris firewalls, paving and manholes. It happened two years before he claimed the domination of the new architecture and necessity to demolish a half of Paris.

But Le Corbusier’s inconsistency doesn’t relate to our today’s talk. There were periods when careful attention to the city environment formed before diminished, and other moments, when it grew stronger. Sometimes it was displaced by architects’ naive wish to create an ideal object, having erased all the unnecessary things. In other cases architects treated the environment too ironically, turning all difficulties and contradictions of the city landscape into a funny game, thus imitating, commercialising and replacing a difficult and unique reality.

February 9 2019

The event was organized by the Yardstreet [Dvorulitsa] project and the Meganom architectural practice as part of public workshop schedule of the New Landscape exhibition in the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation, Moscow.

Translated from Russian by Daria Ermoshina