Evgeny Gerasimov: ‘We struggle for a clear intention and a high-quality implementation’
The portfolio of Evgeny Gerasimov’s team comprises an impressive range of typologies, styles, and scales: for many cases, the architects of this bureau have managed to establish a balance between the functionality and elegance, complexity and laconism, tradition and modernity. Regardless of the project style, they manage to achieve an outstanding quality of implementation, while the customer and the builder seem to catch up their delight of manipulating with various materials, forms, techniques, and effects. The quality of solutions proposed in the design and implemented at the construction site turns for the Evgeny Gerasimov and Partners bureau into the key that lets them belong to the leaders at the design services market of Saint Petersburg, a city all too critical when it comes to its image and to preservation of traditions, even if within a new framework adapted to contemporary demands.
Evgeny Gerasimov,
a partner at the Evgeny Gerasimov and Partners architectural bureau:
For me, quality architecture comprises the quality of the city-planning intention, the quality of a separate building concept, the quality of functional consideration – everything to the last detail. The ‘usefulness, durability, beauty’ triad is still relevant. The a priori implied durability, the answer to the given building function, and the quality of its implementation – this is what the quality of architecture is.
This means you being excited by viewing a building from a distance of 500 meters as well as 20 and 2 meters. It is even better if you want to touch it, feel it with your hand. I think this speaks for the quality of architecture. A building stirring interest for one moment as you pass by in a car is not enough. A building must be interesting at various levels of perception. It is perfect when a building provokes a desire to draw it.
When all apartments in a house are sold out or the building is fully packed with tenants, this means its function being thought through well, the building working well. This is also a part of its quality.
What I value most in a concept is clarity. The intention should be very simple and intelligible, so that you need not to explain. As Chekhov put it, unclear words stand for unclear mind. So, the implementation should also be as simple and intelligible as possible, and of a highest possible quality.
In our projects, it is the simplicity, the clarity of intention, and the best quality of its implementation that we struggle for.
I am certain that it is possible to achieve high architectural quality in the Russian context. Still, as it comes to some of my projects, I cannot always say we did achieve it. Just as in cinema, for a movie to be great, everything is to be in line: the budget, the efforts of the producer, the director, the cameraman, the actors, the cutters, the sound directors, the drivers, and the staff at the shooting. Architecture is the same. The customer must be willing in the first place, so that there is not a struggle, but an effort in accordance with the architect. The budget must be corresponding, as in architecture cheap things are never good. The exceptions, as always, only prove the rule. High-quality work by the project designer and the constructors is also required. When it is the quality that the customer, the project designer, and the constructor aim at, when all these three vectors coincide and point to the same direction, then a high-quality building is possible and does emerge.
video