TATLIN NEWS #42

the summer came from under the chisel of the British sculptor and installation artist Richard Wilson. This 54-year old artist became internationally known thanks to his paradigmatic work «20:50» (the last time it was exhibited in the old Saatchi gallery), where the viewer suddenly finds himself in a room half full of used sump oil . The horizon of a black looking glass mirroring the room back and turning walls and the ceiling over gives one the sense of dizziness and hovering. The most important role in Wilson’s work is played by intervention into architecture due to the tendency to destabilize the normal habitual perception of space and reveal its inner atectonic potential. At the same time it employsindustrial technologies combined with large-scale ready- made objects. Apart from that, the author has been long fascinated with various hollows and cuts. One of his works presenting a cross-section of a real marine vessel several meters thick is even entitled «The Slice of Reality». And the viewer walks into the renowned «oil» room via a sharp walkway – like a knife through butter. He has incorporated his favourite subjects, such as section, rotation and mechanisms, in his project in Liverpool. Probably WilsonlearnedthekeyAnti-Oedipus thesis of Deleuze and Guattari who heard the uninterrupted roar of machines and claimed that the ultimate driver of the world – the Desiring-Machine – is defined by a system of sections. The Liverpool «self-tapping screw» is obviously meant for continuous production and metering of the architectural unconscious flowing into the public space. In a row with architectonic interventions of contemporary art Wilson’s case is not unique, but quite unusual. The first artist who cut a three-dimensional cone in the body of the building was Gordon Matta-Clark – in 1975 at Plateau Beaubourg in Paris. Also, no one would underestimate the historic achievements of the SITE group in the actual deconstruction of supermarket facades. However, the challenge of architecture to art still retains its importance

today – thus, the strategy of giving the construction wound was reproduced in another Unilever mega-installation (Shibboleth by Doris Salcedo) first to entrench the flesh of Tate Modern. Wilton introduces recycling motives, the motives of circulation and reversibility into architectonic section. He implants a foreign matter under the skin of the building, a new organ, a vestibular system that allows the building to turnover.Arotationandexcavation machine that simultaneously acts as both a tool and a material continuously ripping up the facade and smoothing it again, taking out and replacing the construction volume, refreshing that way the genetic principle of modernism – pumping the space from the inside to the outside. It is characteristic of the author, that a functionalist office building was chosen to be an object of inversion and receive an attachment of a «useless» machine that costs 900 thousand dollars. Such dear – in all respects – dialectics of positive and negative space results from freeing the wall from its functions of a bearing construction and a fencing. This is one of the most impressive illustrations to the ethics of art that always insists going against the rules, and the rules most difficult to abandon are the rules of gravitation and the hierarchy of the top and the bottom. An extra bonus of carving the glass facade was quite an expressive plastics. Turning the panel flat to the viewer, the sculptor encourages him to admire the vibrating section of carcass ribs, glass and windows. Though the artist seems to make the cut without anaesthesia at a random place, but one can hardly avoid thinking that he has deliberately carved a shape of a plane out of the facade, and this plane will be swirling in a ceremonial nosedive until the end of 2008. If one translates the title of this project in its idiomatic

meaning, then there is a question of what the artist was looking for, turning the house over? One of the answers lying on the surface is that he probably was looking for new angles of vision. S.K. A Sum of formAl StrAtegieS text Maria Yankovskaya photo Architecture USSR magazine Socialist realism, proclaimed a creative method of the Soviet art of building at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Architects in 1937, provided for the development of «socialist in its context and national in its form» architecture in the multi-national country of Soviets. But by mid-seventies the majority of the architects could hardly tell what exactly the main concept of socialist realism was. Social optimism of the first years was changed by a long-term stagnation which affected all spheres of culture. Architecture was called to refuse from excessive extravagances of the period of Stalin’s monumentalism and to solve constructive and economic tasks with the help of simple and unified forms. The strict system of typification and standardization negatively influenced the expressiveness of new architecture and only few masters were able to achieve bright and original appearance of their projects by small means. One of the most interesting examples of architecture of the 70s became the building of the Ministry of Motor-Roads of the Georgian SSR by architect Georgy V. Chakhava. The building was erected in Tbilisi between two motorways running on different levels with the elevation difference of 33 meters in 1976. This part stayed not developed for a long time due to relief with the inequalities in the elevation. The main principle of the project by G. Chakhava and Z. Dzhalagania was the necessity

to review the attitude towards environment. G.Chakhava calls to build up not vegetation-rich plains but use bare slopes and lifeless rocks in order not to interfere with the natural environment and as much as possible reduce the detrimental consequences of urbanization. A relief, according to G.Chakhava, can and must become an ally of architects and designers, prompting them a most suitable and outstanding solution. The application of a construction method with the use of pile bent on relief allowed the erection of a structure lifted over the ground surface, which considerably reduced the constructed area and in its turn provided a possibility to create additional recreation areas as well as easily let the transport under the building. The result of it has become a project well fitting to the context of the picturesque environment with taking into account of all national features and peculiarities of Georgian architecture. The transparent structure does not block the landscape but becomes a part of it, also making the environment a part of the interior. A set of planted terraces and verandahs emphasizes this unity. The author managed tomake anadministrative building surprisingly human and harmonious, which is an extremely rare case in the Soviet architecture of that period. But apart from aesthetic and designer tasks an important side of this project is its low cost. Due to an original spatial solution it became possible to reduce the area taken by the building to 450 m 2 at the volume of 60 thousandm 2 . With the traditional planning method applied, such a construction would be not 17 but 38 floors high, and at reduction of the number of floors the building would have taken the area of around 1400 m 2 , i.e. three times more. Standardized elements were used in the project, the whole building structure was subordinated to the assumed system of modules but it does not make the architectural solution of the building any worse, more than that, G. Chakhava, due to so few expressive and decorative means used, managed to create a building the appearance of which strikes

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