Drawing by Iakov Chernikhov from his book 101 Architectural Fantasies, published in 1933. (Image: Iakov Chernikhov International Foundation)

The theme of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale — Absorbing Modernity: 1914 to 2014 — was a great incentive to delve back through the annals of architectural history. The concept, which was given to all pavilions by the biennale director, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, emerged from his observation of the uniformity of architecture over the course of the 100 years in question. Once nationally specific and recognisable, architecture has given itself over to modern global design and materials, which ends up making the central business district in Moscow indistinguishable to its counterparts in Shanghai, Saõ Paulo or London.

Rather than use the content of our show to disprove this observation, the pavilion’s curators, Anton Kalgaev, Daria Paramonova and I, responded by using the concept of the show itself as our stimulus: we made the Russian pavilion into an international trade fair — the ultimate manifestation of the kind of standardisation Koolhaas has identified. International trade fairs are the place where the technologies, services and products that have all helped to standardise architecture across the world are introduced and exchanged. We replicated the environment of a trade show inside the pavilion as faithfully as possible, but instead of displaying products, we created a trade show of ideas, showcasing important and influential ideas from the intellectually rich history of Russian architecture. In order to make these historical projects work within the context of a contemporary trade show, we invented companies that "sold" updated versions of each project. These companies were represented in the show by experts who interacted with the visitors and provided a depth of information that is normally impossible to achieve in a large exhibition.

Proposal for new models of communal living, work, and relaxation, based on the Narkomfin Communal House by Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis. (Image: Julia Ardabyevskaya / Strelka Institute)

The backward-looking and unusually philosophical theme was hugely inspiring for us and completely in line with the work of the Strelka Institute, the Moscow-based urbanism institute which commissioned the pavilion and whose Knowledge program I direct. Our collective message was: even if we’ve seemingly moved on historically, socially or in a certain discipline, ideas that were generated in the past retain value. This allowed us not only to exhibit historical work, but to reactive it and, in a way, internationalise it. Despite the historical focus, we placed a lot of emphasis on contemporary relevance: the twenty ideas from the last century in Russian architecture we selected as exhibits were chosen because they remain useful for the architectural challenges cities face today.

During the exhibition’s extensive research phase, we selected the most pivotal moments in Russia’s architectural history with help from a number of experts who advised us on what they thought were the key periods, and main provocateurs, of the development of modern Russian architecture. We decided to exclude purely speculative projects in favour of ones that had been built; our main criterion was that people should be able to identify something in a historical project that could be extracted and applied to a contemporary problem....Continue Reading

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