Book of crazy ships

On September 20, 2019, Eduard Kubensky dined in the Uzbek cafe. He ordered pilaf and mineral water. Even before the removal of the finished dish, they brought cutlery. Twisting in his hands a fork, he read the word eternity on it. In anticipation of food, Eduard walked the word “Uzbekistan” and with surprise for himself learned that according to one version this word means “a country of free people”. Both of these facts seemed to him a kind of sign, and he decided to participate in the competition of curators of the festival “Architecture’20”, in which he subsequently won with the theme “Eternity”.

On the first day of the Architecture’s festival, the theme of which was “transparency”, Eduard Kubensky gave one of the curators of the festival Vladimir Kuzmin a transparent plastic disposable fork with the inscription “Eternity” as an act of continuity of those festivals going after another. Vladimir accepted a gift. On the New Year holidays of 2020, honing the manifesto of the future festival, Edward several times reviewed Nathaniel Kan"s film “My Architect” dedicated to his father, architect Luis Kan. His special attention attracted the plot “To the Sea”, starting in the 51st minute, which tells how Luis Kan, in order to captivate his son with the theme of creativity, invites him to come up with a project of the ship on which the orchestra of his friend-Diriper will live and speak. The result of the game is a homemade notebook shown in the film, on the cover of which it was written: Book of crazy ships. The book consists of three turns. The first depicts a “ship from forks”, on the second-“a ship-shift” and on the third-“a ship ship with toothpicks stuck in it”.

Luis Kan is convinced: the fundamental quality of any creativity is freedom. The artist should be free from all kinds of -ims, functions, material and technology. He should not obey them, but use them to achieve a high goal of creation. Living today, to be part of the moment of life - this means living forever. The acquisition of the quality of eternity, according to the architect, is achieved in the process of creativity as an inseparable act, which contains the fullness of being at a time. At the end of January 2020, at one of the meetings of the Directorate of the Festival Architecture, the vice-president of the Union of Architects of Russia Viktor Logvinov, jokes, to the word eternity four letters brow, as a result of which the word humanity turned out.

Inspired by all the above events and facts, Eduard Kubensky finally decides to build two manifest ships for the Architecture festival: the ship “from the forks”, illustrating the theme “Eternity”, and the ship “from sausages”, illustrating the topic “Humanity” . During the first wave of the pandemic caused by Covid-19, due to new circumstances from April to May 2020, Eduard Kubensky completely changes the concept of filling the festival, leaving only the declared topic. He offers familiar architects to build their crazy ships as evidence of creative freedom, continuity and giftedness. More than 40 captains respond to his offer. Together they go to the sea. The Book of Crazy Ships is a project catalog