Architect Daria Paramonova about favorite books
IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF" we ask journalists, writers, scholars, curators, and other heroines about their literary preferences and publications, which occupy an important place in their bookcase. Today, architect Daria Paramonova, architect and general director of Strelka Architects, shares her stories about favorite books.
I am an architect, but I have to admit that studying at the Moscow Architectural Institute did not give me a basic humanitarian body. The hermetic school, which was not penetrated by the outside world, led to the blockade of knowledge and the isolation of Soviet and then Russian architecture from the world context. I made up on my own, very haphazardly: by itself, I went through philosophy at the institute, but its connection with the artistic language became clear to me as an adult. There was no single picture for a long time, and knowledge depended on personal interests, my clever senior friends and mentors.
The books that determined my approach to work came years after graduating from the first higher education — before studying at Strelka, I had no idea about their existence. I was a graduate of the Moscow Architectural Institute with a diploma with honors and one of the strongest students of the course, but, while designing, I did not realize the connection between form and theory. An architect should always work with both spheres at once: spatial and conceptual.
For many years I have only read fiction - and non-fiction in English from the libraries of the best architectural schools was a huge discovery for me. I realized that in the modern world architecture is always inscribed in history, context and local culture - it is not neutral and does not arise from emptiness. An important feature that unites the books on my bookshelf is the author's work with stereotypes, patterns and ideas. In each book there is a rethinking of hardened truths, the ability to speak outside the box and systemically about the usual is what I value most.
Roland Barth
"Mythology"
I read “Mythologies” without context - for me this book became the most understandable and closest way to tell about the symbolic. Bart parses common cultural codes through everyday things and messages. This technique came in my life in a casual and amateur-superficial way. In the short stories about boxing on TV or what a lottery ticket means, I first faced with decoding everyday life, which I then used in my work. The architecture and its interpretations, the ability to pass obvious things through myself and cultural filters became the method of my research of Luzhkov architecture - such as searching for answers to the question of whether a plastic window has any message and what is behind the selected building material.
Working with iconic signs and symbols is a typical alphabet of postmodernism, which has been recently despised by architects. But it is necessary, if we want to explain to others, why this ugly building is now standing here and what is its meaning. And why it is necessary to discuss not its "ugliness" or "beauty", but some other, less obvious aspects.
Winfried Georg Sebald
"Natural History of Destruction"
I have been driving to Berlin since my two thousand years. For young architects, this was a must-see place - we were interested in how the capital of Europe is being built up. It was there that for the first time I felt the presence of another history of war, or of war in general, as part of history. Compared to our way of working with memory in the city, everything seemed to be on display - it struck me.
In the Natural History of Destruction, Zebald raises from one perspective the theme of war and memory and the ability of both individual figures and the whole nation to cope with the experienced tragedy. His apparent impartiality is very confusing: I always want to clarify exactly what he means. I am always looking for the most accurate ways and examples to talk about my experiences so that it does not become forbidden and repelled. This book is a great example of this approach.
Andrea Palladio
"Four books on architecture"
The Palladio edition was not my reference book when I studied at the institute, but it became it when I became friends with Alexander Brodsky and his closest colleagues, Cyril Ass and Nadia Korbut. They revealed to me the beauty of classical architecture and the texts of Palladio. He describes his projects in simple language, talking about the most expressive architectural techniques. His approach is to present architecture through imperfection, contrary to our ideas of classical architecture as a strict ideal. He explains the practical need for choice - it becomes immediately clear what makes his projects contemporary.
Rem Kolhas
"New York is beside itself"
The books that I read while studying at Strelka became an important educational stage for me. The work of Koolhaas, as my mentor, gave me the key to how to talk about a big city. The fact is that a wide audience still evaluates architecture as “beautiful” or “ugly”. We are accustomed to understand art through context and concepts, and architecture seems to be something utilitarian and invented for humans - and everyone is taken to argue about architecture.
The phenomenon of the well-known New York is explained at Koolhaas through urban oddities, spatial phenomena, a symbolic system and mythology. The invention of urban myths is an important part of the Kolkhas interdisciplinary approach. He is looking for patterns, pulls out the necessary facts from the history of the pockets and puts his own puzzle - and the meaning of this puzzle is not truthful, but convincing. This book is an example of an ideal storytelling: a fascinating story that does not pretend to objectivity.
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Stephen Aizenour
"Las Vegas Lessons. The Forgotten Symbolism of an Architectural Form"
Venturi also interprets the everyday and aesthetically unacceptable. In Vegas, he explores the phenomenon of huge urban signs, high speeds, the priority of motorists over pedestrians, giant casinos, built for profit. Buildings in Las Vegas - the goods made by the most blatant rules. In the case of such "wrong" cities, architects usually try to pretend that everything that happens has nothing to do with them. And Venturi went to Vegas with students: "The lessons of Las Vegas" were the result of a long and very interesting interdisciplinary study.
Commercial architecture is generally capable of driving anyone crazy - this is well illustrated by the example of post-Soviet architecture in Moscow. With what remains of it, of course, you need to learn to work. Venturi helps to determine why the reality around us is so, and to cope with the desire to deny it entirely. This is definitely a book about the importance of the ugly and mediocre in our lives - sometimes it tells about us much more than beautiful.
Pierre Vittorio Aureli
"The possibility of absolute architecture"
Aureli is located on another part of the spectrum from Venturi and Koolhaas. He believes that architecture can rise above the context, including commercial, and be an archipelago of human super-values. Speaking quite simply (the text is actually quite complicated), Aureli contrasts urban planning with the city.
Urbanism is the development of space, subordinated to commercial interests and often chaotic, and the city is the fruit of conscious politics. Economy and politics - equal forces that form the urban space. Aureli himself is in favor of working on architecture, based on the system of values and preferences, and not from our instincts and economic impulses.
Jean Ameri
"On the other side of crime and punishment. Attempts to overcome the defeated"
There are a number of topics about which it is always very difficult to communicate with the world: a conversation often rolls into a set of tragic clichés. The topic of the Holocaust, genocide, Jews and Jews is very complex, and Ameri's book was one of rare texts that didn’t cause questions and irritation at all. The very image of a writer who worked with this trauma during his life and who died tragically, was deprived of emotional terrorism for me. Ameri is working with this topic almost coolly.
In general, this book is about whether it is easier for an intelligent person to survive in a situation of hell on earth: a sober analysis of a difficult topic became for me an example of how to talk about the unbearable in essence and not unwind the readers. Speculation makes such topics taboo, while Amery skillfully avoids speculation - and ethically it is a very valuable book.
Richard Pipes
"Property and Freedom"
In this book, the answers to the questions that torment Russians are brilliantly and easily found. Roughly speaking, Pipes explains how the practice of private property affects the understanding of personal boundaries and freedoms in different states. Pipes’s main case is Russia: the author shows that in our country there was never any private property in its pure form, until 1991. Therefore, all our current attempts to live in step with the rest of the world are doomed to mistakes.
For me, this book has become a lifesaver in talking about the development of Russia and our attempts to catch up with leaps and bounds. We do things imperfectly, and I was always slightly annoyed by the general confidence that the experience of private property was mastered by a man the first time. Intuitively, I understood the wrongness of such an approach, and Pipes has become for me a powerful tool of controversy.
Alexander Chudakov
"The haze lays down on the old steps"
Another example of a wonderful book related to self-identification. Her theme echoes the story of my family: it is clear that almost every Russian family has victims of repression and it is possible to find traces of terror. Mother's relatives were exiled to Karaganda after dispossession, lived in a dugout; mother was left an orphan. Mom barely talked about her parents — it seems to me that this is a common device of human memory — except that she could tell a story between things that made her hair stand on end.
In a certain circle, the topic of repression received discussion and its own rhetoric - but it never sounded in our family. I recognized the history of previous generations in bits and pieces - and this book helped me build the necessary parallels. I am divorced from family memory, but I can get knowledge about someone else’s experience and the history of our state through such literature. For me, as a post-Soviet person, as for an architect, this is very important. Beautiful metro and royal skyscrapers cannot be separated from the time and context in which they were created, and it is important to remember the times with which particular artistic techniques are associated.
William Mitchell
"I ++. Man, City, Networks"
This is not really my favorite book, it just complements other publications in my library. Thirty years ago, Mitchell wrote about how we would live in the world of the future, with the Internet and without an office, go back to the roots and use technology differently.
On the one hand, this book is evidence of how important things about our lifestyle were formulated many years ago, on the other hand, how many expectations did not really come true. Of all the books that build utopias of the future, this is the most basic and the most understandable, explaining the illusiveness of all forecasts and the inability to predict the life of society even for a couple of decades ahead.