- Site-specific cases
ZERKALO is the first step in a broader investigation.
As its name denotes, it is a mirror, the reflection of the past and the present of ways of life and their effect on architecture, urbanism and production. Inclusive, intergenerational, a space of coexistence for local wisdom and new technologies.
Is the transformation of a building of more than 1000 apartments. A building belonging to a poststalinist era still in conversation with Modernism. Today it is an out-of-date skeleton occupying space in the city of Moscow. It is an area of opportunity, with sufficient size to have consequences on a human, urban and even global level.
Operations such as those proposed by OMA or L&V may not be enough to rebuild and change models. We need to make a catalogue of real opportunities-not just to make exciting drawings- in the form of "unloved" buildings in Cities with enough potential to be transformed via local methods and technical knowledge. ZERKALO is the first chapter.
“Live in the house - and the house will stand.
I will call up any century,
Go into it and build myself a house.”
Arseni Tarkovsky
Understanding the complexities and attachments of the Russians with their rural home, the Dacha, and the consequences of this massive suburban occupation by contrasting it with the Soviet kommunalka was key to the first steps of the design.
_ARRIVAL
“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is”
Stanisław Lem, Solaris
The housing models studied will be combined in an existing building, a huge residential complex of 400 meters long, 50 meters high with more than 1000 apartments. Here there are individual and duplex houses with few shared spaces and long and narrow corridors.
“We won´t sleep. But we´ll all be transformed.”
Corintios
Transformation
Based on the inhabitants´ own restlessness, the intention is to stop their unsustainable nomadism by linking sociological, emotional and productive factors in a residential complex. A huge hybrid building where housing and production coexist.
“Let´s give life to the immense building of our memories”
Marcel Proust, In search of Lost Time
Nostalgia
The focal point of the project is to link production with the desired domestic life. Both formal and technological solutions are needed around 3 areas: residential, hybridization and climatic performance.
One night I burned the house I loved,
It lit a perfect ring
In which I saw some weeds and stone
Beyond -- not anything.
One Night I Burned
Leonard Cohen
The project will welcome intergenerational inhabitants willing to search for new life models. Byt, the particular form of Russian Life is explored by transforming spaces of the domestic culture, the traditional sauna, the greenhouse or the Russian living room into modern climatic devices.
