THE BUILDING FOR THE MOVIE «UNDER ELECTRIC CLOUDS»
Place: Saint Petersburg
Year of creation 2014
An all-Russian competition among architects was held to develop the design of this building, the central artistic object of the film. The task of the competition was: “To create, based on the structure described below, an architectural sketch of a high-rise building (20 floors) for residential or office use for subsequent implementation into the visual series of the film.” Then, it was a description of the structure in Alexey German Jr.’s script itself: “A strange, unfinished building, like a broken plant, aspired upward, ignoring symmetry and proportions.… The unfinished concrete frame becomes a symbol of a whole generation of talented and unclaimed professionals in the film.” 160 works were submitted to the competition. Its winners were Andrey Volintsev and Anna Tkacheva, once young architects, and now the founders of the KANVA architectural bureau.
“In a building that will not be built, there are much more opportunities for a flight of fancy. In such a building, you can practically not limit yourself in anything. As a result of the search, a form appeared that looks different from each side: the embodiment of the principle of organic asymmetry, the impossibility of accurately copying forms in the world of living beings. We wanted more bionics, to give the shape a “plant-like appearance”. And then it turned out to be very difficult to translate the sketches into a specific computer model, repeat the line of the hand, and make a flat building in pencil three-dimensional. And it wasn’t the first time that everything worked out according to the task – there should be 20 floors, but this is not so much for the building to look slim and elegant. By searching for the right lines and proportions for a long time, we managed to achieve the effect of instability, fragility, lightness and subtlety.”
In the main competition program of the 65th Berlin Film Festival, the film won the Silver Bear Award for outstanding achievements in the field of cinematography.
Learn more about the contest and the film: