ESSAY: SERGUEI OUSHAKINE
ESSAY: SERGUEI OUSHAKINE
Viacheslav Mizin, Insectoid, 1989; Atrium-Columbary by Viktor Smyshliaev and Viacheslav Mizin, 1985. Aurora, an administrative building by Andrei Kuznetsov, 1989) Yet, apart from an endless play with geometric forms and volumes, these disembodied, decontextualized, grim and gloomy post-utopian landscapes promised (and delivered) nothing – whether narratively or pictorially. And perhaps, it was not by accident that at the turn of the decade Novosibirsk architect found themselves busy with an exhaustive production of visual representations of various “administrative bastions” – massive, unassailable, self-imposing and self-sucient structures that needed nobody. (Ill. 18-19. Façade of the village Council by A. Chernov and S. Grebennikov, 1990; Self-sucient administrative and managerial bastion by XXXX. 1989) Various attempts at self-inscription and embeddedness, various practices of tactful vkluchenie and vkhozhdenie, the cultivation of the chronotopic aect with its distinctive feeling for the place ended rather grimly – with deadening technoscapes and anti-utopian fantasies of claustrophobic towers and enclosures. Was it worth the trip?
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In one of his essays, Viktor Shklovsky, the founder of Russian Formalism, made an observation that is just as striking as it is banal: “Homes that have not been built cannot fall down” (nepostroennye domiki ne padaiut).20 A failure requires an actual eort, actually built walls, the critic seems to suggest. Apparently, his observation does not work in reverse. As the history of WMoscow paperists shows, success is indeed possible without building actual houses; paper architecture might work just fine. There is a third way, too. Structures envisioned by Siberian paper architects were never built and they never fell. But they did not generate much success, either. As parts of the Siberian paperists’ archive become more and more accessible now, the question hinted at by Shklovsky sounds more and more relevant: What do we do with the houses that have never been built? Why should we care about dreamscapes that resulted in nothing? Why bother? Why now?
III.18 20. Viktor Shklovsky, Chaplin-politseiskii. In: Viktor Shklovsky, Za 60 let: raboty o kino. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1985, p. 22.
As I tried to show, there is no easy answer to these questions. The phenomenon of paper architecture points to a series of crucial questions – about the impact of fading utopia; about the importance of aect; about the necessity to be rooted – somehow, somewhere. Perhaps, most importantly, it draws attention to the issue observed many years ago by Yakov Chernikhov. We need these fantasies about houses that would never be built, the architect maintained, because they give us tools for working through problems that could not be addressed, named, or envisioned otherwise. Fantasies provide us with means to deal with issues that have remained unapparent, ungraspable, and, therefore, unnoticed. Fantasies are good for anticipating things that might come in the future. After all, dreamhouses do not fall. But real houses do.
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III.19
