Arch Moscow 2014

The International Exhibition of Architecture and Design keeps it’s major priority which is the principle of selectivity, already for 19 years. The best examples of domestic and foreign architectural achievements are demonstrated on the Exhibition, the big amounts of professional discussions about the development of quality architectural environment are held.
ARCH Moscow is a quality audience and the best platform for establishing business contacts in the field of architecture, construction and real estate.

CURATOR’S MANIFESTO

The changes that have taken place in Russian society since 1990 have had an enormous influence on the way people use the city. Society has become more diverse and people have been given more choices. Stratification in income combined with the emergence of a housing market has given people the possibility to choose where to live. Many have choose to move to new places where they hope to find a community of people with the same lifestyle.

At the same time the buildings in the city have not changed that much. Most of them are inherited from the Soviet era. The wish to be different implies the introduction of borders - borders that demarcate privately owned land. In the Soviet city these borders were absent.

The Urban Block is a plot of private land surrounded by public space. Actually, the prefabricated high-rise building on a plot surrounded by fences fits this definition. However, this is an urban block that lacks urban quality, since its most important part has not been designed: the interface between public and private space. Now things seem to be changing. Many are considering a way of building that is more adequate to capitalist society. Cities with streets and squares, aligned with buildings that are accessible from public space, but also with private courtyards that are not separated from the street by fences, but are part of a well-designed communal space. With the street grid as a neutralizing structure, the block city enables the creation of an open urbanism that can absorb the diversity of contemporary society.

The 2014 Moscow Architecture Biennale takes this urban block as its main theme. It aims at showing examples of its reemergence in Russia through projects by Russian and foreign architects, but also by showing best practices from countries around the world, especially those where a similar transition towards the urban block has been taken place or is taking place at this moment. It specifically wants to address the ability of the urban block to organize communal life.

The urban block is a traditional urban model. Though it is relatively new in the post-Soviet context it has history that goes back centuries of not millennia. At the same time its reintroduction in Russia in no was equals simple historicism. Its principles have only survived over time because they were able to adapt to changing circumstances. Now it is time to adapt it to the reality of contemporary Russia.

Curator: Bart Goldhoorn