«Am I mistaken, or was there nothing here just this morning?»
The stranger’s question was reasonable, because there had never been a free-standing column here. On this evening in the fall of 2024, a man carrying an elongated wooden cylinder (Laugier’s ‘piece of wood’ ) on his shoulder and a pair of stone blocks in his bag assembled a maroon column at this spot just 10 minutes before the passerby’s question.
In the middle of a metropolis, in an underpass at a crossroad under one of the busiest multi-lane city highways. No surprise that this sounds like the plot of some Herzog’s movie, for the idea of a column is one of the most obsessive ideas for an architect.
Whenever we passed through this wide tunnel, we were seized by the phantasm of the free-standing central pillar, this simplest architectural event. And the main role in such an event was to be played by the capital. Only the most fragile porcelain plate could take on the huge weight of the concrete structures and the overlying traffic highway. To be precise, two plates: a soup bowl and a deep plate. This allowed us to experiment with the typology and shape of the capitals.
Rearranging the plates gave us two types, which we called the conventional form and the grotesque form.
Capital types: A – conventional; B – grotesque;
Capital types on site.
The column structure.
The hue of the wooden, fluted shaft echoed both the crimson marble that adorns the nearby metro station and the historical name of the city area – Krasniye Vorota (The Red Gate).
That same evening the column was dismantled by us. What was this ephemeral monument about? An intervention that re\organizes a familiar space and pedestrian flows, or a vessel that immediately turns everything that lies on it into a food: an urban soup.
