The group Obledinenie Architectorov (Iced Architects) (1) seems to lie firmly within the tradition of "paper architecture," the extension of Russian utopian architectural projection that became world famous some twenty years ago. The curator of the Russian contribution to the 1st Architectural Biennale Beijing Elena Gonzales says that these architects are like "batmen": "During the daytime, their lives play out in a spacious architectural studio actively involved in construction...But at night, they grow pointy ears, webbed wings, and take flight to join the black Sabbath of architecture, which is where they think up their projects."
Those projects of Iced Architects that are not made on commission can also be arbitrarily divided up into two types. The first of these involves paradoxical-illusionist conception of architectural form, such as the group's famous "egg-house" on Mashkov Street in Moscow (1998–2003), the design of the Novator shop (2001) (2), or the design of a horse and rider monument "Pushkin in Arzrum" (2005).
One would like to think that there are also other motivations for unusual formal inventions, connected to what we could arbitrarily call the second, more integral and farsighted direction in the work of these architects. It appears as work with space, or to be more precise, work aimed at discovering and legitimating new spaces in the existing environment. For example, the project "Bridge Along the River" (3) was inspired by the desire to appropriate the urban space wasted over and around the river. In searching for a way to describe those of Iced Architects' projects that investigate space, it seems appropriate to speak of "expeditions" or trailblazing. Their compass points in unexpected directions: in the project "New Moscow" (2003), the group looks downward, digging up the sandy ground under the Russian capital, building under and not over existing structures. In their "Scaffold in the Woods" (4), realized for the first "Art Klyazma" festival in 2002, the group successfully appropriated the free space in lakeside woodland, creating structures high up in the branches without destroying the integrity of the forest as a whole.
Iced Architects' expeditions have a striking contrast in their scale: "Outdoor Suspension Gear for Around-The-Clock Habitation" (2003), for example, is a project for a parasitic one-man habitat in a building cradle suspended from the facade of an apartment building, while "Facility on the Bering Straits and the International Date Line" (2002) evidences a convincing logic of development from concept to formal solution: the hotel consists of log cabins shaped like a submarine.
A legend from Soviet times is that the Bering Straits is too small for submarines, which is why they are forced to surface to avoid running aground. There is something "natural" to be found in the oddity of this form: it intimates the nature of the contemporary military-industrial complex that largely dominates the space of the seven seas.
There is one fundamental aspect that makes it impossible to consider the work of Iced Architects as entirely "paper architecture": no matter how whimsical they seem, these projects are intended to be realized in concrete environments. A convincing example is to be found in "Scaffold in the Woods". When the owner of the lakeside property at the Klyazma Reservoir saw that this construction would be able to make a tiny part of the beach profitable, it was built within only one and a half months.
In all of these projects, the architects suggest living environments whose conceptual platform is not defined by the concrete socio-economic demands of our time, but rather goals that arise from the needs and desires of a free, harmonic personality. Iced Architects develops environments for intellectual pastimes, rationalizing these with all possible care: for example, the commentary that accompanies the aforementioned "Facility on the Bering Straits" notes that "the complex is equipped with birdy spots, sealing grounds, and observation points for whale spotting."
The concept of architecture as expedition brings the group's work close to the romantic tradition. This becomes especially clear in the project "Watermill-Hurdy Gurdy" (2002), which is a musical embayment on the banks of a river in a Georgian landscape. Here, one cannot help but remember the garden architectures of romanticism, their labyrinths and grottoes, their inevitable journeys to the isles of Venus. The watermill contains a barrel organ mechanism that plays music powered by the river's movement, repeating a melancholy melody by the contemporary film composer Alexei Rybnikov.
The young Goethe once called architecture "petrified music," but in his later years, when romanticism had made way for classicism, the poet said that he preferred "cramped little chambers" for working (5). The tendency to limit oneself in relation to the spatial possibilities can be found in many famous creative people of the not-too-distant past, including the humble abode that Ludwig Wittgenstein built for himself, the tiny Paris studio of the nonconformist Russian painter Mikhail Roginsky, and Alfred Jarry's bizarre apartment where each storey had been cut in half by a mezzanine to double the original number of floors. In their project for the "Contemporary City Foundation", Iced Architects follow this mental trajectory. Dividing a Khrushchev-era apartment with 270 cm ceillings horizontally with an entresol, they reach a bare minimum of ceiling space needed for living. This project is an expedition-compression. Severely limiting the confines of space and movement, the modesty of this tiny, bare apartment suggests ascetic incarceration. Yet the compression of space also leaves leads to a metaphysical illumination of breathtaking, literally unearthly beauty, born from a close examination of the objects and details of everyday life. Of course, an earlier generation of Russian artists have been here before, discovering the cosmos under cramped conditions as the compression of the quotidian.
Here, it is impossible not to think of Ilya Kabakov and his many installations of the 1980s and 1990s, in which the cosmos takes on a negative, partly demonic connotation, becoming obsession, death, abyss or construction pit. Any thought of metaphysics, in turn, appeared in a similarly impossible, Homeric, terrifying light, expressing the tension in the artist's ethical position: it is impossible to sing hosanna on the garbage dump, since these praises would legitimate the socialist construction-refuse pit, giving it a "human face."
The present interpretation of the cosmos in the installation "Habitat Conditions" has subjected the sign itself to a radical change, and this plus is one of the few happy consequences of the victory of capitalism in Russia. Today, metaphysics are no longer reprehensible; one can dream of the cosmos without looking idiotic or blind. Because if you dreamed under socialism, you were refusing to make critical sense of reality, while under capitalism, you are but declining yet another chance to make some money. Eugenia Kikodze
(1) Trans. note: The name of the group is an untranslatable pun. Obledinenie literally means icing over, but has the word obedinenie (=association) as its homophone.
(2) DIA 2004. First prize.
(3) First place in the competition "Bridges in Moscow for the 21st Century", 1999.
(4) Trans. note: the Russian title of this piece, Lesa v lesakh, is also a lyrical pun. It plays on the homonymy between lesa (=scaffolding) and lesa (=forests).
(5) Johann P. Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, Moscow, 1986, p. 292.
The project "Additional Space for the Homeless and the Guests of the Capital" is presented in the exhibition "Modernikon. Arte contemporanea dalla Russia", curated by Francesco Bonami and Irene Calderoni, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, until 27.2.2011.