The workshop is based in 1992
From the moment of formation and up to nowadays the creative and organizational principles of a workshop have not changed. It is the mobile, organizational structure not burdened by the bureaucratic device focused on functional, structural, socially responsible architecture. Credo - game by rules; if there are no rules, Lyzlov likes to invent them. In designing the main value for him is an inventive refinement of the order.
«The vital chaos is inclined to accept uncontrollable forms in Russia. For the lack of the standard norms and game rules any accident, gesture for the sake of gesture and following to a conjuncture are capable only to aggravate a situation. An ability to create and the personal responsibility of the architect in these conditions are indissolubly connected. Architecture for us - a way of struggle with entropy, a way to give in our life order and harmony. This ethical imperative is based on personal belief, that we can develop, only developing and improving the general situation. We consider design process as collecting in focus of all conditions of a problem to find the decision dictated by internal logic and an environment. Connectivity of answers to questions gives rise to responsible realistic architecture. The realism does its correct, contextual, fair and convincing ».
The project of the museum of Aleksey Gastev, the ideologist of scientific organization of work, located in his hometown of Suzdal, is inscribed in multiple contexts: the contest of a small town, the context of avant-garde design, the context of “lean production”, and the context of the creative quest of Nikolai Lyzlov’s minimalist architecture – and it seems to us that this project even reveals a distant memory of the fact that Aleksey Gastev learned his craft in France.
In this issue, we are publishing the results of the workshop organized in Kazan by the architectural school MARCH. The contestants developed the designs of seven public zones in different cities and settlements of the Republic of Tatarstan.
Playing with scale and simple forms, Nikolai Lyzlov managed to transform atrium of an office building into something Cyclopean and bewitching, a fantasy of Piranesi. They planned to realize the building, but the crisis changed plans and probably it will remain on paper. It would be interesting to see it constructed. However the project seems to be interesting on paper as well. Like Piranesi’s.
We continue to publish interview to architects-participants of an exposition of the Russian pavilion in Venice. Texts of these interviews will be included into the catalogue of the Russian pavilion
The contest project of area in Budva in first variant resembles fancies of Russian avant-garde architects of 1920’s: tribunes and mausoleums. The second variant is more fantastic and modern – but both of them have a common feature: they are penetrated with grating of the construction, and this makes the buildings transparent, penetrable and quite theatrical.