Alexander Brodsky’s multifaceted body of work seems to search for the hidden identity of his Russian homeland, crossing the boundaries between architecture and art – and paper and wood. His broad oeuvre ranges from a pavilion made of industrial windows, designed solely for drinking Russian vodka, to scale models of cities drenched in crude oil (whether vodka or oil – for Brodsky it seems the Russian soul is clearly reflected now in highly-flammable liquids!)
But he was firstly famous for being the leader in the 1970s and 80s, with Ilya Utkin, of a movement known as the “paper architects” – a group of young graduates of the Moscow Architectural Institute, frustrated by the state-run building industry, who fled into the imaginative worlds they created with drafting pencils.
Their inspirations were Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s architectural fantasies, as well as the visions of Le Corbusier. Collage-like utopias emerged, critiquing the inhospitable aspects of the Soviet-era Russian state, sometimes melancholy, sometimes humorous.
“For 30 years, I worked along the boundaries between art and architecture, on paper, installations, and sculptures. Only in the past few years have I begun to actually build something,” he says. Born in 1955, Brodsky decided on architecture very early, but working life out of school was initially a problem: “It was very difficult for me to work with a lot of other people on huge projects. I wanted to make small personal things instead,” Socialist group-think wasn’t his thing.
Brodsky working in tandem with Utkin, developed artist’s projects through drawings, etchings, and installations, and participated in conceptual competitions and exhibitions abroad. One of their best-known works was the Crystal Palace, a design which won the Japanese Central Glass Competition in 1982. Columbarium Architecture, from 1984, is also a typical example of Brodsky’s works on paper: a series of etchings showing a huge, almost unfathomable concrete mausoleum, in which houses slated for demolition are stacked on shelves like a kind of cabinet of curiosities.
This was an early critique of something he still laments today: the disastrous urban planning of his home city of Moscow. “It’s painful to see how the atmosphere in the city is being lost,” he says. “The many, many demolitions are Moscow’s main problem. The urban landscape is changing for the worse, because so many old buildings are disappearing.”
»Brodsky’s most astonishing designs
are in wood or water.«
His installation Coma (2000), for a Moscow gallery, presented viewers with a city model sinking into oil. The black gold dripped from transfusion bags onto a landscape of buildings made of unfired clay and then oozed away. He says of this work: “I wanted to show the city as if it was laying in a hospital on the operating table.” The message behind his oil-smeared city was crystal clear. Moscow was being flooded with petrodollars, with which anyone could buy up, rip down, or build anything.
Whilst the skylines of the world’s cities slowly become increasingly homogenous, Brodsky follows his own impulses – doing his own, small-scale things, which have a high level of complexity, a thoughtful melancholy.
Yet he finds it difficult to put his design principles into words. “I do things that I won’t find terrible afterwards, or think of as a torture for me. Things that won’t burden or bother me for the rest of my life.”
»I do things that I won’t find terrible afterwards, or think of as a torture for me. Things that won’t burden or bother me for the rest of my life.«
Brodsky’s most astonishing designs are in wood or water, like the off-kilter timber construction on stilts 95° Restaurant at the Pirogowo Resort near Moscow in 2000; the temporary pavilion made of ice, which he built in winter 2003 on a frozen lake, and the pavilion dedicated exclusively to drinking vodka. This latter, designed for an arts festival at the Klyazma Reservoir near Moscow in 2004, was a small, elevated structure, cobbled together from wooden supports and the window frames of a former textile factory. Inside its white-painted interior, there was a small table, set with two tin cups attached to a container filled with vodka. “You drank until you couldn’t drink anymore,” explains Brodsky.
Alexander Brodsky, born in Moscow in 1955, is an architect and artist. He studied at the Moscow Art School attached to the Academy of Arts from 1968-1969 and the Moscow Architectural Institute under M. A. Turkus, M. O. Barshch and B. G. Barkhin from 1972-1978. Between 1978 and 1993 he worked with Ilya Utkin on numerous interiors, projects, and installations for competitions and exhibitions in Russia and internationally. From 1993 to 2000 he worked on graphics, sculpture, and installations, before in 2000, founding his architectural practice, Bureau Alexander Brodsky. He represented Russia at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2006. Currently he lives in Moscow running his practice.
Within this intense, temporary ritual, vaguely reminiscent of a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, surrounded by repurposed, recycled building material and a pinch of nostalgia, Brodsky created a piece of authentic Russia. Images from the project, like his drawings, remain long in the mind.
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