Druzhba Sanatorium

INTERVIEW IN ENGLISH WITH THE ARCHITECT IGOR VALIKEVSKY (Entrevista en español más abajo) Robin Monotti: In the West, when we think of the icons of late Soviet architecture, two projects come to mind: the Ministry of Highways in Tbilisi, Georgia, by George Chakhava and Zurab Jalaghania (1975), and the Druzhba Sanatorium in Crimea, which you designed (1985). Chakhava defined his approach as the Space City method, which involved lifting the building off the ground and allowing nature to flow below it. This had its origin in the Aero-City or futurist city on stilts drawings of Lazar Khidekel of the 1920s. Was this your intention too to lift the building off the ground in order to allow nature to flow under the building? Igor Vasilevsky: This issue goes deeper and is more serious – it’s about the relationship of building to the environment. In my opinion nature is the primary element of composition. The steps to solve this problem are basically two. First: create a large-scale environment with greenery and man, include a people container in the natural landscape. Second: attempt to physically preserve nature, separating the building from the ground. This is typical for structures on complex geological conditions and terrain. That is why “Druzhba” was “flying”. We had already experimented with this in Crimea. It is possible to come to such a decision once you have lived your entire life going through the application of standard projects throughout the country: the club-restaurant, sleeping accommodation, medical centre and so on. RM: Was the natural landscape of the Crimean shoreline an important contextual consideration in the design of the building as a whole? IV: Yes, certainly. The defining aspects were the conservation of the natural environment and at the same time the creation of optimum conditions for each part of the project, divided into two components.