ESSAY: SERGUEI OUSHAKINE
ESSAY: SERGUEI OUSHAKINE
Serguei Oushakine
A FEELING FOR THE PLACE:
Paperists of Siberia between Self-Inscription and Self-Enclosure “What we create are not projects; they are “projects of projects”… Yuri Avvakumov, Bumazhnaia Arkhitektura
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“Reflect and copy….” Viacheslav Mizin, Traditsii Sibirskogo Plagiata
1. Olga Kabanova, Narisuem – budem zhit’. Ogonek. No 32, 2004, p.49. 2. For a review of the exhibit, see Grigorii Revzin, Sibirskie tsennye bumagi. Kommersant, June 3, 2000. For more details about the materials, see a recent reprint of the 1997 catalogue Neizvestnaia arkhitektura Novosibirska, 1982 -1994. Ed. by Anton Karmanov, Aleksandr Lozhkin, and Viacheskav Mizin, Moscow: Garage, 2020. 3. For a complete list of international competitions, see : Yuri Avvakumov, Bumazhnaia arkhitektura. Antologiia. Moscow: Garage, 2019. Pp. 13-15. For more details regarding the participation in these competitions, see an interview: Il’ia Lezhava and Ekaterina Golitsyna, Khrushchevskii Dvorets Sovetov, dom Narkomfina i bumazhnaia arkhitektura. In: Ustnaia istoriia. Recorded on August 9, 2016. Available at: https://oralhistory.ru/talks/orh-2064/text 4. Mikhail Bode and Yuri Avvakumov, Pobediteli konkursov. In: Yuri Avvakumov, Bumazhnaia arkhitektura. Antologiia. Moscow: Garage, 2019. P. 358. 5. Il’ia Lezhava and Ekaterina Golitsyna, Khrushchevskii Dvorets Sovetov. 6. Yuri Avvakumov, Bumazhnaia arkhitekrura, p. 27. 7. Kabanova, Narisuem – budem zhit’, p.50
In August 2004, Ogonek, Russia’s oldest illustrated weekly at the time, published a big essay about the 20th anniversary of a cultural phenomenon which has become known in the late Soviet Union as paper architecture. While celebratory in its theme, the article was bitter-sweet in its tone. The twosentence editorial lead with brutal clarity summed up the ironic history of paper architecture and its creators: “Twenty years ago they did not build anything, but they received international architecture awards. Today, they are well established architects; but they have no international ambitions anymore.”1 Late Soviet paper architects – “pragmatic idealists,” as Ogonek called them – pursued a paradoxical career trajectory where success without buildings was followed by buildings without visible success. The Ogonek article did not mention Siberian architects, presenting paper architecture as a solely Moscow affair. And, in a sense, it was. Should non-Muscovites emerge in this world, it would cause a surprise, if not a bewilderment. For instance, when in 2000, some works by Novosibirsk paper architects were exhibited in the Central House of Artists, the show was characteristically called “The Unknown Architecture of Novosibirsk.”2 Since then, the level of this unknowness is slowly going down, and the current volume is yet another important step in a necessary attempt to provincialize – in a good sense – the phenomenon that for many years had a strictly
metropolitan character. In what follows, I quickly summarize key features of (the Moscow-based) paper architecture and then use this summary to highlight most interesting aspects of its Siberian version. As many late Soviet trends, paper architecture was a short-lived phenomenon. It lasted about a decade: starting in the end of the 1970s, it gradually dissipated by the end of the 1980s. The group of Soviet paperists (bumazhniki) was made up mostly by graduates from the Moscow Institute of Architecture (MARKhI) who designed their projects for various architectural competitions, organized throughout the 1980s by major international journals and professional associations – from The Japan Architecture and the British Architectural Design to the International Organization of Scenographers, Theatre Architects and Technicians (OISTAT) and the International Union of Architects3. Yuri Avvakumov – the chronicler and the archivist, the ideologue and the curator of this artistic movement – recalled later that Soviet paperists produced somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 projects in 1984–19884. Il’ia Lezhava, an architect and Vice-President of the Russian Academy of Architectural and Construction Sciences, who was very instrumental in organizing first Soviet submissions to international contests in the 1970s, usefully pointed out a few years ago the main reason behind this radical proliferation of “paper castles”: We had a very good system of artistic training for our students [in the USSR of the 1970s-1980s]. But architecturally speaking, apart from the five-story apartment blocks, there was not that much for them to build in Moscow. Because of this gap, young people started expressing themselves in various architectural fantasies, often with a philosophical bent.5 Never meant to be materialized, paper architecture emerged as a hybrid pictorial genre: a marriage of convenience between easel painting and architectural drawing. Neither urban landscapes, nor architectural blueprints, these paper fantasies were pictorial contemplations and figurative commentaries on structures (and their contexts), which were destined to remain unbuilt forever. Or, as Avvakumov puts it straightforwardly, “as a version of art for art’s sake, paper architecture is good as long as it does not have to be realized in practice…”6 The decidedly non-utilitarian, exploratory and compensatory nature of late Soviet paper architecture, emphasized by Lezhava and Avvakumov, is important. Indeed, paper architecture was an artistic speculation of the second degree; offering imaginary projects that promised more imaginary projects, it filled the gap between available skills and unavailable opportunities for their realization. Of course, there is little surprising in the fact that young architects with a lot of energy, free time, and no realistic prospective of implementing their own projects in real life would eagerly immerse themselves in the realm of architectural fantasies. What is unexpected is the popularity of these fantasies among their international colleagues. Within a very short time, Soviet paperists became leading
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