Introduction

Belyayevo. A residential district — at first glance no different from any other Moscow neighbourhood. The simple silhouettes of concrete housing scattered in an endless space. Between these colossal blocks is an abundance of greenery, although there aren’t really any parks or public squares. A network of wild pathways tie together the few paved sidewalks. At intervals, the odd playground, the self-occupied children overseen by their grandmothers. Nearby, people sit on benches drinking beer. Identical concrete facades reveal traces of human presence: a randomly painted, or illegally constructed, balcony here, an antenna or an air conditioning unit there. All the asphalted spaces are now used for parking, all the street corners appropriated by kiosks and small shops. Essentially, Belyayevo, like any other dormitory suburb (or “sleeping district”, as it’s known in Russia) is a generic, slightly chaotic space. Unmemorable. Bland. Boring.

But there was one day when things were different: the 2nd November 2003.1 Despite the winter weather, which normally intensifies the boredom, on this particular morning Belyayevo was turned into a place, one attractive, curious and warm. On this day, the great Russian poet Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov (himself a resident of Belyayevo) conducted a private tour through his Belyayevo. Prigov’s walk was an unprecedented performance, during which the poet shared the story of the neighbourhood as he saw it. In places of special importance he would stop and read one of his poems. More than 70 people marched with Prigov (whom they would later call the “Duke of Belyayevo”), watching him successfully fill the generic, prefabricated space of their district with life – with poems, stories and anecdotes.

During the performance it became clear that many famous people, mostly connected to the world of art, had once inhabited Belyayevo. Prigov would indicate the precise locations of their apartments. These included Boris Groys, the philosopher and author of theoretical works about Moscow Conceptualism; the writer Yevgeniy Popov; the artist Boris Orlov; the philosopher Yevgeniy Schiffers, and many others. After each name, there would come a story – sometimes related to a part of the neighbourhood, sometimes a moment in time and sometimes to a piece of writing. The Duke would also reveal the glorious and seemingly forgotten past of a number of places, such as the cinema Vityaz’ (“Knight”), which had been the home of alternative cinema in the 1970s. The cinema had once drawn its sophisticated crowd all the way from central Moscow, perhaps even from across the USSR. Similarly, a small exhibition hall on Profsoyuznaya Street (now a local art gallery called “Belyayevo”), had in 1987 housed the contemporary art organisation “Hermitage”, founded by the great curator and art critic, Leonid Bazhanov. Back then it had been one of the epicentres of artistic activity in the capital.

During Prigov’s walk, the meaning of each anonymous building suddenly became deeper through its attachment to local heroes, stories and cultural events. Each wasteland between buildings gained significance when described in one of the poems. This intense dose of culture converted these bland areas into significant ones, making identical houses unique, and filling the senseless empty spaces with meaning. On this single day, Prigov completely changed his audience’s perception of the place, creating new contexts, and adding layers to architecturally monotonous neighbourhoods.

At first glance, Dmitri Prigov’s walk appears to have been an exclusively artistic event, but in fact it was equally important for architecture. For one moment, a link appeared between the words of the great poet and the space of the neighbourhood, which gave the latter new value. The organisers of the walk, the cultural group Moskultprog, posit the question: is it possible to trace the relationship between modernist architecture and conceptualism?2 For my own research into modernist architecture and new ways to preserve it, this question was crucial. I also had my own questions: what did Prigov see in the prefabricated, orthogonal spaces he had lived in? Why did he decide to immortalise them? And finally: is it possible to make the link between architecture and culture, the tangible and intangible, more permanent?

In the course of the 20th century, thanks to the industrialisation of the construction industry, cities all over the world became more and more generic. Now the architecture of the first fully prefabricated neighbourhoods has reached its 50th anniversary, and this raises the question: does it deserve to be preserved? And if the answer is yes, then under what circumstances? This kind of architecture requires a new approach to preservation – the old methods, which primarily focused on protecting uniqueness, will fail in this context.

The architecture of late-period modernism is interesting to architects but underestimated by the general public. Because of its repetitive nature and crude aesthetic, it is often found to be boring and ugly. Could the cultural content influence the architectural surroundings and make them more attractive to ordinary people? Could linking art to the architecture in which it was created make that architecture more valuable?