On May, 22, 2014 within ARCH Moscow exhibition it was a public submission of the first graduates (2-year MA program) of the MARCH school.
The whole course (36 students) of MARCH was divided in three groups (by 12 students) and each group was lead by different architects and was working on separate projects: group, lead by Sergey Tchoban, managing partner of architectural bureau ‘SPEECH’, was called studio ‘Coordination of movements’ and was working on design of the new district in Skolkovo; studio ‘Unfinished city’ was managed by Rubens Cortes, Spanish architect, and Anton Egerev Ribeiro da Silva, Portuguese architect, were developing a typical district in Novokosino; the third studio ‘Perezaryadye’, lead by Evgeniy Ass, founder of MARCH, were working on the concept of Zaradye district.
I saw only a submission of all students from Sergey Tchoban’s studio. They impressed me a lot. It was a great work. Apart from good, challenging and professional projects, the presentations themselves (digital and verbal) were very strong. All students were perfectly prepared. Some of them had small problems with the speech, however, only due to the huge stress. The presentation was public and the judges were such important figures in our architectural market like: Evgeniy Ass, Narine Tyutcheva (architect, lector in MARCHI, CEO of bureau ‘Rozhdestvenka’), Anna Turgeneva (chief architect of Skolkovo), Vladimir Plotkin (co-founder of bureau ‘Reserv’, professor in MARCHI), Sergey Tchoban, Andrey Romanov (co-founder of ADM).
As I understood, initially the studio of Sergey Tchoban was divided in smaller groups and the aim of the each group was to prepare the general plan of Skolkovo district. It had to include 12 building (= number of students in studio) of different functions. Later, the winning project was taken as a base plan for the further studio’s work. At this stage, each student, via lottery, chose a particular place (together with the function) on the approved general district’s plan for their further own buildings. I am not going now to describe every separate project (buildings) – all of them were professional and worth to be seen – instead of this I would like to pay attention at the organization of their work as a team.
The task of each student was to design a building which has a particular given function (office of a large company, offices for start-up businesses, dwelling house, sport center, museum and others) and place on the general plan (divided into 3 clusters, each of which had to have 4 buildings). All the building had also restriction in height (to be in harmony with other buildings in the projecting district). And the main aim was to design a building which could become a logical part of the cluster and, in larger scale, of the whole district. It easy to guess how complicated was task for the students; all of them always had to know what is going on in their cluster and in other clusters as well. I am almost sure there were a lot of compromises and discussions. I find this task extremely difficult to fulfill – the task to design a building which should become an organic part of the cluster and the district on the whole, while you do not even know how the surrounding buildings will look like and function (where an entrance zone or windows in the nearest buildings will be, etc.). In such case everybody needs to react at any changes happening in others’ buildings and always be ready for dialogs, reasoning, criticizing, finding compromises. It should be a team where everybody supports each other. Otherwise, it would be almost impossible to complete this task and, moreover, complete it on time and with a good result.
I was looking at all these students and was proud of them.
The presentations were structured; every image was strong, clearly understandable and correlated with the speech; speeches themselves were also well-prepared and limited in time. It was interesting to follow every said word from the very beginning of the first presentation until the end. It is a good example what for we were training our ‘Pecha-Kucha’ exercises during this year.
I did not have a chance to take a look at their printed design reports, however, I saw that every student had at least one big book (up to A4 size and 2-5 cm in thickness) describing the project. Judges often praised them and told that it is beautiful and professional layouts. I think it would be very useful for our studying process if we somehow could see these or similar good examples of design reports.
Another small point I would like to mark about MARCH’s presentation is impressive hand drawings in almost each presentation (apart from digital collages, plans, sections and others). I think students were lucky to take drawing classes from Sergey Tchoban, whose drawings are gorgeous. I also mentioned about importance of architectural hand drawings because during recent interviews (organized within Professional development module) most of us were asked if we can draw or not. And as I understood they were even more interested in good hand drawing skills rather than in impressive collages prepared digitally. It is probably because digital presentation is just a technical skill (everybody can study it in case of wish), but ability to perform an impressive hand drawing is a talent and demands much more skills and practice.
As a conclusion, I would like to mark once again that studio of Sergey Tchoban shown a good example of harmonious team work. It is what Mansilla and Tunon called ‘erosion of personality’, when you are ready to sacrifice of your personal ambitions to achieve a good common result, when your building is not pulls on all the attention, when it is not a monument of your obsessions, but when it complements and logically and aesthetically conjoins with all the surrounding buildings, thus forming an integrated, coherent, complete picture of the whole district.
Inna Vostrikova
IAD, Level 5
June, 22, 2014
Some more photos from presentation are available from:
http://m.vk.com/album-40195014_196053571?from=profile&post=-40195014_449
Interesting interviews (Dec., 2011 and Oct., 2012) with Narine Tyutcheva about architectural education in Russia and policy of MARCHI:
http://www.archnest.com/mainpage/blog/4518/
http://pl41.com/sovety-postupayuschim/3210-marhi-na-perepute.html
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