PCA’s design for a centre for contemporary art signals the emergence of the new creative pole in Eastern Europe.

It was a red letter day for Ukrainian contemporary art when the Pinchuk Art Center opened its doors to visitors last September. Its owner, Victor Pinchuk, one of the wealthiest Ukrainian oligarchs, has consistently promoted himself as a patron of the avant-garde during the last couple of years. Besides comprehensive exhibitions, the most important enterprise of Pinchuk’s „Contemporary Art in Ukraine“ Foundation was the formation of an art collection, which by now comprises a considerable number of works by talented Ukrainian and international artists (Sarah Morris, Olafur Eliasson, Oleg Kulik, Olexandr Gnilitsky, Carsten Holler, Arsen Savadov and many others). Pinchuk initially planned to establish a museum in the Arsenal – a huge tsarist military complex built in the 18th century. However, after the Orange Revolution he was ostracized by the new government. The competition for the reconstruction of the Arsenal, won by the Foundation, was cancelled and they had to look for another location. Finally, the Foundation bought six floors in a recently restored group of eclectic buildings near Besarabka, the old marketplace in the centre of Kiev.

The museum debuted with an exhibition of selected works from its permanent collection under the title „New Space“, a designation that reflected not only the quality of the exhibited works, but also the building’s standout interior design by French architect Philippe Chiambaretta. The main aim of Chiambaretta’s design was, understandably, maximum dissociation from the building’s artificial appearance. This was achieved by considerable alterations which allowed for the addition of one more floor behind the historical facade. The architect explains: „The rebuilt staircase leading to the Foundation space allows us to understand this intervention – the staircase landings do not match the windows – so that the old facade looks like a film set, detached from the floors themselves.“ In addition to this, the existing route between floors – via three stairs and two elevators – was abandoned. Instead, two new interior stairs were created in order to facilitate circulation. Technical equipment was hidden in a new, one-metre-thick central wall that divides the plateau in two. Electricity, air conditioning and ducting run through this spine, simplifying distribution to the exhibition halls on either side.

The sense of entering another reality is strengthened by the almost sterile purity of interior in contrast to the colourful and decorated exterior of the building. The only areas of congruence are the alcoves corresponding to the former floors. Covered by vivid wallpaper designed by Michael Lin, a Taiwanese artist who lives in Paris, they are the only spaces in the museum that hint at the external reality.

Reactions to Chiambaretta’s design vary. An Austrian architect, to whom I showed the museum as a rare example of contemporary architecture in Kiev, commented: „there is too much design“. Indeed, in the café on the seventh floor one finds a kind of Zaha Hadid space. But it would be a mistake to see specific elements of design, such as the deformed grid of the main staircase and the metal panels on the walls and window sills, as mere decoration, since they derived directly from the logic of design.

The keynote of this space is movement. The journey begins at the very entrance, where the existing balustrades of the main stair were replaced with a matrix of metal tubes, an intriguing installation rising through the entire height of the building, beyond the visitors’ gaze, thus drawing them deeper into the museum. The rooms were designed to emphasize the channelling of circulation. The floor is laid in narrow granite bands five to thirty centimetres wide, following the direction of the exhibition plan. Translucent bands of lighting along the perimeter of the ceilings emphasize the exhibition route, echoing the pattern on the floor. The ventilation grilles are disguised as per­forated metal panels displaying abstract graphics specially designed to avoid distracting viewers from the exhibition. The same graphic code is repeated on a larger scale in the interior staircase of the museum where it does not conflict with the works.

Whatever the gossip might be, the opening of Pinchuk Art Center is a very promising event for Ukraine. One can only hope that the museum will retain its image of a creative laboratory and place for communication to become not a MoMa, but rather a société anonyme of our time.

A10, So., 2007.02.04

Drozdov&Partners cut the Gordian knot of history with a fascinating play of light and glass.

Drozdov&Partners claim that their projects are wholly contextual. But in the case of the Yaske sushi bar, the relationship between the building and its location at the beginning of Leninsky Avenue is not so easy to define. In the 20th century this area became a major architectural battlefield between Russian constructivism and Stalinist socialist realism. Standing near the new bar you can see the side elevation of the famous Gosprom building: a classic example of constructivism, it was intended to serve as the powerful engine of modernization that would give birth to the New City of Kharkov. In part it did: in the late 1920s serried ranks of grey concrete housing blocks arose behind the Gosprom’s vast back. In the 1930s this advance was abruptly halted and even distorted as pompous decorations appeared on many of Kharkov’s constructivist buildings, symbols of the change of political regime. Yaske stands on the scar left by this fierce battle, in the open corner left between two pseudo-classical giants, facing the unadorned facades of the smaller-scale buildings on the other side of the road.

It seems that the architects did not look for compromises here. Instead they illuminated the historical confusion with powerful gestures that take Yaske from the pragmatic level of „edifice“ to the poetic category of „sculpture“. They started off with the old modernist idea of the total penetration of internal space into the exterior. „We tried to leave this corner open, as it was before construction. Integrating the interior into the exterior was also an attempt to give quite an expensive sushi bar a more public character,“ says Oleg Drozdov. What lends Yaske landmark quality, however, are not the fully glazed facades of the rectangular, ground-floor volume (toilets, kitchen and service rooms are the only interior areas hidden from view), but rather the striking contrast between the gentle transparency of this volume and the monumental impenetrability that characterizes all the surrounding buildings, regardless of style.

This total transparency – extending to the smallest detail in the interior including plastic stools and the almost invisible needle-like legs of the tables – turns into something completely different with the coming of evening, as the internal space of the sushi bar is flooded with the bright light of the lamps. Then the glass walls turn into screens which reflect every thing and person inside the bar as well as their slightest movements. Watching these multiple projections, clients are seduced into narcissistic self-contemplation, while outside the surrounding buildings turn into indistinct masses so that only the bright Yaske firefly seems to live in the darkness of the night.

The second defining feature of Yaske’s striking appearance is the karaoke room on its upper level. This ellipsoid volume, raised on three slanting piers, is conceived as a contrast to the lower regular volume, not only in the sense of form but also because of its more private character. The only transparent detail of this part of the building is a horizontal window, a kind of a porthole intended for controlled observation of the outside world. The privacy of the karaoke room is further emphasized by its deliberately limited accessibility. An elegant spiral staircase leads to a narrow hole through which visitors pass into the cabin one by one. Unlike the solid and smooth furniture in the bar, the furnishings of the karaoke room appear to be made of soft and tactile fabric. The cool halogen light on the ground floor is exchanged for a warm, soft pink glow.

At night the ellipse undermines the modernist honesty of the building: its supports vanish so that it appears to hover in clouds of light. The literal obscurity of the karaoke room also has a metaphorical dimension that is not unambiguous. Oleg Drozdov sticks by his claim that his work is contextual: according to him the elliptical form was a reaction to the nearby crossroads as a space of permanent movement and change. This explanation does not prevent one from seeing in it a prototype of a Chinese traditional lantern or, alternatively, a variation on the popular high-tech spaceship theme. To an orthodox Christian the upper part of Yaske might bring to mind a church dome – an association which gives this supremely secular building a faint aura of sacrality.

A10, So., 2006.05.21