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Raue Schönheit

Allgemein
Raue Schönheit

Nachdem der neue Kapitalismus in Russland verspielte Mega-Wohnblocks hervorgebracht hat, versucht sich auch der Staat architektonisch in Szene zu setzen. Ein gutes Beispiel dafür ist das Schiedsgericht in Moskau von Wladimir Plotkin, in dem das gebaute Symbol für einen aktiven und ehrgeizigen Staat in zu vielen Zugeständnissen an den allgegenwärtigen Kostendruck unterzugehen droht. Das Gericht steht an einer unruhigen Kreuzung, die es mit seinem ovalen Bauteil in eine glatte Kurve verwandelt. In unmittelbarer Nachbarschaft ballt sich ein eklektischer Mix aus Wohn- und Bürogebäuden, einer historischen Feuerwache und einer orthodoxen Kirche. Diese Umgebung wird durch das Gerichtsgebäude reflektiert, neu geordnet und belebt. Mit seinen sich überschneidenden Formen – Oval, Raute, Rechteck – ruft der Bau den russischen Konstruktivismus in Erinnerung. Der lange, siebengeschossige Verwaltungstrakt steht der eleganten Kurve des zweigeschossigen Gerichtsbaus gegenüber, beide werden durch das vorspringende Geschoss (ursprünglich für Technikräume vorgesehen, jetzt nichts als eine Geste) akzentuiert. In der Umgebung verankert ist das Ganze durch die beiden Seitenflügel. Leider hatte der Architekt keinen Einfluss auf Baustoffe, technische Ausstattung oder Einrichtung. So scheint zwar das Treppenhaus direkt aus einem Fotoband über den Konstruktivismus zu stammen, der Rest des Gebäudes ist jedoch schlecht beleuchtet, die Einrichtung ist alt, und wenige Monate nach dem Bezug blättert auch schon der Innenputz, Metallpaneele wölben und lösen sich. Vielleicht ist das aber auch ein diskreter Hinweis darauf, dass das Gericht schon bald nach St. Petersburg umziehen soll. Was wird aus dem Gebäude in Moskau? Ein gutes Beispiel für Architektur, die aus dem gemeinsamen Bemühen von Staat und Architektenzunft entstehen kann – oder ein Mahnmal für die gescheiterte Vision davon.

~Aaron Betsky

Re-Constructing Constructivism
It is by now obvious that Russia is building again. The wealth it is extracting from its natural resources is not just turning into consumer goods and expensive meals, but also into apartment towers, office buildings and shopping malls. These are the building blocks of a new capitalist society, just as the housing slabs lining the boulevards of Moscow, the »Seven Sisters« towers standing at the turning points of the city’s ring, and the workers’ clubs in which the constructivist architects tried to prove that even gravity could be conquered by the will of the people, represented a socialist society. Yet the Russian state also is reasserting itself. It is building new headquarters for its bureaucracies even as it tries to reverse some of the privatization of the perestroika era. The question is how that newly assertive state can appear in a cityscape dominated by the glass and steel or Postmodernist castles of consumer culture. The communist fortresses offer only counter-models that the government seems adamant at avoiding. The answer, at least in one recent example is to reach back to that brief moment when Russia thought it was building a new society and to rethink it in terms of the rationalized building practices imported to the new Russia by developers. The result, in the Court of Arbitration designed by Vladimir Plotkin and completed last year, is a structure in which the memory of an active and ambitious state is caught in the compromised realities of cost-cutting construction.
The Court is the final site of appeal for all disputes in Russia before the country’s Supreme Court. It was commissioned by the Federal government in 2002, though its construction was overseen by the City of Moscow. Its site is in Moscow’s historic core, on what was for many years the building site for a metro station. The complex sits at the intersection of several curving streets and a small park. It is surrounded by an eclectic mix of apartment and office buildings, as well as by a historic fire station that is now a police museum and a nearby Russian Orthodox Church. Plotkin responded to the complexity of the setting by concentrating most of the program in a seven-story tall, C-shaped administration building, separated by what was meant to be a public walkway running east-west from a two-story, cut-off lozenge-shaped wing housing most of the courts. The court building’s sweep opens up views to the police museum while transforming a messy intersection into a smooth curve. To further activate the building, Plotkin cantilevered a canopy over the main entrance. It was originally intended to house the technical installations, but now is only a sign. To the rear of the administration building, the block splays out to accommodate the lobby of the large lecture hall that tops the building and is now slightly cantilevered over the courtyard below.
All of these elements together create the kind of active intersection of forms in space that was a hallmark of Russian Constructivism, and Plotkin is fully conscious of these references. Educated in the Russian system, he rediscovered this legacy after the opening up of the profession. Here he plays the expanse of the administration wing’s long, east-facing façade off against the swerve of the court building, then accentuates these major gestures with the cantilever of the canopy and lobby volume while anchoring the whole in its urban setting to the west with the two cross wings. It is an amazing feat of composition that breaks down the complex into pieces that not only articulate the various functions but also respond to, reorganize and activate the neighborhood. As one moves around, the building changes scale and shape, jutting, thrusting, receding and standing in alternate relations to itself and its neighbors.
Yet the Court of Arbitration’s materiality also makes it part of the new world of big business building up in Moscow. A poured-in-place concrete structure clad in a grid of white-painted aluminum sandwich panels and clear glass, the building has the rationality and clarity of office buildings anywhere in the world, as it is made with the same building systems one can find adorning office buildings in Shanghai, Frankfurt or Chicago. The result is a balancing act between expressive forms and generic envelopes that represents an obvious ambivalence about the place of the state in the urban landscape. It is noteworthy, for instance, that the court building does not express its dozen courtrooms, but instead faces its southern exposure with Hunter Douglas fins meant to shade the interior lobbies while activating the curved corners. There is no symbolism here, only at attempt to act as a good citizen. The large space on top of the office block that does press out from the building’s envelope is not used for any but the most important court cases and is instead essentially a private conference room for the legal eagles. The same ambivalence carries through in the Court’s detailing. Where Plotkin had originally wanted to have open corners on the administration building, cost cutting meant that the windows at those edges became encased in heavy frames he could only paint gray in an effort to suppress their presence. A recessed portico whose columns are clad in black granite marks the entrance to this building, but the public enters into the court building through a set of flush doors leading directly to a security checkpoint. The worst problem is the heavy fence that completely surrounds the building, thus cutting off all access even to the public part of the complex, though these kinds of absurd security measures are part of a global phenomenon that is destroying the relationship of almost all public buildings to their public and public space.
The architecture disappears almost completely in the building’s interior, where Plotkin lost all control of finishes and furnishings. Though a winding staircase brings some formal excitement inside, the public spaces are dimly lit, poorly furnished and, in the courtrooms and formal spaces, marred by the addition of wood wainscoting and imitation French chandeliers. It is hard to imagine how a state authority that would commission a building that harks back to the most optimistic and radical aspects of modernism would then cocoon itself in the accoutrements of a second-rate provincial hotel.
Moreover, the building is already falling apart only months after it has been finished (again, without Plotkin’s supervision). This again appears to be a generic problem in Moscow: buildings are created for immediate effect, like stage props, with no sense that they will survive much beyond the grand opening. Here the metal panels are warping and popping off and the plaster is coming off the walls. Perhaps this is appropriate: rumors abound that the Court of Arbitration will move to St. Petersburg, leaving the new building as a white, neo-constructivist elephant.
To stand back from the Court of Arbitration without paying too much attention to its details is to experience a sense of what Moscow could become. The city was once the site of intense experimentation, and its stature as great capital has turned it into a veritable opera of palaces, whether for workers, czars or culture. Its urban plan promotes the play of forms against the turns of the boulevards and the rise and fall of the low hills. This dramatic urbanism plays itself out on the small scale of the street and the neighborhood and, in the best buildings, of individual structures as well. Plotkin’s building sings an aria of modernism both international in nature and specific to its site and its traditions, although its voice may be hoarse and its make-up may be running. One can only hope that a chorus of better buildings will pick up its cues and not be drowned out by either the catcalls of reactionary preservationists or the false notes of unscrupulous developers. The state and architecture should stand together for something better in Russia, and the Arbitration Court is either a good building block for such a stance or an instant ruin reminding us of failed vision.
Aaron Betsky ist Direktor des Cincinnati Art Museum und Kurator der diesjährigen Architekturbiennale. Bis 2006 leitete er das NAI, davor war er Kurator für Architektur, Design und Digital Projects am San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Als studierter Architekt verfasste er rund ein Dutzend Bücher über Architektur und Design, im Herbst erscheint »What is Modernism«.
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