Almost like home
by Andrey Permitin
portfolio shortlisted call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023', 2023
Category: Representations of Space, Architecture, and Conflicts
After moving to Marseille from Moscow in 2009 and losing touch with the places I grew up in, I began to explore the city and its architecture in search of new perspectives, trying to adapt to the new environment.
In frequent walks with a camera, I stumbled upon something familiar - residential buildings of the mid-fifties in Marseille that are reminiscent of Moscow's collective dwellings like Ginzburg’s Narkomfin apartment complex. Although the best example would be Le Corbusier’s unité d'habitation, my personal interest as an architect and photographer was in buildings with external corridors leading to flats that are for me the very essence of rational approach in architecture.
In this project I focused my attention on several residences in Marseille : Bel Ombre residence, situated in La Pomme district in Marseille, Lou Trioulet résidence at Mazargues district of Marseille and several others.
Post-war social housing in general has several things in common across Europe and the Soviet Union - they were often built without taking the surroundings into account. Often the entire neighborhoods were demolished to fulfill the growing need for housing. This was the case in Moscow, where hundreds of old houses were demolished and in Marseille also, although not with the same scale.
Now, 50 years later, some of these buildings still stand as a monument to the past era of bold urbanization experiments. Architects were free from old rules and created their own new modern language that answered to the urgent needs of the time but created new questions for the new generations to answer.
Nowadays it's hard to imagine these types of buildings in Marseille. The height and surface of new constructions are regulated and the notion of context and surrounding is more or less taken into account in the process of designing a building.
This out of context experience and the height of the building is what drew my attention and reminded me of my hometown. I grew up in a typical 14 story building in the Moscow suburbs with long narrow balconies that spanned across the entire facade of the building. I lived on a 12th floor and together with my fear of height it was rather challenging to step out on these balconies.
Going back again and again to take photos from the balconies of the towers in Marseille I find myself thinking about my old home. Seeing the city far below, the detachment from the ordinary life beneath you, and the excitement of change of perspective, feeling of being small, alone and vulnerable although with admiration of the great effort of many men and women who built these towers fulfills me.
The choice of using a large format film camera for this project was obvious - precise, slow paced approach helped me to contemplate and observe the architecture and my thoughts about the space.
Review by URBANAUTICA
The city is a conceptual construct before it is a planned one. We can choose to view it this way if we wish. A concept may be more or less familiar to us, and consequently, we relate to cities based on our memory, which functions as a reference text. Our expectations about cities are projections of our reasoning; they are a 'virtual' construction, an attempt to live and, therefore, to relate to a context, much like in a simulation game. We expand by occupying territories, thus moving. This certainly evokes a nomadic nature, not yet extinct, that is functional to the common survival of the animal being with a destiny to wander. But above all, it highlights our capacity for calculation, prediction, management, and control (planning), which better traces and distinguishes our evolutionary path. Memory is also linked to our emotions connected to specific spaces; in this sense, memory is also a map whose reading awakens positive or negative emotions. The series 'Almost Like Home' by Andrey Permitin effectively interprets this theme. The photographs document buildings constructed in the mid-1950s in Marseille. Primarily, they depict views from and of residential blocks, housing solutions designed in the post-war period to address housing needs. This building typology responds to housing demand with a clear constructive intent. The relationship between living and building is strictly rational and straightforward. Permitin, of Russian origin, who grew up on the outskirts of Moscow on the twelfth floor of a typical Soviet block with a narrow balcony running along the entire facade, is fascinated by the formal similarity. At the same time, he is 'enlightened' by the emotions evoked in his memory as he walks along the long corridors of these monstrous rectangles of inlaid concrete that characterize the coastal city in the South of France. The use of the view camera amplifies this reflection, as he writes: 'The slow-paced approach helped me to contemplate and observe the architecture and my thoughts about the space.' Although anonymous to an outsider's view, that apartment in the suburbs of the Russian capital has been translated into a concept of living, reconstructed retrospectively in a city overlooking the Mediterranean and experienced in the form of reproducible images, i.e., photographs.
Let's take a step further: when photographs related to a specific experience of the city accumulate and settle in the collective memory, we can argue that they acquire social weight in the common imagination, and therefore political significance, influencing decisions on what to preserve or not in the city, and also impacting urban planning.
also from Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023