Andrey Litvinov urged architects not to hide behind the facade

“Architect as conductor”

On New Year’s Eve on the Black Sea coast, where a new concert hall will appear in a year and a half, an unusual person appeared among the builders in helmets. He looked like a Tim Burton character – an unusual hairstyle and style. “Who is it, who is it? Musician? An artist?” asked the uninitiated. It turned out that the architect Andrey Andreevich. So they called Andrei Litvinov.

They say about him, unlike many architects, he does not think in boxes, he fits the object into an already existing space. His track record includes more than a hundred projects, among them an arena on the territory of the ZIL, built by the World Cup, residential complexes and hotels in St. Petersburg, and industrial facilities. Now a concert hall, the acoustic system for which was created by the largest specialist in this field from Japan, Yasuhisa Toyota, who has already worked in Russia, who created concert halls in the Mariinsky Theater and Zaryadye. He has many projects around the world, and it was important to do everything so that he felt the peculiarity of this particular creation of his, perceived himself as an integral part of it. In order to “draw” such a major specialist into the project, Andrey Litvinov called him every week to tell him how the construction was going.

We are still talking in a concrete structure, in the place where the orchestra pit will be, but for now it is just a lifeless abyss.

– I don’t know what I will design tomorrow, – Andrey Litvinov says. – Each one is like a new dive. Cultural objects are a different story. A museum complex will soon open in St. Petersburg. The Museum of Photographic Art is my project.

– Are you interested in creating cultural objects? How free are you in your flights and fantasies?

– There is no architect who specializes in one thing. Now I have a sincere interest in cultural objects and at the same time I am interested in schools – ordinary, in different regions. I love designing them. I have a lot of ideas that I want to implement. There was a period when I was interested in hotels, because they are multifunctional, they have a little bit of everything. It is interesting to collect all this. Sport is also a whole era. I worked in Russia and neighboring countries. We made two arenas in Bishkek and Issyk-Kul. If I haven’t designed some type of object and I’m doing it for the first time, then I assemble a team of technologists, narrow specialists. This is not the work of one person. A large serious object involves a huge number of consultants and experts who form the idea. And you, as a conductor, form all the relationships.

I am forming a certain approach to design and teamwork. There is a design of what surrounds us. There is industrial and landscape design, architecture as the design of facades, building envelopes. There are many different divisions, professions that form the elements from which you collect the environment. In design, representatives of different professions express their inner world.

Each creative person is in search, expresses his inner world through his own image. There is also the design of communications, how people interact with each other. I am an architect, but I understand the importance of all other areas of design.

– Sometimes it seems to architects that they are the most important, and the rest realize his plan.

– Architects have such an approach that the main thing is the facade of the building, and everything else should adapt, that the architect is above everyone else, and the rest of the designers do something there and adjust. No! All are equal. The architect is only part of the whole. A comfortable environment is formed in the balance of different professions. If you put the appearance of the building at the forefront, then you infringe on the space in which people are located. You shape the space from the inside, arrange the windows, and then go outside and see what happened. Next comes the adjustment. Today there are so many tools for making the design of any shell, which was not 100 and 200 years ago. Back then, there simply wasn’t such a variety of materials. Sometimes it is worth making an effort and creating an interesting shell from a comfortable interior space. And when the position of an architect is like this – first I do it, and then everyone else – then there is no incentive. This is the easy way. And the difficult one is to enter into communication with all the specialists, adjust to them, and create an interesting solution. The “building itself” approach no longer works in architecture. What is important is the environment with a large number of meanings, and not the object that exists on its own. And this is urbanism. It is important to understand what kind of infrastructure to create. If people leave, it means that the territory is degrading. If they come, the territory develops. I can talk about this topic for two days.