Vladimir Filonov

As in many European cities, the renovation of factory buildings has become a key part of Moscow's development, as industry is moved beyond the city's bounds. Arts centers such as Winzavod and Garazh, and clubs including B1 are popular choices, as is office space, like the reconstruction of Krasnaya Roza. Residential conversions, as planned for Krasny Oktyabr (on photo), remain a rarity in Moscow.

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Factories are not an image easily dissociated from Russia. The Soviet Union’s development of military-industrial complexes turned a country once known primarily for its peasantry into one associated with heavy industry. A skyline of plants, factories and chimneys dominates many of Russia’s cities. While in some, medieval churches and merchant houses were demolished or built around, numerous other one-industry cities were founded solely to serve their factories — a legacy that today is causing political and economic problems.

It is precisely this landscape that the curators of the Russian Pavilion at this year’s International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale intend to explore. At a press conference at the beginning of March, Grigory Revzin, one of the curators, revealed the concept for this year’s Russian exhibition. “Fabrika Rossia” will develop the idea of industrial reconstruction in Russia. The project, to be presented at the world’s most celebrated architecture event, will bring together Russian architects to investigate what can be done with the country’s abandoned industrial buildings.

The redevelopment of former factory complexes is, of course, not new to Russia. The relocation of plants to beyond the city center may have begun in Moscow much later than in Western European cities. Nevertheless, Moscow has its share of abandoned factories that have become cultural centers, such as the popular Winzavod, Garazh and Proyekt Fabrika, in the city’s Baumansky district. Similarly, numerous former industrial sites have become home to offices. This has happened across the board and scale, from well-known redevelopments of architecturally valuable sites, such as the Krasnaya Roza development, to the countless conversions of factories across the city into low grade office space.

Although most redevelopment has concentrated on commercial real estate, plans for residential conversions do exist. Following the end of production at the plant, Norman Foster was commissioned to design the conversion of the city’s iconic Krasny Oktyabr, or Red October, chocolate factory into residential property. However, the economic crisis has made it unclear whether these plans will progress further. On its web site, the developer, Guta Development, continues to list the project but provides no details on proposed start or completion dates. In the meantime, as with many of the city’s former factories, the Krasny Oktyabr building has been hosting art exhibitions.

However, the curators of this year’s pavilion in Venice are not interested in major arts centers or clubs in Moscow. They plan to look at the possibilities for abandoned factory space in the country’s many small industrial towns. “In metropolises former industrial plants are successfully reconstructed as offices, museums and entertainment centers,” reads a statement about the project on the web site of Speech, the architecture bureau working on the exposition. “But in smaller towns in the surrounding area that exist thanks to one or a few factories, these facilities are not needed,” it continues.

Converting industrial property can already be called traditional in Russia, Revzin told the architectural news agency Archi.ru, listing discos, modern art museums, offices and loft conversion type projects as the usual fate for disused factories. “Not one of these is needed in a small town where resources and possibilities are limited and where the old factory is often the basis of the town’s fabric,” he said. “We are asking the question of how we can fundamentally rethink the role of industrial zones in small towns in a different way.”

The small town the curators have selected for the project is Vyshny Volochyok in the Tver region northwest of Moscow. With a population of approximately 50,000, the town is of medieval origin and is located between the basins of the Baltic rivers and the Volga, once playing a key role in the transport of goods between the two river systems.

The choice of Vyshny Volochyok was not accidental, Revzin said at the press conference, Ria-Novosti reported. Aside from its industrial architecture, the town’s location between Moscow and St. Petersburg made it an attractive candidate. The town has four former textile complexes, all within walking distance of the center, reported Kommersant. These 18th and 19th-century buildings are to be the focus of work by the five architects invited to take part, Yevgeny Gerasimov, Sergei Kuznetsov, Sergei Skuratov, Vladimir Plotkin and Nikita Yavein.

While the project is to be purely design based, at the press conference announcing the topic the town’s mayor, Oleg Menshikov, asked the architects to consider the commercial viability of their work, should an investor for one of the projects be found.

Once the Venice festival, which runs from Aug. 29 to Nov. 21, is over the exhibition will move to Russia. As well as Moscow and St. Petersburg, it will travel to Vyshny Volochyok, which joins a host of towns and cities, great and small, that are often referred to as the “Venice of the North.”

Joining the duo that curated the 2008 Russia Pavilion — Revzin and the deputy culture minister, Pavel Khoroshilov — is Sergei Choban, the architect behind the idea. The Leningrad-born architect, who is jointly responsible for the design of the Federation Tower in Moskva-City, has spent much of his career working in Germany. In 2003 he opened his own architectural bureau in Moscow, Choban and Partners, and since 2006 has been the head of Speech, the architectural bureau that will be realizing the Russian exhibition at the 2010 Venice Biennale.

In an interview at the beginning of March on Russia's Kultura channel, Choban described the Russian entry in this year's Biennale as returning to buildings. “Now we are talking less about architecture as an abstract work of art, as it was last Biennale, when at times it seemed that the function, or the content of architecture was preventing it from being created.”

Fabrika Rossia will be Russia’s response to “People meet in architecture,” a topic set by Kazuyo Sejima, the director of the 12th International Architecture Exhibition and the first woman to hold the post. Sejima is a Japanese architect who together with Ryue Nishizawa and their studio, SANNA, has designed the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, London's Serpentine Pavilion and the Christian Dior Building in Tokyo.

This exhibition’s theme is intended to explore how many of the oxymora associated with architecture could be put to use in design work. In a statement following her appointment, Sejima lists such binary pairs as public/private, monumental/mundane, global/local and symbolic/pragmatic to illustrate areas where the boundaries of apparent opposites might become blurred. The particular area that Sejima has chosen is how people relate to these boundaries, identifying the “human encounter in both public and private scenarios, both as creators and users” as an area to look at.

“The idea is to help individuals and society relate to architecture, help architecture relate to individuals and society, and help individuals and society relate to one another,” she said in a statement on the exhibition’s web site, released following her meeting with the curators of the entrant-countries’ exhibitions.

The curators of the Russian pavilion have yet to announce details of exactly how their exhibition will address the topic. Previous entries have stimulated lively debate on the state of Russian architecture, both as a practical and theoretical discipline. The Russian pavilion at the 2008 Biennale in many ways dealt with the theme almost as an aside. An exhibition in the pavilion’s ground-level floor by Nikolai Polissky, an architect and land artist, explored the idea of architecture before building, with a photographic display of temporary wooden structures in Russia’s various landscapes. Intending to represent landscapes as architects see them prior to any design work, Polissky used what he described as “proto-images” in response to the 2008 Biennale’s theme, “Architecture beyond buildings.”

Criticism at the time saw this as a continuation of the concepts and installations that Russia had been presenting for many years. Various critics had previously been calling for “buildings” to be showcased. However, in 2008 the exhibition in the pavilion’s main hall did answer this. “At last instead of the marginal, conceptual exhibitions of previous years, Russia is presenting an architecture exposition,” said Andrei Chernikhov, a participant in the 2008 exhibition, in an interview with an Archi.ru reporter at the time.

“The Chess Game. Tournament for Russia” in 2008 was dedicated to concrete projects, predominantly commercial buildings that were part of the recent construction boom in Moscow and other major Russian cities. Conceived as a struggle between foreign and Russian architects in the post-Soviet built environment, the exhibition placed large-scale models of these buildings on a white and red chessboard. Foreigner-designed buildings, such as David Adjaye’s Skolkovo business school and Zaha Hadid’s Capital Hill residence, stood on white squares, while the work of Russian architects, including Nikita Yavein’s Ladozhsky Station renovation in St. Petersburg, occupied the red.

The unfortunate irony of that exhibition was that not all the models exhibited have made it beyond the drawing board. The 2008 Biennale took place as Russia’s real estate market followed the rest of the world into the crisis after a period of isolated stability. The dominating model, Norman Foster’s Russia Tower, remains incomplete. Construction work on the tower was halted in November 2008, and in August 2009 Kommersant reported that a temporary parking lot would be built on the site.