Позитивные изменения. Образование. Школа будущего (Тематический выпуск, 2022)/Positive changes. Education. The school of the future (Special issue, 2

DEMOLISH OR RECONSTRUCT?

Sooner or later, our state will mature enough to begin investing in unique and beautiful architecture — not just in schools but also in other public buildings built with the state money. Right now it seems to have other priorities. And of course, it knows better how to spend its money at any given time. I should add that when the state eventually gets its hands on this problem, it will have to do something about those model schools that have already sprung up throughout the country in huge numbers. Some of them will at some point reach the end of useful life (our typical architecture ages quickly — after 25 years it is almost guaranteed to be obsolete), and then we will have to decide — to demolish or completely reconstruct. The other part will just need minor updates, and this is where the German experience of renovating typical Soviet architecture in the former GDR comes in handy.

The interiors are very spacious and bright. The central crossing in the building is reserved for rest and recreation. It contains a double-height hall with an amphitheater, where you can rest between the lessons or, on the contrary, study at leisure, have some time with yourself or talk to your classmates. Our schools certainly need such spaces. This is one of the conditions for achieving that flexibility that I wrote about earlier.

To be fair, typical doesn’t have to be boring and depressing. After all, typical architecture existed in the tsarist times as much as it did under Stalin. But then the problem of beauty was addressed with decorativism, or ornamentation, in the late Soviet terminology. Right, typical cannot be unique by definition, but until the middle of the last century, our typical design provided for beautification of the facades with all kinds of stucco or carved stone details. With Khrushchev coming to power, beauty in architecture was abolished as an impermissible luxury, excess. In the 1950s, the entire construction industry in the USSR was reorganized to meet the task of providing accommodation to the people as cheap and as fast as possible. I must note that to some extent we are still living in this old paradigm of speed and cost cutting. After all, the inertia is enormous in the government system.

We will, of course, eventually abandon these attitudes, but it will take some more time. I consider a return to decorativism to be impossible today, for a number of reasons. First, the craft culture necessary for this style has been lost, and reviving it is mission impossible. Secondly, decorativism is politically toxic — who needs architecture today that is associated with the era of the dictatorship. Thirdly, there is the spirit of the times, which obliges the architects to profess certain approaches. Decorativism, in my opinion, goes against the spirit of modernity, albeit with some reservations. Yes, there are neo-classical architects in Russia, their main representative in the "noughties” being the famous critic Grigory Revzin, now a partner in the Strelka Design Bureau, but they never formed a common school; they are not even a group of like-minded people. They are all working off a certain request, which is always coming from private capital. That’s a fairly narrow segment of the market. The state does not show any demand for neoclassicism, and it is not expected to, in the future.