Daria Belyakova Architect Biography

Why should you know me: the founder of the Arch E Type Bureau Daria Belyakova 3 min. Early enough for myself, I decided that I want to become, as I called it then, the designer of the environment is not to design specific buildings, but to invent the world around, where there is only an element at home. I strove for this purpose, gradually gaining the necessary knowledge and discovering new horizons of profession for myself.

The first educational institution that brought me closer to my dream was an art school. Then, for four years, I studied at the design department, and then finally decided to enter the architectural. Unfortunately, studying in Russia was not easy - I repeatedly disagreed in opinion with teachers and scientific supervisor. As a result, she decided to leave for Europe, where she received higher education in two legendary architectural schools - Politecnico di Milano and Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.

Studying abroad demanded victims: in order to enter Italy, I had to learn Italian in nine months from scratch, since teaching at the chosen course in Milan was only on it. But it was worth it. At the London school, my mentors became architect Takero Shimadzaki and Pierre Wittorio Aureli, the largest modern architecture theorist. The teaching of architecture in Russia and Europe is different.

In London, we were taught that any project is based on a concept, some kind of global idea or even a mission. If this is not, then it makes no sense to squeeze something out of himself to the architect. It came to the point that students who use the word “building” on the protection were sent to the retake. This was argued by the fact that they, apparently, did not understand something during the training, they think so narrowly.

At the same time, in London we were practically not taught to make plans, cuts and draw us, as is happening in our schools. So the experience of education at the Polytechnic University greatly facilitated my life in labor practice. Studying in Milan, I worked as an illustrator in Russia, did some small projects. When she won the competition for the creation of a summer veranda for the Institute of Russian Realistic Art and began to receive the first orders for the creation of interiors from friends, she decided to establish her own architectural bureau.

We started together - I and my friend, and now there are 30 people in the bureau. The first office was the table in Squat in Milyutinsky Lane, where we were adjacent to another architectural bureau. When he stopped grabbing, we moved to one of the “Books” on New Arbat, and then to the current office of the Bureau in Granata Lane, where we occupy most of the building. We also have a separate space - an audience in Bolshoi Kozikhinsky Lane.

There we hold big meetings, lectures, presentations, show new projects. The first projects of the bureau were mostly interiors. Unfortunately, the architectural business is arranged so that “young” and beginners are all architects under 40 years old, and in the forefront most often men. At the same time, Russia has much more freedom than, for example, in Europe - thanks to the growing market and brave developers, ready to attract new names.

In the same London, I would not organize my bureau at that age. To get a place in the sun, the team and I worked on many competitive projects, more often at a loss to ourselves, but with a dream that we will be noticed and called to make a large architecture. Sometimes I had to go to the tricks: to get into closed competitions, we made numerous interiors for developers.

At 26, I became the youngest architect whose team was entrusted with the design of a residential complex in Moscow - a house for apartments on the Nagatinskaya embankment. The project opened new opportunities for the bureau. Architecture is an art created in a creative impulse and, undoubtedly, causing emotions in a person. The more interesting the idea, the concept of the project is better worked out, the more remarkable the result and the more impressions it causes.

Working on this residential complex, we thought a lot about the city context. The house is located on the embankment, which reminded us of the works of the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto: we used the images of waves from his minimalist work in the design of the facades. And in the project of landscaping, the collages of the American artist Lisa Khokhstein were inspired.

Art is tightly intertwined with my work. So, in September, in the Flor et Lavr gallery, an exhibition of architectural photography was opened in a grenade lane, where the works of living classics of the genre Igor Palmin, Yuri Kalmin and Mikhail Rozanov were presented under my curatorial. Although we are the architectural bureau and we want to make great architecture, we look globally.

The bureau is still engaged in interiors. The Lobby interior got into the AD Design Award, Elle Decoration Award, and the Bureau has also called me in the TOP rating of the best architects and designers of Russia according to AD. In the work, we practice a multidisciplinary approach - we work in several directions.The prototypes for the products of the first jewelry collection were the architectural monuments familiar to all: Kazan Cathedral in St.

Petersburg, the ancient temple of Parthenon in Athens and the ancient Egyptian pyramid of Joser from the Memphis Necropolis in Sakkara. Furniture projects and jewelry make it possible to come up with what you want, fantasize and receive a controlled result. In architecture, it is more difficult to implement.

And I also want to once realize a children's dream - to create a large project, where absolutely everything - architecture, design, furniture, shape - will be invented by us. For example, design a hotel. Photo: From the personal archive of Daria Belyakova.