Peter Kudryavtsev on Architecture and Travel

What is the importance of architectural tourism?

It’s a great idea to come to the city and have a look at the buildings but for me it’s much more important to have a look at the contemporary buildings. The problem right now is that you cannot really find a lot of guides for contemporary architecture. If we could have more information on contemporary architecture of all the cities were you usually go, like for example in Barcelona, there is quite an interesting big layer of modern architecture and you can actually quite usually find a booklet or a book about new architecture with a guide, which actually guides you from one place to another quite easily. So, the whole architectural tourism is very good. In Moscow, where I’m from, unfortunately it’s not a usual thing, because we don’t have special routes, but it could be a very profitable thing for the city.

For architects it’s very important to travel. The first thing is that you can see different new buildings and experience them and the second thing of course is to see new phenomenal architects or clients or manufacturers and new materials and things like that. So, it’s a very important thing for an architect especially when the architect’s country is only developing new contemporary architecture, like Russia or former CIS countries. It’s definitely the most important thing to travel abroad and to invite people from outside to have a look at local architecture.

What do you think is the added value that architecture creates within a city?

The city is the architecture. If the architecture is good, you’ll get much more people who would want to live in the city. Architects are some kind of creators of the world we’re living in. Of course there is a big responsibility for that. So, I would say that you couldn’t divide architecture and modern living. It’s like they’re almost synonyms.

What is the importance of Architectural events worldwide? What are the profits for a city holding this kind of events?

The main idea of the World Architecture Festival is that this is a very good venue for professional discussion and meeting professionals from all over the world. There is no other event like that, if you compare it to any kind of other exhibitions, like the Biennales or stuff like that. Here people are talking about their work, about the professionalism of their work and I think that Barcelona is a perfect place for such a talk because it’s a historic city with a very strong tradition but on the other side it’s a great city where local architects are doing beautiful contemporary architecture. So, it’s very good for other countries to have a look at what is going on. But still, in my opinion it would be interesting maybe sometime to change location and have a look at what is going on to other cities. Because bringing such a big number of very interesting professionals, clients, architects, engineers, manufacturers to a city would actually change the whole future of the city.

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